Slashdot Mirror

Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time. For instance:
http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html?download=mirrorbrain&files/stable/3.3.0/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_en-US.dmg

So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.

Well, I have both LibreOffice and NeoOffice on my Mac (2010 MacBook Pro). The only thing I use NeoOffice for is printing, which seems to not work properly on either LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org.

Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time. For instance:
http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html?download=mirrorbrain&files/stable/3.3.0/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_en-US.dmg

So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.

And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.

Some of these are already addressed in LibreOffice, but I think it would be a nice starting point in a community fork to address the things the community obviously wanted, but Sun didn't prioritize.

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?resort=1&Submit%20query=Submit%20query;issue_type=DEFECT;issue_type=ENHANCEMENT;issue_type=FEATURE;issue_type=PATCH;issue_status=UNCONFIRMED;issue_status=NEW;issue_status=STARTED;issue_status=REOPENED;issue_status=RESOLVED;email1=;emailtype1=exact;emailassigned_to1=1;email2=;emailtype2=exact;emailreporter2=1;issueidtype=include;issue_id=;changedin=;votes=25;chfieldfrom=;chfieldto=;chfieldvalue=;short_desc=;short_desc_type=allwords;long_desc=;long_desc_type=allwords;issue_file_loc=;issue_file_loc_type=fulltext;status_whiteboard=;status_whiteboard_type=fulltext;keywords=;keywords_type=anytokens;field0-0-0=noop;type0-0-0=noop;value0-0-0=&order=issues.votes%20desc%2C%20issues.priority%2C%20issues.issue_type

I've bought 3 computers in the last year sans OS - no Windows. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856173011&cm_re=zotac_ion-_-56-173-011-_-Product I could find more but you get the idea, computers without Windows exist and run just fine.

I have also created documents and spreadsheets and presentations without Office. http://www.openoffice.org/

Please show me evidence that any OEM will drop your warranty if you run another OS on their hardware.

Sorry but you're full of it.

my understanding is that the reason they don't take the patches is because there isn't a single point of license assignment for the patch source. if RH has a large patch, then RH doesn't take on the role of copyright assignment, but rather allows each single code creator to keep that duty. warm and fuzy of them, but not very practical at all i'm guessing

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=208463

mkdir oo | cd oo | wget http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/stable/3.2.1/OOo_3.2.1_src_core.tar.bz2 | tar -xzvf OOo_3.2.1_src_core.tar.bz2 | *alter at will* | ./configure | make | make install | enjoy

OpenOffice.org only uses Java for the database and some of the accessibility technology and wizards. You can run the rest of it just fine without Java. This shouldn't be a deal-breaker. They have been moving away from it for some time and I suspect that the LibreOffice people will make an extra effort to remove all reliance on Java. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org

There is some disagreement about the java dependencies. According to OpenOffice.org, you do NOT need Java "If you do not require database tables or accessibility integration or some wizards" and I would not call this a very heavy relianse. Read more on OpenOffice.org wiki. I would imagine the same text applies to LibreOffice at this stage.

Maybe just a 'forke'. Looks like this group are from the OO German language project, not the core team:

http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/jacqueline_rahemipour.html

"Sure, I need Office for work..."

No you don't. http://openoffice.org/

OK, I realize this is posted by an AC, but the reality of it is, a lot of us don't have a choice about using Microsoft Office.

It's standard issue, installed by IT, and you're going to be seeing documents in that format. You think I'm going to our CEO to say we shouldn't use Power Point or Word? Hell, when we're bidding for work, often there's a requirement to deliver the docs in Word format.

Open Office is simply not a realistic alternative. If you're working on stuff in isolation, or only with other OSS geeks, or if only your printed work ends up in someone else's hand.

What am I going to do, *not* use the installed version of MS Office so I can use Open Office and hope that it doesn't mangle the formatting of something? To heck with that.

You must live in a bubble if you don't think those of us who work for large organizations have any choice in using Office or not.

Just to correct you here as well, Oracle have not dumped OpenOffice.org.

