I’ve just done an interview for the Swedish magazine Datormagazin. The journalist wondered whether there was any conflict: I mean the fact that Sun takes the voluntary work done by the community, tacks on some fonts and makes money from that?

I hope I succeeded in persuading him this statement could not be further from the truth. Sun not only founded the OpenOffice.org community, but is still the principle sponsor and contributes the largest number of developers. Sun’s investment is over one hundred people, including 82 of the original 120 StarOffice team acquired by Sun in 1999. This represents a huge body of knowledge in the code, and one which the community would find impossible to replace at short notice.

However, we’re equally pleased that other companies are starting to share the load, notably Novell’s 14 strong team, and more recently the announcement from Red Flag CH2000 in Beijing to commit 50 engineers to the project.

I can see this trend continuing. The list of sponsors of this year’s OpenOffice.org Conference shows some of the big names in IT taking an interest. It’s only a matter of time before one or more of these takes the plunge and joins in developing the code. I’d also love to see some of the big software houses join in – Oracle, SAP, etc – as they clearly have a major interest in seeing the OpenDocument Format (ODF) used by OpenOffice.org succeed.

However, I contend that the major breakthrough will come when major users start sponsoring development. Let’s say a dozen large Microsoft Office users (companies, government agencies…) decided to abandon MS-Office and convert to OpenOffice.org. By spending just ten percent of their annual licence savings on OpenOffice.org development, they could double the number of engineers and have a huge say in the future development of the product (as well as putting the other ninety percent in their pockets).

Economics like that are hard to resist in the long run. Why continue to be at the mercy of a monopoly supplier when you can have a meaningful share in an alternative?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.