Why free is bad for the StarOffice suite

Psychologists have identified a condition which has come to be known in close-knit academic circles as the 'free leather jacket syndrome'.

It goes a bit like this: If Harrods offered you a stylish leather jacket for nothing would you take it? Or would you be a tad suspicious? Soiled goods maybe - probably worth leaving alone?

Now what if that same highly fashionable, well-cut leather number was, say, half price? You'd snap it up, wouldn't you?

This is the way our clever little human brains work. It's that strange mix of cynicism, snobbery, capitalist conditioning and plain old idiocy.

So when you go to your CEO and you say "Why pay for software when you can get it free?" he/she is most likely to say: "What's wrong with it? Where's the flaw?"

Typical.

The news that Sun is going to start charging for the next version of StarOffice for those running it on Windows and Linux - and cunningly not Solaris - received a warm welcome. And this is partly down to the 'free leather jacket' syndrome.

One IT director silicon.com spoke to explained the idea of a product being completely free actually turns the board off. He said: "No one wants to be accused of taking the cheapest option just for the sake of cheapness."

StarOffice is actually a decent product and even if Sun is going to make us pay, so what? It's still going to be the cheaper option - even if we don't know quite how much it'll cost yet.

Sun splashed out $73.5m when it bought StarOffice three years ago and it seems both the corporate and public sectors and even the Linux community are largely happy to pay for the suite. We'll see in May when the new version is released.

For those of you not afflicted with 'free leather jacket syndrome' - for which, incidentally, there is no known cure - get your completely free office software here http://www.openoffice.org .