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It's in the OOo FAQ.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 includes a WordPerfect filter. See http://wp.openoffice.org/filter.html

>Oh but you can get it for free!!!

Good point

>Very good, asuming that
>a)The person wants to give up their paid for/bundled MS Office app that works as they want and has worldwide compatilibility or b)

The person does not have to give anything up. The person can install both office apps. I do not mind receiving OASIS docs even if I prefer to write in LaTeX. (unless it a simple email that should be simple text).
The person can even open documents in OO, save as .doc and open and edit in MSWORD.

Besides I can use OO on linux and read and write both OASIS and doc formats. MSOffice users should just demand that MS makes Word read OASIS.

>They have the know how to download a file, unzip the contents to a folder, find the setup executable and run it,

I did install OO on a windows computer on a friends computer last year. I just clicked on the link. Then Winzip opened, I pressed "install" (or something like that") and OO was installed.

> or c) They're on dialup so it takes them 2 days to download an
> application to open a single document.

If they are on dialup they do not want to receive MSWord documents anyway. PDF would also be better.
But they can just get an OO CD: http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/

PDF

and

Open Office XML

Strangely, both say you need Adobe reader to read them ;)

Easily fixed. Don't use Office.

http://openoffice.org/

The debate over OpenOffice 2 vs MS Office 200X shouldn't even be taking place. Why? Because OO 2 isn't even out yet.

There should be an unwritten rule that you cannot review an application until it is actually released (It would be a preview otherwise). That would hopefully discourage FOOS companies from using these incredibly long beta periods. Thus have smaller yet shorter improvement cycles.

What the folks at http://openoffice.org/ need to do is get a workable product out the door. Don't get me wrong, I rate the latest beta, but they need to stop swinging for the fences and just get a hit.

There used to be this Lipton ice tea add that said, "Save it for the sequel..." That is what the fine people at OO need to do. Let the battle on Office 2003 take place with v3 of OpenOffice and get a working product out right now.

I was personally hoping to deploy OO 2 to 8,000+ workstations in a K-12 environment, thus giving our stakeholders a better product and save our district $500,000 USD in MS subscriptions. However, with the delay of a "totally supported product" from OO our tech committee decided to stick with Office XP or 2003 (woo is me, right). As they say in NASCAR country, "Get er' done!"

How many other mandatory formatting bugs exist and are unfixed, or unreported? Yes, I know that openoffice is free. But if you don't fix bugs that users tell you about, don't ever complain that they aren't using the software.

It was called Open Office before, then there were trademark issues, now it has to be called *.org: http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/summary.html

WsFtp (~40)
PhotoImpact(80)
Quicken (30)
Spybot - Detect and Destroy (free, donated $15)
MS Access - (300 ?, needed a DB program)
MS Visual Basic ($99, not full version which costs as much as $699 IIRC)
Tiny Firewall (was free when I used it, it seems to be $49 now)

Cost I had to pay: $550 (Not including donation)

You're not really comparing like for like though; let's go through that list again...

FileZilla
The GIMP
Grisbi Personal Finance Manager (Windows & Linux)
Ad Aware
AVG AntiVirus
Services for Unix(make, GCC, etc)
OpenOffice.org Base
Windows Firewall / ZoneAlarm Personal Edition

Total Cost: 0

I would also add that these are still high quality applications - not poor quality abandonware/freeware.

Productivity:

Graphics:

Media:

Internet:

Survival Kit:

Development:

OpenOffice.org's GLOW directly competes with their Java Calendar Server software.

Sun developers work on Glow: http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/team.html

Additionally, Sun knows that Sparc is dying, that's why they're handing over a lot of control to Fujitsu. Sun'll be concentrating on x86 in the next five years, and I believe will start to make inroads in the commercial server market.

OpenOffice.org's GLOW directly competes with their Java Calendar Server software.

Sun developers work on Glow: http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/team.html

Additionally, Sun knows that Sparc is dying, that's why they're handing over a lot of control to Fujitsu. Sun'll be concentrating on x86 in the next five years, and I believe will start to make inroads in the commercial server market.

Just expanding on your suggestion...

