Not for the faint of heart. Thus the StarOffice breakage remains a trap that will continue to bite users for a while. Red Hat claims that they are not licensed to distribute this working version via the net. That may well be true, but there is nothing preventing StarDivision from making this version available. What we are really seeing here, of course, is another example of the type of risk that one runs with proprietary software.
Any software can break in an upgrade, and one can only get so upset about that.
But if StarOffice were free software, a version which fixes a show-stopper bug would not be withheld from users that need it. And, of course, if source were available, a fix would have been widely distributed in a very short time. But StarOffice is proprietary, so its users will simply have to wait until StarDivision gets around to making the fixed version available. There is a place in the world for proprietary software, but businesses and individuals that depend on proprietary systems are placing themselves at a certain amount of risk. Ken Thompson's criticisms revisited .