Why did Apache make OpenOffice free?

[adammadigan]

Hi,

Hope this doesn't ruffle any of the wrong feathers, as I love OpenOffice and have used it primarily after getting sick and tired of Microsoft Office.

However, my boss and some of my colleagues got into a conversation recently, with the topic focused on one question.

What prompted Apache and before that Sun Systems to put in the funding, effort and expertise to create such a great office suite and then offer it to the public for free?

Would be very interested in any answers or insight that this forum could provide.

Thanks!

Adam

[FJCC]

Random comments.
I have heard that Sun found it cheaper to buy the StarOffice company and use the suite internally than to pay the Microsoft license fees.
Some companies provide software for free and then offer support for a fee. I don't know if Sun did this with OpenOffice/StarOffice.
The Apache Software Foundation exists to produce free software under a permissive license. See www.apache.org. Some of it is extremely popular but is not intended for the consumer market. OpenOffice is much more consumer oriented than the standard Apache project.
Many software developers believe that software should be free and devote a huge amount of time to supporting it and many companies also support this model. See such products as Firefox, Linux, MySQL (owned by Oracle!), Python, R.

[Villeroy]

More important than this or that office suite, it is the standardised Open Document Format (ODF) which is free of patents, free of obstacles, free of secrets and free of license fees. It is made to break up the dependency of one particular file format to one particular program. All MS document formats are designed to strengthen the dependency of your files to their products, including their "Office Open" XML formats they bribed through the international standardisation boards.

[adammadigan]

This is all great information. Thanks!