Robin Miller of NewsForge looks at Sun's upcoming release of StarOffice 6 and its open source sibling, OpenOffice. “I have OpenOffice build 641C (now known as version 1.0) and a pre-release copy of StarOffice 6.0 running side by side, and I have been looking at the differences between them. OpenOffice is free in both senses of the word, while StarOffice is not. I am generally happy with OpenOffice, but I can also see why some people — and many corporate users — would be willing to pay up to $100 for StarOffice.”
You might say that free OpenOffice is roughly equivalent to Microsoft's $479 Office XP Standard, while StarOffice is comparable to $579 Office XP Professional. In this context, StarOffice is probably worth $50 or $100 more than OpenOffice to most corporate users, especially if StarOffice includes manuals and support, and OpenOffice does not. And don't forget price. Instead of spending more than $500 per desktop to equip an entire working group with Microsoft Office, a company that respects its stockholders (or a government agency that respects taxpayers) could give most employees free OpenOffice, and buy StarOffice only for those who need its additional features. Instead of $500,000-plus in MS Office license fees for 1,000 desktops, you might see 800 desktops equipped with OpenOffice and 200 running StarOffice, which would bring the total license cost for all desktops down to $20,000 if Sun decides to charge $100 per copy, and to $10,000 if Sun decides $50 is enough.