Check the copyright notice on http://www.openoffice.org/

The project does not need to be adopted. There are a number of companies contributing to what is considered the major legitimate fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice: http://www.documentfoundation.org/

Not correct: http://www.openoffice.org/

Take a look at the fat Oracle logo in the bottom left. Oracle is still very much in control of Open Office.

What you are probably referring to is the majority of other contributing organizations to Open Office have gone and started their own fork called LibreOffice, which is not under Oracle's control.

There are negotiations being held to have Oracle relinquish control of the Open Office name, but as of yet it has not happened.

OpenOffice runs fine without Java. OpenOffice Base requires Java, but the majority of the rest of the suite doesn't.

As stated on the OpenOffice wiki:

If you do not require database tables or accessibility integration or some wizards, then you do not need to download and install Java.

Personally no, but this thread may be of assistance to you:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5745

Sorry I can't help more, but OpenNote isn't something I've used, let alone alternatives.

If OOo was a complete rewrite in 1999, why are there so many timestamps from 1991 in the source?

"I think depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more. And a point of market share on a number that's about 300 million is interesting. It's an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think, but we're very focused in on both Apple as a competitor, and Linux as a competitor."

and

I assume we're going to see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones. We'll see Google more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before. The seams between what's a phone operating system and a PC operating system will change, and so we have ramped the investment in the client operating system.

And, OpenOffice runs on Android mobile phones: http://www.alwaysonpc.com/aboutOpenOffice.php. That is something for Microsoft to be sleepless about.

OpenOffice on Android mobile phones. Mmmmmm. Sweet.

With the upcoming 3.3 version it doesn't seem to be an issue anymore:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_3.3#Component_:_Spreadsheet

I work extensively with and in Japanese as a translator, and some in Chinese and Korean as a language geek. OOo has yet to properly support simple out-of-the-box features like word and character counts for CJK text.

Rather that word/char counts are absolutely vital for the translation business (it's how we gauge time requirements and figure out our billing), this renders OOo a no-go from the start.

FWIW, IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo v1.x, *does* properly implement word/char counts that break down the Asian (i.e. CJK) character versus Western (i.e. alphabetical) word counts.

For reference, this was reported as Issue 17964 way back in August 2003, with the CJK problems first mentioned (in this bug report, anyway) back in March 2004. While the OOo team did deign to add a Tools -> Word Count menu item (it had been in the File menu previously), there has been zero noticeable movement on the Asian text issue in all this time.

For as much promise as OOo holds, Microsoft couldn't possibly shoot the project in the feet any better than the management team to date already has.

Cheers from a disaffected former OOo user,

"Microsoft .. Office .. infinitely quicker and more powerful than Open-Office"

Not actually true, once you enable the OO preloader, it starts and runs just as fast as msOffice. And msOffice displays the first page while still loading the rest. Try and scroll down a long document to see what I mean. You can try out the Windows version for yourself. link

Did anyone download and install LibreOffice 3 ? If you click "About LibreOffice" under Help, you get :

LibreOffice 3.3.0
OOO330m7 (Build:9526)
ooo-build 2010-09-24

Copyright © 2000, 2010 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This product was created by The Document Foundation, based on OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org acknowledges all community members, especially those mentioned at http://www.openoffice.org/welcome/credits.html.

why does it still mention Oracle ? Is it a license issue ?

I understood that they had to call it OO.org instead of simply OO because they do not own the trademark on that name, at least not in every country. The Dutch homepage of OOo has a disclaimer on their page, saying that there is already a local company with that name. From what I understood they are far from being a trademark troll: they predate OOo, own the trademark in the BeNeLux and actually appear to be some open-source-friendly consultancy bureau. I am not sure about the status in other countries. Anyhow, Sun did a bad job choosing the name OO, but at least as a brand-name it sucked a lot less than LibreOffice.

It would've been if this had happened. Merge too much text together and... goodbye.

Is MS Office really superior in anything that 90% of the users actually need from their word processor?

As of the latest version, you still can't have a word count in your status bar. This is pretty-much a killer failure for anyone who writes to word targets (i.e., most professional writers).

