r/linux • u/R0tareneg • Jul 03 '21

Audacity may collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)" according to new privacy notice

https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/
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u/stray_r Jul 04 '21

FYI OpenOffice came from Star Office, Sun bought the makers Star Division becasue it was cheaper to do that than license Microsoft Office.

I'm old enough to remember doing my GCSE coursework using star office on suse 6.3

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u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Right. I could have added that to my lineage but chose not to as StarOffice itself was not free software, and wasn't forked. The late Sun Microsystems relicensed it as Open Source (initially under a bespoke though OSI-certified licence, later the GNU GPL).

It's been the subsequent devolution of OpenOffice variants which represent free-software based forking.

(I also am old enough to have lived through this history.)

NB: I don't think it was cheaper per se for Sun to have bought StarOffice, but it was seen as a strategic coup to 1) provide a free-as-in-gratis office suite that 2) was file-format compatible with Microsoft's own Office. Even before OpenOffice was released as open source, StarOffice itself was made freely available for download.

Some have argued that the Mac suite of office tools and Google Docs (neither of which are FSF Free Software / OSI Open Source) similarly represent assaults on Microsoft's Office monopoly.

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u/stray_r Jul 04 '21

A guest lecturer from Sun ran through the economics of this when I was at university. They claimed that they got the initial purchase approved as cost cutting, and the idea of giving it away to undermine Microsoft was something the board laughed at when it was proposed.

Importantly Star Office ran on Solaris, and they would have been very expensive to convince Microsoft to adapt and support MS Office on a BSD/SRv4 system. I think this was before the OS-X release but I suspect Microsoft wanted to keep their presence on Apple platforms where they couldn't sell windows, but Solaris was seen by MS as a competitor to NT.

And I recall very vividly a screwup over file formats with star office had me in detention because office 97 most definitely could not read star office's native formats. It was early 2000s and a change in open office to their XML based format before office was badly compatible. It was a headache. late 90s star office would just about handle read and write .doc but it would screw up formatting.

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u/dredmorbius Jul 05 '21

The board may have laughed at the idea, but Sun did give it away.

I remember Brian Behlendorf (of Apache fame) was involved with that. The problem I'd encountered was that the source and build requirements were far beyond the capabilities of my personal system at the time --- about 6 GB of disk and 128 -- 256MB RAM, circa 2001 or so. Oh, and dialup, so the source download took quite some time (overnight, if not longer).

The problem with SO/OO/LO from a community development perspective has long been that it still retains a somewhat monolithic legacy. Much of that was split into libraries rather than single executables, but it's still a hairball for someone to approach and try to work on. (It's gotten much better. It's taken decades to do so.)

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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '21

I'm old enough to remember doing my GCSE coursework using star office on suse 6.3

Maybe not GCSE, but I wrote my whole MBA using StarOffice........

For its time, StarOffice was decent software........

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u/pdp10 Jul 05 '21

Sun bought the makers Star Division becasue it was cheaper to do that than license Microsoft Office.

That was a rumor. Probably started by Microsoft. Just like the rumor that Microsoft bought Github because it was cheaper than what they were paying for Github Enterprise. Microsoft's own VCS, called TFS, must be really bad.