Perhaps he could use the OpenOffice API to automatically have a server-side instance of OpenOffice open submitted Word documents and save them as HTML. This should happen at the same time the user uploads the document - that way the user could preview the conversion to HTML, and if it was flawed, he could choose to publish the document as PDF.

OpenOffice API:
    http://api.openoffice.org/

Code snippet shows simplicity of converting OpenOffice Writer SXW document into PDF:
    http://codesnippets.services.openoffice.org/Writer /Writer.StoreWriterAsPDF.snip
Perhaps a few small changes here would get him what he wants.

Perl interface (ooolib):
    http://ooolib.sourceforge.net/doc/ooolib-0.1.5-doc .html#info
There are also Java code snippets. I think it would be possible to convert the OOBasic snippet above to either Java or Perl.

Just expanding on your suggestion...

Perhaps he could use the OpenOffice API to automatically have a server-side instance of OpenOffice open submitted Word documents and save them as HTML. This should happen at the same time the user uploads the document - that way the user could preview the conversion to HTML, and if it was flawed, he could choose to publish the document as PDF.

OpenOffice API:
    http://api.openoffice.org/

Code snippet shows simplicity of converting OpenOffice Writer SXW document into PDF:
    http://codesnippets.services.openoffice.org/Writer /Writer.StoreWriterAsPDF.snip
Perhaps a few small changes here would get him what he wants.

Perl interface (ooolib):
    http://ooolib.sourceforge.net/doc/ooolib-0.1.5-doc .html#info
There are also Java code snippets. I think it would be possible to convert the OOBasic snippet above to either Java or Perl.

They were using Star Office from a release in 2000? (StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000) The only wonder is that they didn't switch sooner! That package sucked (IMHO). No wonder they went to M$. I loathe Office with a passion, but if it were to appear that my only two options were office or star office - easy. If my options also included Open Office, well then; MS be damned. Star Office is just a Sun hack of Open Office. "Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org" http://about.openoffice.org/index.html The version the coppers were using wasn't even based on OO yet. No wonder they didn't like it. They weren't even using a hack of Open Office - they were using a Sun product.

We've used several "office" applications here in schools and I must say this:

Staroffice was terrible when we brought it in. Hard to use, with incompatability errors and a generally unpleasant interface. For quite awhile it propogated a mindset that anything that wasn't MS Office was frightening

Openoffice.org on the other hand (and perhaps more modern StarOffice versions), is very nice, better interface, decent (and improving) compatability, etc. Kids picked up Impress faster that I have, and design some *very* kickass presentations with it. The built-in PDF export facility from the document editors is nice too...

For those that prefer a slightly nicer interface than OO, depending on your version I've found quite a few people enjoyed Abiword as a replacement for the just word component of office.

Seriously, even as an OSS advocate I really disliked StarOffice, but there were/are better alternatives out there.

XEmacs is GNU software because it's a modified version of a GNU program. And it is GNU software because the FSF is the copyright holder for most of it (...) This is why the term "GNU XEmacs" is legitimate. (GNU XEmacs ?! Oh, like, GNU/Linux...)
But in another sense it is not GNU software [my quote], because we can't use XEmacs in the GNU system (etc)

Things like Open Office, TurboCash (Windows only) which includes POS for retail folks. I'm not too sure about tax software. Even closed source tax applications for business are pretty difficult to maintain.

It would be interesting if somebody were to write an article that included absolutely everything a business could need, from the desktop applications, through database, financial, reporting, tax, web, OS, etc..., maybe categorized by small business, meduim-sized, and enterprise.

The company I work for always provides me with Non-OSS supplies like Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, MS Office, and Windows XP. But my work at home involves various types of media projects including audio, video, and web. Right now I use Nvu for development, Audacity for my audio editing, and I'm trying out Jahshaka for video editing. And of course Open Office for everything else.

A GREAT example would be show them Open Office: http://openoffice.org/ ask and tell them they can install this on their systems at home, to communicate with work as well. It shows them just how much money they can save using open source concepts and also saves them a ton of money instead of them needing to purchase a version of Microsoft Office form their home systems and at their cost. You could also explain, that unlike Microsoft Office, when a bug is found in this software because you have he source, you can fix it, instead of waiting for patches from Microsoft. Heck, if you can convince your office to use it, you just might save the company a TON of money as well ;-)

Profits on MS Office increased by 7%, but that is because R&D expenses are down. This means MS Office isn't going to get substantially improved--which we already pretty much knew.