Last time I looked, there were several serious shortcomings with calc, in that it couldn't cope with (IIRC) more than 64K rows in a sheet, which can seriously hinder using it for statistical analysis.

Trying not to be alarmist as this looks like a pretty specific case and while Sun was content to look the other way while Oracle isn't. It probably wouldn't hurt to discuss possible ports/alternatives. OO has always been more than good enough and the ubiquity given by java meant no gtk/qt squabbles. How would things go if Oracle decided to stop spending any resources on it? The license is LGPL. What about patents/CRs? Could someone fork oo or re-implement in another language without legally running afoul?

And no, being a corner case myself; google docs is not the answer.

OpenOffice sucks, it's ok for the price I guess, but it sucks. The mods may mod me flamebait but it has bugs that would not have passed proper QA.

Example: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56449

There are others I've had that I can't really remember in detail - I think I had some problems with Impress - when I ended certain bullet text entries with certain characters, weird stuff would happen - mades me wonder how screwed up the underlying code is.

Other options: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Office_suite?p=1

I've tried the eval version of Kingsoft Office and it does look quite like MS Office. I think they just need to make an Outlook compatible that works with Exchange and they would either be a great success or sued to oblivion by Microsoft ;).

Except my wife hates OpenOffice with a passion

I'm quite curious, why?

I presume she's had some sort of experience with the app that's soured her on it; I doubt she just woke up one day with the word "OpenOffice" in her head and decided she would hate it. :)

FWIW, I am quite put off by OOo too, largely because of moribund development, boneheaded design, and an opaque codebase, among other issues. Various bugs have been on the books for over 8 years, and linger still. When I first learned about OOo back in 2002 or so, I was very excited about it -- hey, who wouldn't like a feature-complete, essentially drop-in replacement for MS Office? But the more I used it, the more it became painfully apparent that OpenOffice is *not* feature-complete, and *not* a drop-in replacement for MS Office. Some missing features are even stupidly simple, like broken word/character counts for Asian text in Writer, or absolutely baffling date display and editing formats in Calc. Both are clearly bugs. Both would seem trivial to fix. Both have been on the books for more than half a decade. Both are targeted vaguely at "OOo Later" (i.e., the devs have no clear target for when a fix might be released)...

I've personally given up on ever being able to use OOo professionally (I'm a Japanese translator, so bogus Asian counts are bad, and I deal with dates in spreadsheets a lot, so bogus display/edit formats are bad). Reading your comment here, I'm curious what reasons your wife might have for disliking the software.

Cheers,

Except my wife hates OpenOffice with a passion

I'm quite curious, why?

I presume she's had some sort of experience with the app that's soured her on it; I doubt she just woke up one day with the word "OpenOffice" in her head and decided she would hate it. :)

FWIW, I am quite put off by OOo too, largely because of moribund development, boneheaded design, and an opaque codebase, among other issues. Various bugs have been on the books for over 8 years, and linger still. When I first learned about OOo back in 2002 or so, I was very excited about it -- hey, who wouldn't like a feature-complete, essentially drop-in replacement for MS Office? But the more I used it, the more it became painfully apparent that OpenOffice is *not* feature-complete, and *not* a drop-in replacement for MS Office. Some missing features are even stupidly simple, like broken word/character counts for Asian text in Writer, or absolutely baffling date display and editing formats in Calc. Both are clearly bugs. Both would seem trivial to fix. Both have been on the books for more than half a decade. Both are targeted vaguely at "OOo Later" (i.e., the devs have no clear target for when a fix might be released)...

I've personally given up on ever being able to use OOo professionally (I'm a Japanese translator, so bogus Asian counts are bad, and I deal with dates in spreadsheets a lot, so bogus display/edit formats are bad). Reading your comment here, I'm curious what reasons your wife might have for disliking the software.

Cheers,

> I thought go-oo also required copyright assigned to them when
> submitting patches (I agree they're not as retarded as Sun when
> it comes to accepting patches).

I did not know that. I've never submitted a patch. It sounds ironic, and I see no mention of it on the site:
http://go-oo.org/developers/

Can you tell me where you found that info?

