Mandrake Policy Change Angers Users

phalse phace writes "Yahoo! News is carrying a ZDNet News article which reveals that Mandrake has decided to change its policy regarding its Mandrake Club. Previously, Mandrake stated that all membership levels would enjoy the same benefits. But since Mandrake Linux 8.2 will include StarOffice 6.0 and Sun is charging for it, they decided to only allow the download of SO 6.0 to Silver members and higher."

Re:OpenOffice?

[bero-rh]

They are the same codebase, but unfortunately the codedrop to OpenOffice was incomplete.
e.g. the Adabas database is missing because it was licensed from a 3rd party, which didn't agree to open the code.

While OpenOffice is preferrable for most things,
there are a couple of people who need StarOffice until
there are free replacements for the missing parts.

Re:Given the choices

[ReinoutS]

openoffice-6.0.41-6mdk.i586.rpm

Included on the third CD of Mandrake 8.2 download edition.

StarOffice is NOT FREE.

[Simon Carr]

Understand that. The world does not run on pixie dust, it runs on cash unfortunately.

more on announcement from MandrakeClub

[jd142]

If you go to:
http://www.mandrakeclub.com/article.php?sid=1 3

You will see this as part of the announcement for commercial applications for MandrakeClub members:

"At this moment it isn't clear what will happen with the StarOffice. How badly do you need this application?"

This is dated March 8. Before they made the big membership drive, IIRC, or very close to it. Most of the responses below say that they don't care about SO. So, it looks like someone is spreading FUD about Mandrake and that Mandrake needs to be a little bit more thorough is updating its the marketing on its website.

Re:Duh!

[Brian Knotts]

Most big companies have already standardized on MS Office and won't change so i don't know who they plan on selling this too

Exactly.

That's the point that people are missing. Yes, Sun has a right to sell StarOffice for whatever price they wish. But, in the long run, which course of action will result in more revenue for Sun? I'm not convinced that this one will. They aren't going to sell more than a handful of licenses, as there is insufficient reason to migrate from MS Office.

Now, when it was free, there was a great reason to migrate: you could reduce your licensing costs tremendously since you had not per-seat restrictions. I know of a company that very nearly switched. The reason they didn't switch was not that StarOffice was free; they didn't switch because StarOffice 5.2 kind of sucked. There was something accomplished, though. They were able to negotiate down their MS Office licensing fees. So, free StarOffice in that case helped to "cut off Microsoft's air supply" just a little bit. Imagine what a good, free StarOffice 6.0 could do. Sun could do better giving away StarOffice, and making money from support and server purchases, I suspect. I'm pretty certain that they won't make much money under the current plan, though.

Re:Dont understand the outrage..

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you read a corporate EULA from M$ recently? M$ freely gives you the right to install M$ software you use at work on your home PC, as long as it's never used at the same time as the software that is covered by your employer's license. Not illegal!