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The Openoffice.org marketing site has more information about upcoming features in Openoffice.org 2.0.

I'm not Santa, But my last name is Rudolph (like the reindeer... seriously it is) and I got a Spell Checker for him.

Slackware, you insensitive clod! ;-)

Actually on a serious note, I install (for my mother, family and friends)...

7-zip
gs / gsview
Firefox / Thunderbird
AVG
WinPT
Eraser
OpenOffice
Gimp (depending on the family member or friend)
Gaim
FileZilla
Amaya (only because bluefish is not available on win32 yet)
RealVNC
VIM
irFanview
Azureus (depending on the family member or friend)
Daemon Tools (depending on the family member or friend)

A lot of my family members and friends use Microsoft Windows and over the years I must have spent months fixing their systems myself or telling them on the phone what to do. I am tired as hell of playing the pro bono Microsoft support tech and I no longer offer any kind of support for anything Microsoft related to anyone. Period. My immediate family members now all have a dual boot system with their favorite version of Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD 4 with the following free software:

• KDE
• OpenOffice
• Sylpheed-Claws
• Opera
• FireFox

Keep in mind that all of the software above also has versions that run on Windows, so there is no need to use one application under Windows and another under FreeBSD. Great integration, no confusion, easier transition.

The raw Windows partition is backed up in an image file created with dd, so if there's any Windows related trouble they can't fix on their own they just boot the special FreeBSD floppy which employs a simple shell script (using dialog) to let them backup or restore the primary partition image. If you need something more complex like Norton Ghost then I suggest you use the absolutely free and cool replacement called PartImage.

If they have any trouble while using FreeBSD they just click a special icon named "Call for help" which starts a shell script that sends a number of specially crafted packets to my computer's static IP, where such packets are logged in a special file which I see on my desktop (tail -f), so if I'm available I can log into their system via ssh within minutes of any sign of trouble and they do not even have to bother to email me, let alone use the phone to call me. It works like a charm.

I feel sorry for the people who buy Microsoft Windows and then call me to help them out when things go wrong, but I just can't afford to waste my life fixing what should not have been broken in the first place. Enough is enough.

OpenOffice.org already has OOBasic which is the Visual Basic language, but with a different object model. So, what is lacking is a compatibility layer for Microsoft documents.

Have a look to OOoMacros.org and the french OOo sub-projectfor interesting native OOo macros.

But Gnumeric is a very good choice. Here is a detailed write up of Gnumeric. The Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Statistical Software Newsletter has a report reviewing Gnumeric vs MS-Excel titled Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel (Warning for PDF) Regardless, of which spreadsheet you use, it's worth a read. Some excerpts:

When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2 has largely fixed the flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions.
...
Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perfome statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel

Id there a reason whay you haven't tried Open/Star Office?

I've been happy using it for several months. If you're not involved in extremely complex spreadsheets it should work fine.

you KNOW that something is wrong when something so mediocre has total market dominance.

Hmmmm....

OpenOffice
or NetBeans

nothing dirty there.

I wish some of the "security" campaigns being run by the occasional government or tv station would take notice. For your average home user (the one that prints letters, writes e-mail, surfs the web, listens to music, but doesn't necessarily have to have the latest game) there's no excuse to still be running some slow, defective product from Redmond.

...then carefully remove as much Microsoft software from your machine as possible.

Start with MSIE and MS Outlook, then MS-Office (replace them with FireFox, ThunderBird and OpenOffice, respectively). Really dig in and make sure every trace of them has been removed, don't stop at believing what the MS uninstaller tells you about MS Outlook.

Don't offer any shares, even to the LAN (get people to dump stuff elsewhere on the LAN and you pick it up from there), connect to the minimum number of shares (zero if possible) and for the shortest reasonable time.

Run a good firewall.

Pray a lot.

One more option: if you have a modern Linux box around, throw LogicWave at WINE on that and see how far it gets. If it doesn't work outright, maybe you can hack up an interface to the actual analyser in WINE. That'd be a lot of effort for one workstation, but if you have 20 or so it might be worthwhile.

The answer to the first question, taken literally, is "yes, obviously". Presuming you really mean "anyone" as a casual way of saying for "a very large portion of the general market" then the answer right now is "no". But...

Does *nix really think it a chance in the desktop sector considering how entrenched Windows is?

This is a different question altogether, and the answer is "yes".

See, most people really DON'T care what OS brand name they use so much as they care about being able to play well with others - whether the "others" are other computer environments that the user is already familiar with, or other people playing the user's favorite game, or websites on the internet and email clients on their friend's computer, or being able to look at the slideshows that someone else produced and uploaded, or whatever...

Most people also don't want to blow wads of money on licensing if they don't have to.

The "typical" computer user these days seems to be interested almost entirely in email, web browsing, and "Mahjong" games. These basic functions are already well supported in *nix environments and ready to be sold as "appliances" running *nix to anyone who is satisfied with those basic requirements. Related to email and web, though, people also want to be able to watch all those little internet videos that their friends email to them, which are often in proprietary formats. Now, MPlayer already supports all of the major formats pretty well, and plugins are available to use it to play internet videos in Microsoft(r)'s formats, Apple(r) Quicktime(tm), and so forth, not to mention the existence of the Helix media player as well. So, that's possible to take care of.