> Why is Oracle making an even bigger mess of it? By attaching it's
> name to the project?

I actually like the Oracle name. But they've reassigned OOo engineers from bug fixing (I am in contact with Oracle for licensing so long as Issue #5556 gets fixed) and they've taken the MS Office ODF compatibility plugin and started charging for it:
https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:8843910539649667::::P3_PPI,P3_LPI,P3_METRIC,P3_TERM:3710062267511641485310,3760869190131631757316,Application%20User,_Perpetual

> And what exactly did Novell do different than Red Hat that
> makes Suse such a 'dog'?

I never called Suse a dog.

Hi.

I'm trying to come up with various ODF templates for OpenOffice.org, and other compatible software. Would you tell me what obstacles you encounter with OpenOffice.org, please? I'm more interested in making templates for Writer & Draw.

I recommend the following corrections for your post.

"Being an OSS fan, I have, at various times, tried to..."

Most people will say that that is too many commas, but I find that it helps with readability. I think that the first comma is quite important.

"OpenOffice.org is commonly used here to style manuscripts. I find it better than Word for certain tasks, but there's nothing...".

I think that the first phrase works fine as its own sentence, and it would be incorrect to join it to the other phrase, without a word, like "and".

Just so that you know, I deliberately leave punctuation outside of quotes, parentheses and brackets, because of readability. It's wrong for me to do it, but many of us think that it is better that way.

Just so that you know, I wouldn't have noticed your English problem, if it weren't for your sig. Your English is quite good.

Okay, I have to put a bite in on the Anti-Microsoft plug. I'm sorry, but as much as microsoft products suck, most everything else sucks more for consumer software. Microsoft provides integration between their products, they are supported and fixed. Very few products in other realms come close to that.

Apple's products are better to some degree because they provide reliability through simplicty, but nobody has ANYTHING as good as the office suite that works with the rest of their stack.

OOo? It feels like I'm back in the '90's every time I use it! Seriously, Microsoft Office '95 feels more polished than that! And crashed less too when I was running it on Windows 3.1. Sure I can submit a bug report on Open Office, but it doesn't change the fact that the stuff is still behind the times comparatively.

I agree on the rest of your post, so I'm trying not to be aggressive here, I just get aggravated when everyone just puts Microsoft out there as the big bad evil source of everything sucky. I agree that in the server market, I prefer Linux products and open technologies, but the real money is almost always in mass-market areas and that's where Microsoft does an insanely good job.

I still firmly believe that a better product could dislodge Microsoft, but that product has not shown up yet and it's because of naivete. Software isn't just about the pretty code. It's about usability testing, support services, marketing, integration, distribution, training. I'm sure there are more parts to that, but I'm only a developer, I don't have to manage that part of it most of the time. As far as customers are concerned, those are all equally as important as the product itself and rightfully so. If more groups got their s*** together and developed a full platform for the product like that, it could do well!

A market has begun to develop around professional support for these products. How do I find professional support for Open Office? I look at this: http://bizdev.openoffice.org/consultants.ods - a long, UGLY and hard to play with spreadsheet file! They won't even put up a webpage so i can select my area and they tell me a consultant? This is abominable!

Okay, lunch break is about over, no more time to rant :(

The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office

Not really.

The office manager has work that needs to go out by the close of the business day. He is employing fifty to one hundred and fifty temps he needs to be productive at every empty desk he has to fill.

More power to short-sighted companies that put themselves in positions such as your particularly contrived example making it necessary to waste money on overpriced proprietary software just to get work done. We'll spend our money on benefits and salaries for our employees thank you very much. And as a nice side benefit, we'll put what's left over after that in our pockets.

Classes and certification programs no farther away than your local high school, community college, senior center, or public library.

There have been classes and certifications that supported obsolete business models and practices for long before you or I got here. Fortunately, market inefficiencies tend to be self correcting in the long run. Although, sadly, that tends to only happen after many businesses that hitched their wagons to an out dated model have bitten the dust.

> I use Word 2007 at work and it is very buggy. If I had my way, I would not use it, even OOo is better.

I agree Word 2007 is buggy. But OOo is NOT better. It's far buggier.

