It's free (except for the support) and it will be available in 24 languages by the end of the month. Symphony is the next big thing in free word processors, but there's something curious going on under the hood.
IBM has decided to follow in Oracle’s footsteps and try to make money out of cheap business-orientated open source software.
IBM’s Lotus Symphony seems to be eyeing up large enterprises by taking old OpenOffice.org code and re-releasing it in closed source format as a freeware office suite for making and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
The firm reckons that, if it offers unlimited subscription-based remote technical support, say at around US$25 a head for 1,000 employees, it can still make quite a killing on the “freeware”.
Of course IBM is claiming that Symphony, which will be available in 24 languages by the end of this month, could save big companies big money; purportedly something in the region of US$8 million in software license fees for a 20,000 strong company. But the move comes at the expense of truly free and open source alternatives.
So far, IBM says that almost a million people have downloaded the new software, and the company is now also approaching smaller enterprises (around 500 employees) with a similar package dubbed Lotus Foundations.
Foundations is a sort of mish-mash of Lotus Notes, Domino mail, file management, firewall, directory services, recovery and backup, anti virus and anti spam programs and support for Microsoft Outlook.
So it seems IBM is proving yet again that there is no such thing as a free lunch... or in this case, corporate-sponsored ‘free’ open source.
More info, including some mixed opinions on Symphony here.