CeBIT: OpenOffice + Linux = Mac

National ICT Australia's Professor Gernot Heiser had some blunt words for the OpenOffice community -- the product isn't ready to compete with the big boys.

"If you want to be successful in open source it can't just be a 'me too' product. Anything that's not the best technology will not work ... enterprise is willing to pay for the best. OpenOffice is not the best ... it's the first thing that made me move from Linux to Mac," Heiser, NICTA program leader of Embedded, Real Time and Operating Systems, said.

"Open source is creating the most pure Darwinist environment possible. It's brutal survival of the fittest," he said, surprising the crowd at CeBIT's Open Source Business session today.

"Only the best software will be able to survive. Regardless of how free it is, enterprise will not use it unless it is better," Heiser, who is also the founder of Open Kernel Labs, added.

Heiser predicted that it was inevitable for the infrastructure of computing, in particular operating systems, to become commoditised. "You can't make money making operating systems ... [soon] proprietary operating systems will just go away."

In the audience waiting for his turn to speak was Sun Microsystems chief open source officer, Simon Phipps. The OpenOffice.org community was founded by Sun in 2000.

Upon taking the podium, Phipps said: "You have to start somewhere.

"OpenOffice is the reason that Linux users can now write letters. It's high time people jumped on the program and helped develop it."

Riding the wave of community excitement about the "open sourcing" of Java, he was equally bullish about the future of OpenOffice.org. "OpenOffice will become a market leader if we all just contribute what we want to see in it," Phipps claimed.