FWIW, it's not so much the bugs in Word 2007 that annoy me than the way it does formatting and selection of certain stuff. Yes I know you can customize the behaviour but I still find I have to "battle" with it a bit too often.

OpenOffice on the other hand has rather blatant bugs like these:

Launch openoffice writer.
Type three lines of: "This is a test testing 1 2 3"

Select one of the lines.

Press ctrl-f.

Enter test in the "search for" field
Enter foo in the "replace with" field
Click on More Options.
Click on current selection only.
Click on replace.

Bug: openoffice replaces the ENTIRE selection with "foo", instead of the first found term.

It is not possible to search and replace terms within a selection. You either have the entire selection replaced (if you click replace), or openoffice forgets your initial selection (if you click find).

This bug has been around for ages: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=15501

I can't be bothered to see if it's still present in 3.2.

Just go the the openoffice bug site and look at the open bugs there and you'll see how behind they are. But hey it's free...

OpenOffice.org directly supports digital signatures:
Digital Signing of documents

They're already grappling. The problem here is that MS Office and VBA are moving targets and Microsoft isn't perfect at adhering to its documented implementation. To Microsoft's credit, when you're dealing with something as big as VBA, it's difficult to line up documentation and behavior; that's part of the reason why standards committees take so long nailing down how something is specified and how it should be implemented.

If someone asks you when you were born, you don't say:
"1964, 22nd, May", you say, "May 22nd, 1964" - which is the American format. Enough.

I would say the 22nd of May, 1964.

When someone asks you for the time, do you tell him in HH:SS:MM format? The units must be ordered either from least to most significant (dd-mm-yyyy) or most to least significant (yyyy-mm-dd). I don't care which you chose. But don't put the least significant unit in _the_middle_!!!

See this horrible Open Office bug on the subject:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5556

After all, open office exists along side microsoft office.

And there's OpenOffice.org, which is a completely different product from Open Office. Which brings us right back to copyrights and all that...

Yes, MSO2007 has issues (I don't know why MS Word uses CPU even if supposed to be idling, and I've had trouble pasting ) and the UI change is "meh", but in my opinion Open Office is very significantly worse[1]. Perhaps the latest version is much better now, but after so many years of disappointment, it's hard to believe it has improved dramatically. I'll still use it if I have to, but it is far from a good substitute.

In contrast, I've tried Kingsoft Office and they seem to be a better MSO replacement option. My bro says the spreadsheet doesn't support the matrix multiplication function (which Excel has), but he bought the Kingsoft Office anyway just to test it out, said it was cheap enough - I told him he could just download the eval copy. I think he just likes to support the underdog.

They don't have a Microsoft Outlook substitute though. Outlook sucks (CPU hog, crashes, hangs, search needs improvement) but the stuff it does (works with Exchange, calendaring, etc) is necessary in many organizations.

[1] See: http://tinyurl.com/ykvya22

Lots of the bugs there look familiar to me: formatting not being saved, bullets not behaving correctly.

And stuff like this (I just picked one of the bugs from the above list which caught my eye):
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56449
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=74707

It's been around for years (reported in 2005) and still not fixed (implications of bug: you cannot step through a find-and-replace within a selection - it has to be for the whole document).

I just tested it on 3.2 and the bug is still there!

In contrast when I search for bugs in Word 2007 I see the usual crash bugs (I doubt OOo is immune) and stuff like:

"For example, in Word 2007, if you use a nonbreaking hyphen to join
two words, the new combined word is flagged as misspelled (which is fine),
but then you cannot "Ignore All" instances of the combined word when doing a
spell-check. Wen doing a spell-check, you must ignore each individual
instance of the combined word throughout the document. As you can imagine,
if you have a proper name that includes a nonbreaking hyphen on every page of
a 200 page contract, individually ignoring each instance of the combined word
during spell-check can get very annoying very quickly. Thanks for any
replies!"

I also have been very annoyed with Word 2007 by one bug - sometimes when I try to paste something into certain word documents, somehow all the formatting isn't copied over when it's supposed to (even when I choose "keep source formatting" - some behind the scenes weirdness, it works in other word docs). For example the table and contents are copied and pasted fine, but the font is wrong!

