InfoTech: IBM / Sun deal off is good news for OSS community

When Sun bought out MySQL, some eyebrows were raised. And its involvement in OpenOffice.org is already well established - it is, after all, based (back in history) on Star Office which Sun has had in its stable for some time.

IBM has a closed-source office suite. But a couple of years, it decided to revive an old product name - Lotus Symphony - but it was to be a slightly modified version of OpenOffice.Org, a far cry from the old DOS product of the same name which was, essentially, a boxed collection of software that was not very well integrated but, based on Lotus 123 became the product of choice in figure-intensive environments.

And here's the rub: Lotus Symphony, despite being based on OpenOffice.Org is proprietary software. It is not open source - although it is free of charge, a distinction IBM makes with its Lotus marketing that says "at no charge" but stays away from using the word "free" - at least in the headlines.

IBM says that this is justifiable for it has developed a product that is lighter and faster than other office suites. And it has done that by recognising that the vast majority of users make use of a small range of features. Try it, and if it does all you need, then look no further, is IBM's approach. If it doesn't get something else having lost nothing except the time it took you to download and play with it for a while.

Sun had worked out that it would make more money providing paid-for support for MySQL (and - despite what most people think - its commercial licensing deals) by attacking the mass market than it would in aiming at the dwindling market for huge computers and its Solaris database.

Indeed, both IBM and Sun are in the same position: their mid- and mini- computing products are under threat from web-based products such as Apache and MySQL. A growing number of e.g. banks now run much of their back office on a LAMP stack. That leaves both Sun and IBM with the bread and butter business being pulled from under them.

A tie-up made a huge amount of sense - for them.

But for the rest of us, it began to raise a number of serious issues as to to how much longer leading open-source products would remain open-source.

A scan down IBM's Lotus Symphony plug-ins pages shows something interesting: a tiny proportion provide the source code. For the rest, you are buying (in the sense of investing your time and resources) into the future of a product that - at some point - IBM might decide to charge for.

After all, Lotus has a paid-for office suite. Ironically, it's the one that was based on the Windows version of Lotus 123 - which was always a poor second to Microsoft's offering in terms of integration, including as it did a bought-in word processor (eventually renamed WordPro) that was muddled in its conversion process from DOS, a database program (Approach) that raised difficulty to new heights for novice users and a presentation program that was easy to use but horrible to look at. In fact, the best thing about the Lotus office suite was the program originally (in the UK at least) given away free with the Financial Times in the early 1990s - an onscreen diary that looked like a Filofax and had page turning graphics. Neat, but not integrated into the rest of the package. It's called Organiser and it's still there, and still available as a stand alone product - but at USD68, it's hardly a bargain. The whole package is called SmartSuite, it isn't. And at USD313, it's expensive.

Which brings us back to the concerns: after all, both MS office and Lotus SmartSuite are newly formed fans of XML - the document format pioneered by OpenOffice.Org. If the leading open source packages are going to end up on the concentrated hands of companies who produce products that do the same job - more or less - but cost substantial sums to roll out across large companies, surely it is in the interests of consumers and the community at large to protect against the risk that the successful open source products are not simply bought up for a couple of million dollars and then either sabotaged or left to wither.

Can't happen?

When Netscape went all corporate it lost its way with its (free of charge but not open source) browser. It was only when it went back to the community that we got choice - and improved product.

What did we get? Firefox and Thunderbird.