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#1: Sarah Abbott (sabbott) on Jul 19, 2006 [SPOILER]

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Your student is either wrong or a very big fan of Microsoft.

Very smart people, have worked very hard to ensure that OpenOffice is 100% legal. People sometimes raise questions because OpenOffice reads and writes .doc files, which certainly started life as a proprietary Microsoft file format, however (1) most legal opinions agree that reverse engineering done with the aim of achieving interoperatability is legal and (2) Microsoft has release the .doc format as an open standard. Other people say that since OpenOffice looks and feels so much like Microsoft Office, it must be some sort of copyright violation. But that whole legal argument has long since been defeated (if it hadn't, Apple would own Microsoft, and Xerox would own Apple). Ever reliable opinion that I am aware of seems to back the legality of OpenOffice.

Except maybe Microsoft's lawyers. Microsoft's lawyers like to make noises about the "possible" illegality of open source software. If you company commits to using that stuff, and it turns out that it violated some copyright, then you might be in trouble, so you better steer away from that dangerous stuff. They have claimed that Linux violates hundreds of Microsoft copyrights, but won't say which ones.

This is called FUD. "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". It's a classic computer industry sales tactic that was invented by IBM back when IBM ruled the computer industry, and has since been inherited by Microsoft. Though they haven't got a legal leg to stand on (probably), they like to spread uncertainty in the hopes that people will flock to the safe haven of Microsoft instead of giving money to their competitors.

OpenOffice started out as StarOffice, an office suite developed by the Sun corporation for Unix systems. As they have done with a lot of other software, they decided to open source it, helping to found the foundation that oversees and coordinates it's development by gazillions of programmers all over the world. So, like most major open source projects, this has some very sophisticated corporate smarts behind it, including some very sophisticated corporate lawyers. Code contributions for these kinds of projects are pretty carefully checked not only for functionality, but for freedom from legal encumberances. It's not unusual for huge hunks of perfectly good code to be thrown out and rewritten because the legal provinence of the original code could not be established.

So anyway, go ahead and download. It's a certain to be legal as anything you find on the net.

Thanks for the info, Jan! I will no longer feel even a twinge of guilt recommending my students to download it. If nothing else, they are not a big corporation!

Well, actually I think most of the development of OpenOffice is done by Sun Microsystems employees and Sun Microsystems pays them to do it. Sun just renounces ownership of the finished product and gives it away for free. Lots of other big corporations pay people to work on OpenOffice, too, including Novell and and Red Hat and many others I forgot. Plus various people work on it just for fun. So while OpenOffice.org isn't a big corporation, it is a sock puppet for a big corporation, which does all this for reasons of it's own (probably having to do with wanting a first class office suite to be available for their operating system (Solarias) but not wanting to pay 100% of the money to develop it).

Interesting puzzle.

Interesting facts. Cool logo.

https://www.opensuse.org/ You can see the little guy at the top left.

That was a very fun solve. Great image.

As always a great puzzle from Jan plus some interesting info.

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