Yes, MSO2007 has issues (I don't know why MS Word uses CPU even if supposed to be idling, and I've had trouble pasting ) and the UI change is "meh", but in my opinion Open Office is very significantly worse[1]. Perhaps the latest version is much better now, but after so many years of disappointment, it's hard to believe it has improved dramatically. I'll still use it if I have to, but it is far from a good substitute.

In contrast, I've tried Kingsoft Office and they seem to be a better MSO replacement option. My bro says the spreadsheet doesn't support the matrix multiplication function (which Excel has), but he bought the Kingsoft Office anyway just to test it out, said it was cheap enough - I told him he could just download the eval copy. I think he just likes to support the underdog.

They don't have a Microsoft Outlook substitute though. Outlook sucks (CPU hog, crashes, hangs, search needs improvement) but the stuff it does (works with Exchange, calendaring, etc) is necessary in many organizations.

[1] See: http://tinyurl.com/ykvya22

Lots of the bugs there look familiar to me: formatting not being saved, bullets not behaving correctly.

And stuff like this (I just picked one of the bugs from the above list which caught my eye):
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56449
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=74707

It's been around for years (reported in 2005) and still not fixed (implications of bug: you cannot step through a find-and-replace within a selection - it has to be for the whole document).

I just tested it on 3.2 and the bug is still there!

In contrast when I search for bugs in Word 2007 I see the usual crash bugs (I doubt OOo is immune) and stuff like:

"For example, in Word 2007, if you use a nonbreaking hyphen to join
two words, the new combined word is flagged as misspelled (which is fine),
but then you cannot "Ignore All" instances of the combined word when doing a
spell-check. Wen doing a spell-check, you must ignore each individual
instance of the combined word throughout the document. As you can imagine,
if you have a proper name that includes a nonbreaking hyphen on every page of
a 200 page contract, individually ignoring each instance of the combined word
during spell-check can get very annoying very quickly. Thanks for any
replies!"

I also have been very annoyed with Word 2007 by one bug - sometimes when I try to paste something into certain word documents, somehow all the formatting isn't copied over when it's supposed to (even when I choose "keep source formatting" - some behind the scenes weirdness, it works in other word docs). For example the table and contents are copied and pasted fine, but the font is wrong!

But a system or an office suite are very simple applications. You need some know-how, but it's not rocket science.

There is nothing simple about an OS or an office suite.

In 2003-2004 OpenOffice.org had reached 9 to 12 million lines of code. Build FAQ for OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org statcvs (Lines of code)

Microsoft spends an enormous amount of time and money on studies of office work and the office worker. That is why it can take a chance on something like the ribbon and win - and why competitors like OpenOffice.org are left playing catch-up.

Windows and MacOSX has APIs from a single provider with a single controlled release schedule. Linux has APIs from hundreds of providers with different release schedules. Linux distributions are efforts to bridge this problem and present a stable API within a distro release.

If you want an extremely stable distro, go for Ubuntu LTS or a RedHat/CentOS release. If you want the latest features and releases of software, pick a non LTS Ubuntu / Linux Mint or Fedora release. Ubuntu releases are usually upgradeable, while I usually reinstall my Fedora installation every second release.

Compiling a piece of software yourself is really not that complicated. Most of the time its simply: install required dev packages, then run configure; make; make install. As for OpenOffice it seems to be: install required dev packages, then run ./configure; ./bootstrap; source LinuxX86Env.Set.sh; dmake

I never suggested OO.org was not bloated too - its written in Java after all

This is a popular misconception. Most of OO is not Java, and 95%+ users do not need Java installed to run OO.

To quote from
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org

"If you do not require database tables or accessibility integration or some wizards, then you do not need to download and install Java."

I believe *very* few people use the OO 'base' database.

OO.o 3.2.0 consistently crashes for me (KDE 4.3.5 / Fedora 12). This seems like a known issue (#109176).
The workaround is to add:
export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome
to "/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice".

