Legal but
September 20th, 2007From time to time we get emails from people: “I’ve just paid 30 dollars for Fred’s Office only to find it’s really OpenOffice.org, which I now hear I could have downloaded for free. What are you going to do about it?” Unfortunately, what Fred is doing is perfectly legal under our open-source licence. You can take a copy of OpenOffice.org, install it on as many PCs as you like, use it for any purpose (domestic, educational, commercial…), burn it onto as many CDs as you like, give it to who ever you like … and even sell it if you can persuade people to buy it. Legal? yes; ethical? hmm…
Like many others, I was interested to try out IBM’s new Lotus Symphony office software. When IBM made the announcement on Monday, their download website collapsed, but during an idle spot during the OpenOffice.org Conference I decided to have another go. The download completed successfully, and with a bit of hacking I eventually got it to work. It was a bit suprising that a company of IBM’s standing should have made such a mess of packaging a piece of software, but I suppose they did brand it as a beta release.
What really annoyed me though was that the product immediately installed itself – without asking – as the default application for all my OpenOffice.org files, and also replaced all the OpenOffice.org icons with gaudy orange Lotus ones. Very bad behaviour IBM. The program also runs like a dog and has a pretty amateurish appearance – with some really poor font rendering. It also crashed horribly when I tried to load a complex spreadsheet.
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| Symphony | Calc |
I grabbed the attention of a community software engineer, who had a quick peek under the bonnet and soon discovered this was a very old version 1.x release of OpenOffice.org, with a new user interface and a rebranding exercise to make it look like an IBM product. My colleague had a happy ten minutes testing which Easter eggs the IBM thought police had found, and which ones they hadn’t.
However, it does beg the question as to why a company of IBM’s stature should take software well past its sell-by date, and try and pass it off as a new product. This beta is a free download – I imagine there will be a charge for the final product. Again, like Fred, IBM aren’t doing anything which they are not legally permitted to do, but we’re talking about a major public corporation, and one of the most respected names in the IT industry. Is this really what their customers expect in a “new” software product?
September 24th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
[...] Some bloggers have tried IBM’s new Lotus Symphony office suite that is based on Open Office. Well, they found out LotusSymphony is based on a rather outdated release 1.X of OOo. [...]
October 1st, 2007 at 1:30 am
Remember this was forked ages ago. They have worked on the UI and Ihope to work on other aspects. But thats the problem of fork open source projects and not give back and is that u don’t get the patches or the evolution of it.
I wonder if similar things happens with web software such as mambo and joomla.
October 1st, 2007 at 2:16 am
In one respect, you might be glad that they changed the name if that is the type of product that they are going to set out there. It does OO no good to have its name associated with a dog of a program like that.
I would think that most of us realize the standards for ethical behavior are a lot higher than those for legal behavior (professional ethics aside). If IBM is doing what some e-bayer is doing for a quick buck then that is legal. However, I don’t think that says much for IBM if they’d rather just slap their name on any old product rather than make sure it was a good product.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 pm
So what did IBM do?
I commented on this over at Linux Weekly News: http://lwn.net/Articles/250464/
Basically, they wrapped it in the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, did a little work on UNO, file import/export and accessibility, and felt it was done. Then, later, they realised that they had fallen behind OO.o, and could either go their own way and stay behind or join in and get the benefits. Joining the OO.o community and releasing Symphony was the right decision, surely?
Yes, that history means that there’s no 4-dimensional alpha-blending accelerated charting package. But then again, the Eclipse RCP work may mean it’s easier to port Symphony to the Mac. Could OO.o use that? The accessibility work done means it’ll be much easier to get into areas where this is an important consideration – the average small company barely knows accessibility exists, whereas higher education/government/corporations often have it down as a deal-breaker.
It may be OpenOffice.Org 1.x, and it may not have new Office features – but I still think it has a fair amount to contribute. IBM are late to the party – there’s no doubt about that. But they have brought a nice bottle with them…
October 9th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
[...] http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/2007/09/20/legal-but/ [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
[...] Knott wrote: > http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/2007/09/20/legal-but/ [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
[...] the workings of big corporations? > > Jim Hartley > > James Knott wrote: >> http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/2007/09/20/legal-but/ >> [...]
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:46 am
[...] e ciò non è sicuramente un bel vedere per entrambi i progetti, Symphony incluso. McCreesh conclude con una domanda: “E’ veramente questo (n.d.r., un prodotto obsoleto) ciò che vogliono [...]
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:13 am
Hello everybody, my name is Damion, and I’m glad to join your conmunity,
and wish to assit as far as possible.
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Damion, please look at http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_how.html for some ideas how to get started!
John