What Does Sun Microsystems Get by Giving Away OpenOffice.org?

No matter how much time or effort you put into OOo, Sun Microsystems is still OOo's prime benefactor. Sun not only bought StarDivision and gave away its newly-acquired star product for free, but it has paid skilled software developers to work on OOo. This is not charity. Sun uses OOo internally, and it's a large-enough company that purchasing Microsoft Office or another proprietary office software suite for all Sun employees would cost as much as hiring a considerable number of programmers. So, if nothing else, Sun gets an excellent piece of software for internal use. Plus, Sun gets the benefit of volunteer work done on OOonot only by programmers, but also by artists, usability experts, documentation writers, and even volunteer question-answerers, who function, in effect, as a free help desk.

Beyond all this, Sun actually makes money from OpenOffice.org. Not from OOo itself, but from StarOffice, a name Sun reserved for the commercial version of OOo, which it sells as proprietary software to both companies and individuals.

StarOffice 8.

So why buy StarOffice when OpenOffice.org is free?

There are a number of reasons, starting with the fact that StarOffice includes an extensive manual, while OOo provides only community-produced documentation. Another factor is clip art and templates. OOo includes only a few pieces of clip art and not many premade document templates, while StarOffice includes thousands of pieces of clip art and hundreds of document templates.

These are not the only features StarOffice offers that OOo lacks. Go to www.sun.com/staroffice, and Sun will tell you about many more, up to and including online training. Because StarOffice is based on OOoessentially it is OOo with some "secret sauce" addedSun manages to develop StarOffice for much less money by drawing on community resources. It would cost much more to continually improve such a complex program using only staff employees. As a bonus, freely-distributed OOo serves as free (but priceless) advertising for StarOffice.

The reality is that most of us do just fine with OOo and don't need StarOffice's extra features. But some people happily pay for StarOfficeespecially companies that want not only the added StarOffice functionality but also the ability to call Sun software engineers directly for support.

(As an additional plug, StarOffice costs much less than most office suites and has fewer licensing restrictions than almost any of its competitors.)