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OpenOffice - splits and pirouettes

Posted by zigzag on · 12 comments
The H; By Richard Hillesley 		Mail this story
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The splits and controversies around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted a number of issues concerning the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities

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Comments (12)

henke54 ·
Quoting:Simon Phipps, who was Sun's chief open source officer, gave another explanation. "The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999", he told LUGradio, "was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licences from Microsoft."
Scott_Ruecker ·
I love it! Wow! Oh how the truth is so illuminating..;-)
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux ...


Is that possible?!!!

Let's see:

(42,000 PCs) * $13,000 (annual TCO per PC) * 5 (years) = $2.73 Billions

I guess it is possible.

cr ·
...Being able to then push it out there for free, to rattle sabers in MS's face: priceless.
JaseP ·
StarDivision was acquired for about $73M by Sun,... That's $1,738 per machine, $348 per machine over 5 years. Between OS & tech support, etc., and accounting for a 5 year amortisation of the acquisition cost, versus the ROI from StarDivision products, it's actually believable...

Fettoosh ·
Quoting:And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licences from Microsoft


It sounded to me that the only reason Sun had to have PCs is for a Desktop Productivity suite, thus the annual average TCO, which includes hardware, software licensing, management, and support.

BernardSwiss ·
Quoting:$13,000 (annual TCO per PC)


Are you sure you didn't misplace a decimal, there?
DrGeoffrey ·
@Bernard

Remember, it's TCO for a Winblows computer. . . And that's before considering that the software is rented.
BernardSwiss ·
Yes, I know -- the hardware, the "basic" (Windows) OS, proprietary anti-malware tools, proprietary management tools, and of course the proprietary getting-work-done "productivity" apps -- and then the "Client Access Licenses" on top of that, etc, etc, Not to mention the physical plant and man-hours of actually running and maintaining the systems.

But $13,000 dollars ? Per desktop PC ? Annually ?

I'm not arguing (I've never managed an "IT infrastructure" of more than a handful of boxes), just making sure that the number is "reasonable" (presumably in a large-scale "enterprise" context, anyways).
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:Are you sure you didn't misplace a decimal, there?


Yeab, pretty sure, it is $13,000.00 per PC that is $13K per PC. Google it to find reputable TCO studies and should back it up. The one I used a while back was from Gartner.

http://www.open-mag.com/features/Vol_34/TCO/tco.htm

Quote from Article:

Quoting:Who invented this “TCO” acronym that is now a vendor, analyst, and user term, anyway? The credit goes to the Gartner Group, which first introduced its total cost of ownership idea over five years ago. In 1996, Gartner won a lot of business attention to the hard and less apparent costs of IT when it said that it cost at least $13,000 for a corporation just to maintain a workstation.
dinotrac ·
@fettoosh --

That number is probably much lower today ( it was derived back in the 90s), and its a bit of a BS number to begin with, trying to include everything that goes into the cost of a PC, including networks, tech support, etc.

To the extent it's useful at all, it answers (badly) the question "Should I have some kind of workstation for my people or not"?
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:That number is probably much lower today...


@Dino,

True, but when did Sun purchase Start Office? August 20, 1999. So it applies

One could argue that the figure was less, but the fact was that the figure was a range, which depended on what is included in the TCO, the size of the enterprise and its IT group, and many other factors. Believe it or not, I was told that the $13,000. figure was the average.

Of course the figure is much lower now. New better management tools & utilities, more experienced better qualified IT staff, less costly out source services due to more competition, etc.

For Sun, this figure could have been much lower, and it would have been cheaper to buy Star Office.

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