If MS Office is standing still, then it's going to be a lot easier for OpenOffice to catch up with it. Indeed, very soon, OpenOffice will release version 2.0, a major upgrade that has even better compatibility with MS Office.

All this suggests that in the medium term, MS Office revenues could be in for a hard time.

Note: all data is from http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY05/earn_r el_q4_05.mspx.

There's a VERY easy way to stop MUCH of the Microsoft supported liberal garbage, simply notify Microsoft that because of their financial and name support of liberal corruption that you are going to openly publicize and promote freeware replacements to their software products. FREE OS - Linux (to replace Windows) http://www.linux.org/ [linux.org] MS Office replacement (to replace MS Office) http://www.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org] WEB Server products (to Replace MS IIS Server) http://www.apache-asp.org/ [apache-asp.org] Linux Applications (many are free) (additional free applications) http://www.linux.org/apps/index.html [linux.org] Web Mail replacement for MS Exchange http://www.squirrelmail.org/ [squirrelmail.org] PHP-Nuke Content Management System http://phpnuke.org/ [phpnuke.org] Combatting Microsoft Liberal Media Corruption through MSNBC, NBC, and MSN Let Microsoft know that because THEY have their name associated with NBC / MSNBC / MSN that you will stop buying their products in the future, but that many of the great opensource (i.e. FREE) products below that work as Microsoft replacements will be promoted to friends, family, and businesses everywhere. U.S.-based news media needing information on topics not specifically addressed in the list below should contact the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response Team at rrt@wagged.com or 503-443-7070. Additional PR contacts can be seen here (do NOT accept any excuses, THEY SUPPORT MSNBC AND NOTHING BUT STOPPING THE LIBERAL RANTS IS ACCEPTABLE. PERIOD!!) http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.asp [microsoft.com]

A prudent approach, in my opinion, is to assume that you aren't allowed to dual-license contributions if you're the original author

You're entirely right that a lot of licenses should be really MPL-like, definitely not the GPL. This just shows the ignorance regarding the licenses. Law firms, ahoy!
What I meant was that dual-licensing is happening all over! Small projects wanna do it. Large projects do it. MySQL does it. AFAIK, the only big projects that are carefull are OO.org and the FSF. They demmand that you fill a paper form and snail-mail it giving up on your copyright.
I agree that that the prudent approach is that of not assuming you can dual-license, but a lot of people are assuming the contrary, either due to unfairness or ignorance (the hype and noise around GNU, Linux and the GPL).
People need to be conscious about what they're getting into if they contribute to a project. Is it serious? Or are they going to dual-license it and just say "thanks very much for your code", or simply turn it closed-source once they think it's good enough?
My point was that the BSD license levels the playing field for everybody. Either that or the LGPL. Projects like JBoss use the LGPL because they want the reciprocity that it provides. However, the FSF actively plays against the the LGPL and they renamed it to "Lesser GPL." This license is adequate for libraries, though.
I guess we can assume from this discussion that there are a lot more subtleties to licensing than people assume. Knee-jerk reactions defending the GPL just won't cut it.
I prefer the simple, time honoured, tributary to the hacker spirit, court-tested, pro free-software/pro-proprietary approach (the +/+ approach) - the BSD License The other licenses aren't as flexible, or as simple to work with, or as tested.

Being the sole author or my software allows me to dual license it. If somebody wants to use my code in a closed-source project, I can grant them a seperate license in exchange for a fee.

And that is why anyone with half a brain should never contribute to your project, because that would mean you take their code too, and sell it, while they can't do it.

And in GPLing a project that no one should contribute too, defeats the purpose of the GPL. So the GPL, by allowing a dual-license trap, is the smartest choice for the developer dual-licensing, but the dumbest choice for the contributors, who must, in practice must assign their copyright to others.

Only the BSD license allows fair play.

NeoOffice/J is the port of OpenOffice.org to MacOSX. It does make full use of the Java Cocoa interface.

I don't use it [MS-Office] often, since my job requires more design based software (read: Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver, etc..) However every year my work spends quite a lot of money making sure I have the newest version, yet I don't really know what changes.

