A couple of years ago we came up with a slogan for OpenOffice.org – Open for Business – to get across a couple of messages:

• OpenOffice.org software may be used by commercial businesses completely free of any licence fees
• OpenOffice.org software is also a great platform to build businesses around – training providers, systems integrators, PC manufacturers to name but a few

The message is getting across, and at the OpenOffice.org Conference every year we hear case studies of businesses who are doing just that, and some are now contributing back to the Community – which is great. The OpenOffice.org Ecosystem is living and growing.

So is there a conflict between FOSS (free/open source software) and business? we don’t think so. We believe passionately that the best way to build quality software is through open publication of source code and peer review – just as the best way to build quality science is through open publication of experiments and peer review. We also believe that we should not be afraid to test this in the marketplace, and are happy to be benchmarked against commercial closed source rivals.

We also happily offer versions of OpenOffice.org to run on commercial operating systems: in fact, once users of commercial operating systems experience the quality of OpenOffice.org, we hope it may tempt them to try other FOSS software, or even change to a FOSS operating system.

This openness to competition is important to the OpenOffice Ecosystem. When we championed the birth of the OpenDocument Format as a way that all office software should store documents, it was important that any software supplier should be able to use it – FOSS or commercial. We aren’t precious about who integrates OpenOffice.org via APIs into their software (as long as they respect our licence). If commercial software houses want to sell extensions to OpenOffice.org, then let them compete with FOSS developers. If open source development does deliver better software, then users will notice and choose accordingly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 8:14 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.