What are the implications for Open Office and other initiatives supported by Sun of the proposed takeover by IBM?
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What are the implications for Open Office and other initiatives supported by Sun of the proposed takeover by IBM?
IBM use the OpenOffice code base so I think if anything an IBM take over of Sun could be good for OpenOffice because it could pull in additional resources that IBM would be reluctant to invest in a product that is the basis of commercial activity in a competitor. The best thing would be to spin off OpenOffice as a Foundation and support it as a genuine community project. That way others would be more likely to contribute sharing the development . Google, Novell and IBM have all made siginifcant contributions one way and another. If a few large IT companies persuaded a few key customers to invest say half what they do buying MS Office licenses into the foundation it would make a massive difference and the likes of IBM make more from support contracts than selling licenses so really they have not much to lose. To compete MS would have no option but to lower its license fees and that has already happened to an extent. Competition is good ;-)
The IBM Symphony situation is a bit more complicated than is widely known IBM took a fork of OOo 1.1.6 which was dual licensed LGPL and SISSL (a SUN license which is very permissive) The SISSL allowed IBM to incorporate the code into a product without sharing that code, or the rest of the code they added to it. Then OOo went LGPL only. This prevented IBM incorporating new versions of OOo into Symphony. IBM have a lot of their own resources and I believe the project paid for itself purely on the basis of IBM's internal deployment saving them licensing costs. IBM buying SUN might mean they can do something more to progress Symphony, however this would probably be through a merger with the staroffice team rather than the community OpenOffice.org. In my opinion if you are wild about the Eclipse platform and having everything running in the Eclipse framework and you want an office suite that fits in with it then Symphony is great (as long as you don't mind it not being Free Software). If you have no idea what Eclipse is then OpenOffice.org is the one to go for.
Sun also owns MySQL which adds to IBMs very large collection of databases. They might do wierd things like port it to iSeries.
The basic reason companies buy other companies is because they think that they can be more efficient, which is corporate speak for keeping all the customers of the joint entity and shedding staff and facilities in duplicated areas. There could be some interesting spinoffs and new things emerging from ex-IBM/SUN employees over the next few years (if the sale goes through)