OpenOffice.org does a very good job at reading / writing MS-Office formats and usually does a better job with the older versions than MS-Office itself. If nothing else, since it costs nothing while MS-Office does and since you wouldn't use either often, it's worth a test.

Oh, and OpenOffice.org can make your PDF files for you, no extra tools needed.

How is this news? I've been using Office 12 for weeks already. You can download it free right here.

that's a lies. The oppsite is true. If you later try to makes proprietary verions of that GPL program, you have to strip out anything that's not your.

You're absolutely right. In fact, this is why big projects like OpenOffice.org demmand that you do this:
"How to submit code to OpenOffice.org
We ask that all code submitted to OpenOffice.org be submitted via Issue Tracker . In your submission please list "Issue Type" as PATCH. Your code will be sent to the committer for the appropriate project.
1. Submit a filled-out copy of the Joint Copyright Assignment form (JCA); we have a PDF version you may print out. We explain our reasons for requiring the JCA in the Licensing FAQ. The FAQ further explain the use and advantages of using this license.
2. In order for your code to be committed to the source tree:
1. Your Joint Copyright Assignment form must have been received. This Assignment covers all submissions of code.
2. The committer must approve your code for submission." This from http://contributing.openoffice.org/programming.htm l

This is also the reason Stallman never accepted the Emacs fork XEmacs as legit, because he demmanded a slew of paper trail.
Theres a whole bunch of companies playing the dual-licensing game (you eith GPL or you buy a proprietary license), or playing the game the OP said (waiting to be bought out by a larger company). The dual-licensing game is IMHO relying on a probable GPL loophole and, AFAIK hasn't been legally tested.

Here's what www.mysql.org proposes: http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/opens ource-license.html
"You are allowed to copy MySQL binaries and source code, but when you do so, the copies will fall under the GPL license." (...) we recommend the commercial license to all commercial and government organizations. This frees you from the broad and strict requirements of the GPL license.
To all free software enthusiasts we recommend our products under the GPL license. We believe that MySQL AB is one of the world's largest companies that offers all its software under the GPL license."

So, what you have here is a company recommending the commercial license, with the explicit proviso that all your code contributions will be incorporated under the GPL, with the implicit caveat that your code will be sold under their proprietary licensing scheme. And if you read that, and contributed, it's kind of hard to argue in court that it wasn't what you meant to do.

Why provide a copy of MS Office when there is a perfectly good free product? http://www.openoffice.org/

Free is good!

I'm no programmer, however isn't Java's appeal the fact that it's very easy to make Java apps cross-platform?

While Sun's intentions in open sourcing their products may not be neccesarily benign, they ARE giving *something significant* to the open source communuity. The best example I can give is OpenOffice.

Sun does have it's own commercial office suite called StarOffice which is derived from the OO suite, however OO is being developed into a very well-rounded competitor.

NeoOffice/J for OS X is a great opensource alternative for MS Office, and that project has its roots in the OpenOffice suite.

http://kde.openoffice.org/
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/

if you go to either of those two URLs above, you'll see that your assertion that GNOME is where is where "all the OpenOffice" integration work is being done is less than accurate.

No offense parent....but you are really talking out your ass on this one.

Last I'd heard, NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org hated each other's guts.

Oooh, look at the hate; they haven't updated the page yet!

Or see this post, which was featured on the OpenOffice.org homepage for a while.

Last I'd heard, NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org hated each other's guts.

Oooh, look at the hate; they haven't updated the page yet!

Or see this post, which was featured on the OpenOffice.org homepage for a while.

Did I miss something? The OOo website clearly states that it will have native theme integration. All of the screenshots of the betas already show what appears to be full integration.

Apparently the KDE team already has OOo 2.0 native widget support ready.

Unless you can find a reference for that, I don't believe you.

Also cross platform GUI's definitely aren't easy, but they're not a complete nightmare. And just so you know I'm not talking out of my ass I've personally created a GUI abstraction layer that supported GTK, win32, and a custom OpenGL widget library. You just have to think about it before hand.

Yeah it's tough, and yeah you learn a lot along the way, but just ask the Mozilla folks, it's not an impossibility by any stretch of the imagination.

Also, especially now with toolkits like wxWidgets that suddenly becomes a whole lot easier!

