According to a recent tweet, Oracle (the company which recently acquired Sun Microsystems) has started to charge a license fee for its popular open office compatibility plug-in for Microsoft Office. Is this a signal for other open source and free software vendors to start charging for commercially valuable applications?
Full story »
akf
14 years 23 weeks 2 days 20 hours ago
confused
There seems to be a big confusion here. The ODF-Plugin for MS-Office was never Free Software. Yet, still I think, this is a very bad move.
akf
14 years 23 weeks 2 days 5 hours ago
monetizing Free Software
Okay, this article is not about Free Software. But to answer the question: it would not be wrong to monetize Free Software. The FSF even encourages to do so.
knowing-card
14 years 23 weeks 1 day 10 hours ago
Open formats are part of FSDaily's scope
Even though this is about a company charging money for a proprietary plugin for a proprietary office suite, it might be of interest to the free software community for several reasons:
* It relates to ODF an open format and standard.
* It illustrates how Companies behind proprietary software can (through vendor lock-in) squeeze their customers.
* It gives the FOSS community an insight into the possible future other Oracle software: MySQL, OpenOffice.org etc.
* It can be used to convince to use a free software office suite instead of MS Office.
If it's of interest or people think others should know about it they can vote it up.