I'm running CentOS 5 on work desktops and I do something similar to install the latest OO.org, although my procedure is as follows:

Go to http://download.openoffice.org/other.html and *untick* the "Include the JRE" option, otherwise you end up downloading a JRE you don't want (since I keep the full Sun JDK updated via downloads from java.sun.com).

Click on the "English (US)" 32-bit RPM Download link (yes, we run 64-bit CentOS, but the lack of an official 64-bit Linux Firefox (if distros and other 3rd parties can build it, why can't Mozilla?) causes a cascade of 32-bit dependencies including Java and hence OO.org).

This downloads a (147MB!) .tar.gz which I unpack into an OOO dir using tar (and no, the dir name doesn't match the root of the .tar.gz file, ho hum).

I cd into the unpacked dir and then cd again into the RPMS sub-dir. I then *remove* .rpm files I don't want to install. Typically this would be openoffice.org3-dict-es, openoffice.org3-dict-fr and ooobasis3.2-testtool, but your mileage may vary.

I also "mv desktop-integration/openoffice.org3*-redhat-menus* ." so that the packages appear in my users' start menu when I finally do an "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" as root. And, yes, there's a ludicrous 47 RPMs at this point to install - there really should be something like 5 or 6 (one core [aka "common"] RPM and one RPM for each app).

One final - often later - step is to download the en-GB language pack from the other.html page I mentioned at the start. Annoyingly for 3.2.0, they haven't released an en-GB pack for it yet, which is ridiculous considering far more diverse (compared to en-US) and much less popular languages have their 3.2.0 packs (e.g. Danish, Polish, Serbian and Slovenian).

...and only with programs that they want you to use...

Wait, what?! How do you people not get modded down for this blatant misinformation? There are absolutely no restrictions on what applications you can run on OSX, as evidenced by the vast selection of free and open source software available for it, much of it competing directly with apple products.

I'm no MS lover -- I've lost many an hour due to their pointless mucking about with the UI and other functionality between versions of their products, and I quite loathe how abusive their relationship with their customers is. (By the same token, it takes two to tango, but anyway...)

That said, I must also say that OpenOffice.org has been an amazing disappointment in various and sundry ways. Despite the considerable *potential* of the project, there are so many ways in which it falls completely flat. Assorted bugs that may present substantial barriers to adoption for more serious use remain unfixed, some for 5, 6, 7, even *8* years, sometimes with no indication of any progress and despite being theoretically trivial to implement (and despite sometimes being implemented in IBM's OOo-derived Lotus Symphony suite): [1], [2], [3]...

By any objective measure, the OOo development process has been poorly managed. I seem to recall an article here on Slashdot some months back that characterized OOo project management as "moribund", but I cannot find the link at the moment. The fact remains that other office software applications, some FOSS and some proprietary, have progressed by leaps and bounds (though, in MSO's case, perhaps simply "changed" as opposed to "progressed", YMMV) over the past almost-decade, while OOo has been largely dead in the water.

I've followed OOo since I learned of it some time before the 1.0 release, and I've gone from enthusiastic supporter and interested contributor to the fora, to a disaffected and disillusioned (though still hopeful) former user. As a Japanese-English translator, I need accurate word and character counts, which OOo still hasn't implemented. I know this makes me something of a fringe case, but I am far from alone when I say that I simply cannot use OOo in any real professional capacity.

Oh, well.

Cheers,

I'm no MS lover -- I've lost many an hour due to their pointless mucking about with the UI and other functionality between versions of their products, and I quite loathe how abusive their relationship with their customers is. (By the same token, it takes two to tango, but anyway...)

That said, I must also say that OpenOffice.org has been an amazing disappointment in various and sundry ways. Despite the considerable *potential* of the project, there are so many ways in which it falls completely flat. Assorted bugs that may present substantial barriers to adoption for more serious use remain unfixed, some for 5, 6, 7, even *8* years, sometimes with no indication of any progress and despite being theoretically trivial to implement (and despite sometimes being implemented in IBM's OOo-derived Lotus Symphony suite): [1], [2], [3]...