And yeah a GTK port to Mac would definitely be cool.

Seeing as you're not a developer maybe you should leave the development talk to people who know better.

Huh? OpenOffice has runs very nicely on other architectures such as SPARC and MIPS, and in fact, it's predecessor, StarOffice was sold for such platforms. I mean, the project is basically run by Sun! It was not x86-specific by any stretch of the imagination. Mac OS X has it's own set of peculiaraties that make porting the code of this particular project a bit of a pain. For more information, see Compiler and Other Technical Issues in the Mac OS X 10.0.x Platform.

I decided to do a little researching on my own and found that there is a project to make referencing etc. easier in OOo which can be found here:

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/

Looking thru that it seems the best bet is bibus which can be found here:

http://bibus-biblio.sourceforge.net/

That could drive more people to the alternative, OpenOffice. http://openoffice.org/

Well, I was involved with this on a number of levels and can say there was no announcement. What happened was a slip up and spin control. The original article contained quotes that were taken from the end of an interview with Tony Siress on a completely different topic. He was mostly talking about OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. Note the quote that was interpreted as being the "announcement" of a cooperation:

"I don't want to sell StarOffice for OS X," Siress said. "I want Apple to bundle it. I'll give them the code. I'd love it if I could get the team at Apple to do joint development and they distribute it at no cost--that it's their product. Nobody makes a product more beautiful on Apple than Apple."

Does that sound like a product and bundling announcement? Hell no. It was Tony going off on what he'd "like" to happen, that he'd "like" to have a partnership with Apple and a bundling deal. It never existed. The StarOffice team that he was talking about was the one that existed under Patrick Luby back in 2000 prior to when Sun open sourced the failed remnants of the Mac port.

It also turns out that by this time Patrick had already been working on NeoOffice/J and, being a former Sun employee and manager of the Mac port, he was beginning to show early versions of his application to people within Sun. This is one of the projects that was mentioned by Sun managers as the Java port, even though it wasn't even a Sun project. Tony himself referenced NeoOffice/J's ancestor in his interview.

Tony later explained the mixup to the OOo community, which was later picked up by the press. He was talking out his ass and made my life hell for a whole week.

CNet was embarassed, of course, since they essentially now looked like fools by "breaking" completly false information. So they ran a counter-argument story that had longer quotes from the interview. The Quartz version that he's referring to was the Quartz porting work I had been doing in OpenOffice.org. The Java version he's referring to was the early work by Patrick. It even had some quotes from a Sun PR person confirming that Tony said what he had said. Sun PR sacrificed Tony to maintain a working relationship with CNet (apparently there had been a Sun PR person involved with the original interview but they hadn't stopped Tony from making off-topic comments).

The key point you'll see in that "refutation" article that makes it known he's full of it is the quote on laptops at the bottom. He mentions Apple wanting to sell Sun PowerBooks. His "contact" at Apple was a sales rep who was trying to sell laptops, not an engineer!

After that fun blunder, Tony never really was allowed to speak to the press again, particularly on StarOffice related issues.

Conspiracy theorists love making a big deal out of this up until this day (witness the parent), but in the end it was all a bunch of bull caused by an eager manager and an overexuberant reporter "breaking" a supposed story without doing any fact checking to confirm the horseshit coming out of the manager's mouth.

The good thing was that it pissed me and Dan off so much we created the NeoOffice project (NeoOffice/C) to prove it could be done. Eventually Patrick was convinced to open source the code Tony referred to and thus NeoOffice/J was born. Bad thing is it wrecked any chance of Sun or Apple actually providing OpenOffice.org engineering support since the PR n

Sorry, but all your Base are belong to OpenOffice.

Sorry, but all your Base are belong to OpenOffice.

I am a professor at a small University, and encourage my students to use open source options, such as OpenOffice.org. I have no problems with PDF, however it's not so easy to submit PDFs to TurnItIn.com -- but this objection can easily be overcome, by requiring the student him/herself to make their own submission to TurnItIn.com, and then attach the results to their paper.

The only problems I would have would be if a student used an early beta of OpenOffice.org (such as build SRC680), which introduced briefly the .oot format. Naturally, I can unzip the file and use sed to edit the manifest in the XML, but it's a pain. I'd happily accept .rdf, .sxw, .sdw, .odt, .doc and even Word Perfect and LaTeX if the student wanted to put some effort into it!

