Well, I don't know what McNealy is thinking right this second, but I do know that when I read that I thought:
"Gee, ESR sounds full of shit."
Sun isn't going anywhere. Yes, they are very slow in moving to the latest industry trends. Yes, they depend too much on sparc. But they have a good cash flow and 4 _billion_ $$ in cash. I've heard enough analysts predicting the death of Apple for the past 15 years to not really pay much attention to them when they say that Sun (or Apple for that matter) will be "dead in 2 years". Sun is a huge company, they do not simply go away. They will lay off workers and refocus on their core businesses perhaps, but they will stick around. And since OpenOffice.org is the only office suite that gives Linux a fighting chance against Microsoft, I don't think StarOffice/OOo is going to go anywhere either.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 10:58 pm Post subject:
I do agree with Dan that ESR does seem full of shit. It's precisely the new "apple is dying" fad, now with Sun I do agree that OpenOffice.org is one of the key components for making Linux competitive. But that's almost its weakest point...if Sun ever gets down to the stage of needing to retract to focus on "core strengths", I don't think office suite development really is one of them I'm not aware of the strength of their StarOffice revenue stream, but my gut tells me it's not something to be writing home about
I don't fear for OOo's survival as an application (hell, it's already surviving on a number of external CVS servers), but it will take a lot of effort to get volunteer developers who aren't funded by Sun (or RedHat!) to keep working on the core. Kind of like Mozilla, it's not terribly pretty under the hood, and progrmaming office suites doesn't have that same open source "hobby" appeal that drives so much OSS development (how often have I heard the vi mantra as the true geek word processor).
As to the community, well, it faces the same problem as any other community when people supporting the infrastructure no longer decide to pay to support that infrastructure. AFAIK, while the code is replicated elsewhere, the full bug database, mailing lists, etc. are not and are all caught in dependencies on collabnet's systems. That may not be so easy to replace.
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I do agree that OpenOffice.org is one of the key components for making Linux competitive. But that's almost its weakest point...if Sun ever gets down to the stage of needing to retract to focus on "core strengths", I don't think office suite development really is one of them 
I'm not aware of the strength of their StarOffice revenue stream, but my gut tells me it's not something to be writing home about