Abstract
It's easy to think that the success of OpenOffice.org StarOffice and has only to do to with out-of-the-box cost. But that is not the most interesting part of the story. The story rather has to do with the real and significant change in the ecology of software production and consumption that StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are leading. StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are internationally standardized; they use XML as the default file format, and they can also easily read and write in many formats, including Windows. The adoption of international standards, which occurred early last year, has only strengthened the products. And it is doing more: no longer will governments be required to sustain an informational infrastructure that essentially sends megadollars out of their countries, in the form of supporting remote offices, remote training facilities, a whole ecology of proprietary development and implementation. OpenOffice.org?the project and code?and StarOffice promises nothing less than the tools to build a sustainable system of software development benefiting local governments and enterprises. Because StarOffice is fully standardized and because OpenOffice.org, the project, provides the infrastructure and tools for local configuration, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org jointly This paper examines the predicating structures enabling this change in development and implementation ecology. I briefly describe the relationship between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org and the productive environment that has grown around OpenOffice.org. I then touch on the site infrastructure, SourceCast, which has allowed the efficient, trans-national collaboration among disparate groups including open-source developers and endusers and proprietary interests. But these elements only set the stage for the change of development and implementation ecology, and the remainder of my presentation will focus on the ways in which governments and enterprises are shifting to using and advocating the use of StarOffice, which provides support, training, and an integrated database, and OpenOffice.org, which is both a dynamic, open-source project, and a freely-available application. In fact, as I write this, I can think of several large governments that are either moving to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or seriously considering the option. And they are doing so because it makes both immediate fiscal sense and long-term development sense. |