I said they were supportive. Discussions on mailing lists, blog entries, that sort of thing. Encouraging.

Please note that Macromedia is being supportive to their own developer community. Also every tool (open source or not) that has a chance to provide added value to their own platform while not being a competitive threat to their own product line is likely to get some (little) support as well. That does not even compare to what other companies do, by really embracing the free software / open source movement. IBM offered a couple of dozzens of programs to the open source community (list) one of them being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Laszlo. Sun open sourced Star Office, Netbeans and will soon open source Solaris. Laszlo Systems open sourced their RIA Platform (OpenLaszlo). These and others are companies being supportive to the open source community. Macromedia however is not one of these companies. On a greed scale they would be somewhere very close to Microsoft.

Flash (which, btw, costs half of what you said)

I don't know where you live but in Germany the half cripple Macromedia Flash MX 2004 costs 694.84 euro (=855.926701 US$) and the full Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 costs 973.24 euro (=1,198.868952 US$).

If you don't like it -- don't buy it.

You can bet I won't. I already told about OpenLaszlo. That is what I would use, should I ever consider writing Flash applications again. For now I am a lot better off using SVG and JavaScript for the open source projects to which I contribute. SVG and JavaScript are both open standards while Macromedia's technologies are proprietary. Supporting Macromedia's technologies would help Macromedia more than anybody else, and would surely hurt web standards and interoperability.

It's a shame Microsoft won't be using the recently-standardized OpenDocument format, which would mean exisiting products could read it. It also saves the XML file and all included data files (images, etc) within a ZIP file.

(Disclaimer: They might be using it, but TFA doesn't mention it and it wouldn't fit with their MO.)

The one thing that these others have in common, that MS Office lacks, is support for the OpenDocument DTD. OpenOffice.org v2 will use OpenDocument as its main format.

Note that many of the articles linked to by the original post express skepticism about how open MS' XML will actually be. Recall that in the last year, and even in the last weeks, MS has sought patents from the USPTO for XML and XML related functions. And is even now pushing to get legislation in Europe to make those same patents valid in the EU. That smacks more of a PR stunt rather than an actual opening up.

Furthermore, since the articles don't mention the current leaders in productivity tools with XML-based formats (i.e. OpenOffice.org or StarOffice), that looks all the more like warmed over press release being passed of onto the public as news. What's next? A press release about MS suddenly supporting PDF export like in OOo or StarOffice?

• Simple
• Flexible
• Effective

I think that is the same reason that companies like Dell don't bundle quality open source products with the computers they sell. Even though it's better for the customers, they just don't make money off that practice.

For example, if Dell gives users the option of having Open Office preinstalled or Microsoft Office preinstalled, some people will go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and see that they don't need Microsoft Office and Dell sells fewer MS Office licenses.

To avoid OOo switching back to English randomly you need to do the
following:

Tools-> Options-> Language Settings-> Languages-> Default
language for documents-> choose the desired language.

Make sure you have the corresponding dictionary installed. Get it from here.
Also, I use the "For the current document only" option to keep English
as the overall default.

Cheers,

Morel

Plan:
March 2005: OOo 2.0 Beta
May 2005 : OOo 2.0 changes will be done on separated branch, the trunk (HEAD) will then be used for the next OOo major (3.0 ?) release.
May 2005: OOo 2.0 rc
June 2005 : OOo 2.0
Q3 2005: OOo 2.0.1

taken from:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOff ice_org_2_x.html

BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast.

So fast that the browser times out on a search for "mozilla". Hopefully they'll get those kinks worked out soon. :-/

Bandwidth generously provided by Hot or Not

That explains everything. ;-)

Will he get sued?

I still think that anyone trying to sue Bittorrent or a generic search engine would have a hard time of it. Bittorrent has so many legal uses that it just isn't funny. Here's some example of legal torrents:

Privateer Remake
OpenOffice
Star Trek: New Voyages (legal fan made)
FreeBSD
Star Wars: Revelations (legal fan made)
Xandros Free Edition
Mozilla Firefox
Doom 3 Demo
America's Army (now for Linux and OSX)

I could go on, but I think you get the point.