By any objective measure, the OOo development process has been poorly managed. I seem to recall an article here on Slashdot some months back that characterized OOo project management as "moribund", but I cannot find the link at the moment. The fact remains that other office software applications, some FOSS and some proprietary, have progressed by leaps and bounds (though, in MSO's case, perhaps simply "changed" as opposed to "progressed", YMMV) over the past almost-decade, while OOo has been largely dead in the water.

I've followed OOo since I learned of it some time before the 1.0 release, and I've gone from enthusiastic supporter and interested contributor to the fora, to a disaffected and disillusioned (though still hopeful) former user. As a Japanese-English translator, I need accurate word and character counts, which OOo still hasn't implemented. I know this makes me something of a fringe case, but I am far from alone when I say that I simply cannot use OOo in any real professional capacity.

Oh, well.

Cheers,

I'm no MS lover -- I've lost many an hour due to their pointless mucking about with the UI and other functionality between versions of their products, and I quite loathe how abusive their relationship with their customers is. (By the same token, it takes two to tango, but anyway...)

That said, I must also say that OpenOffice.org has been an amazing disappointment in various and sundry ways. Despite the considerable *potential* of the project, there are so many ways in which it falls completely flat. Assorted bugs that may present substantial barriers to adoption for more serious use remain unfixed, some for 5, 6, 7, even *8* years, sometimes with no indication of any progress and despite being theoretically trivial to implement (and despite sometimes being implemented in IBM's OOo-derived Lotus Symphony suite): [1], [2], [3]...

By any objective measure, the OOo development process has been poorly managed. I seem to recall an article here on Slashdot some months back that characterized OOo project management as "moribund", but I cannot find the link at the moment. The fact remains that other office software applications, some FOSS and some proprietary, have progressed by leaps and bounds (though, in MSO's case, perhaps simply "changed" as opposed to "progressed", YMMV) over the past almost-decade, while OOo has been largely dead in the water.

I've followed OOo since I learned of it some time before the 1.0 release, and I've gone from enthusiastic supporter and interested contributor to the fora, to a disaffected and disillusioned (though still hopeful) former user. As a Japanese-English translator, I need accurate word and character counts, which OOo still hasn't implemented. I know this makes me something of a fringe case, but I am far from alone when I say that I simply cannot use OOo in any real professional capacity.

Oh, well.

Cheers,

Who said anything about moving away from MS software? MS Office supports ODF.

MS Office supports only ODF version 1.0 (the up to date version of ODF is 2.0). Also, it has many features which aren't going to convert into ODF 1.0 correctly so it's not really suitable. What's the point of using MS Office as an ODF editor when you can get Open Office for free? Even if you do have MS Office, you'll be better off having OpenOffice.org installed on your computer as well.

The quote itself is referencing third-party apps. Try comparing Adium to Pidgin, or TextMate to pretty much any other GUI text editor, or iWork to OpenOffice (not really a third-party app, but you get the picture). As a general rule of thumb, apps written for the Mac are better thought-out visually, are more consistent both with themselves and with the rest of the system, and often manage to do this without sacrificing power or features.

Hell, even Microsoft is susceptible to this: just look at their Bing iPhone app, and compare it to their own WinMo equivalent. It's like night and day.

That is the main problem with closed source software; in the event of a security hole, you as a customer / company are left to the mercy / arrogance of your software vendor to patch the flaw. Until he does, you can do nothing but become increasingly concerned...
0day? Fixed tomorrow!

You can patch only what you know how to patch.

In 2008 there were between 6 and 10 million lines of code in the Linux kernel alone. Linux Kernel Surpasses 10 Million Lines of Code

In 2003 OpenOffice.org had 9 million lines of code. Build FAQ for OpenOffice.org

You can only test your patch only on systems you can access.

That your home-brewed solution is seriously flawed may only be discovered by your neighbors.

The next time they load a JPEG from your site.

As soon as a security hole is discovered, virtually anyone can contribute to a timely resolution.

Most likely by staying out of the way.

There is the final problem of how to roll out a patch. The naive end-user who auto-patches was spared Cornflicker.

Secunia integrated with Microsoft WSUS