The slideshows (I refuse to call it a "presentation" when there is nobody actually presenting...), word-processor documents, and spreadsheets can all be handled pretty well by OpenOffice. There are still a few formatting differences that come up sometimes when loading a file produced by a Microsoft(r) program, but I'd call it "good enough for typical home use". Plus, the ability to generate .pdf's natively built in means if someone is USING OpenOffice they can generate documents that look correct on everyone's computers. So, for ordinary home users, this is also at a "good enough" stage.

That's not all of the market, or I think even a majority, but it's a pretty big chunk. What's really missing, as the Slashdot discussion boards echo loudly with every time this subject comes up, is video games. Right now, most are written exclusively for the purpose of being installed on a Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) general-purpose operating system, and this does create a genuine speedbump in the path of *nix desktop marketshare.

However, the concept of having a dedicated "boot disk" for running a video game has been around for a very long time. Tech support people tend to love them, because when used, the video game in question ends up running on a known, well-characterized environment without other processes interfering. Because providing tech support costs money, software company tend to love anything that reduces the need for tech support.

Since it seems like most people who are playing anything more intensive than "Mahjong" or "Solitaire" usually play full-screen and dedicating all of their attention to the game (and generally want as little running in the background reducing their framerates as possible), the possibility of distributing videogames on self-contained boot CD's is very real. The boot disk might be a no-license-fee-paid-by-the-software-company Linux disk, as they've talked about doing (have already done?) with America's Army. I think the only technical capability lacking to make this really feasible is full write support for NTFS (since

Hi!

What is Microsoft doing?
Microsoft is shifting more and more of their revenue stream to server products. There are only so many features you can stuff into Word, and let's face it, OpenOffice is perfectly suitable for most office workers. Microsoft is also pushing hard to have third-party software (and hardware) vendors embed Microsoft components in their software. We're in the Microsoft ISV program--and I have spent time with the corporate legal staff discussing whether or not Microsoft will indemnify us against any claim for IP infringement. This announcement clears the issue up--they will.

What's the big deal?
I work for a company that makes lighting controls. We make the dimmer in your dining room--but we also make control systems for very large projects, such as Lincoln Financial Field (home of the Philadelphia Eagles). We provide Windows-based control software (among lots of other things)--it would be a serious issue if a vendor to Microsoft sued us for infringement based on Microsoft's code. That's exactly what SCO did to AutoZone. SCO didn't contend that AutoZone intentionally infringed--they alleged that AutoZone was using an app developed by IBM that infringed. Nonetheless, AutoZone lands in court in an IP infringement case. Microsoft's indemnification effectively means that if somebody sues us on the same kind of claim, we don't have to worry. Microsoft will defend the case, bankrupt the attorneys, crush the plaintiffs, reduce their homes to rubble, enslave their children, and--and ruin their self-esteem!. We won't have to be involved at all. 8-)

From our perspective, that's a good thing.

But doesn't this portend an onslaught of Microsoft attorneys arrayed against the forces of Open Source? Isn't the battle of Armageddon nigh?
No. This simply means that Microsoft is telling vendors that embed Microsoft products that they do not have to worry about getting caught up in an IP infringement case. That's all.

It will come

He was absolutely right. You can get good wordprocessing programs for free on the Internet.

that I was making $250 on it, becuase he can get it online for $50.00. I was making $30.00 on the software,

Ok, so you didn't rip your customers off. But someone most certainly did (hint: the manufacturer, probably...)

CrossOver Office Office runs just fine on Linux when you HAVE to have that Access database... otherwise, OpenOffice and Ximian Evolution [with optional Exchange connector...] works wonderful. AAMOF, I use OpenOffice on Windoze and Thunderbird to save that $550.00 per 10 computers.

--OR--

Windows users can use OpenOffice!

If you've been living under a rock for the past several years, you can get it at: http://www.openoffice.org/

My fiance and I have replaced MS Office with Open Office, Outlook Express with Thunderbird, Internet Explorer with Firefox, etc.. All of which *also* run on linux.

Once I can fulfill my computer needs on Linux I'll switch (yes gaming=needs).

Until then, I'll tweak WinXP to my liking and make good use of my firewall and antivirus software.

But, if you need a hit-me-over-the-head obvious comparison, enumerating how OOo is better, then look at PC Pro's review of OOo1.1.2. Or you can read Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer, which makes several direct and indirect comparisons.

Or you can try editing a long document with OOo and see for yourself. Menus are flexible. File sizes are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Support for styles is better, as is the ability to export to PDF including PDF forms.

Acquisition and installation has no cost except labor, which is perhaps less since OOo is easier to install than MSO. There are no annual fees or overhead such as the tracking of licenses. There are no hidden gotchas such as the need to purchase additional servers, and user licenses for those servers, to manage Digital Restrictions, etc.

I'm sick of being unemployed, but I'm glad I don't have to work for a company whose high-profile CEO publicly makes these kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Nowhere in the article does Ballmer clearly identify how software prices have any relationship to hardware prices.

But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations. In recent months, the software maker has announced plans to introduce low-cost "starter editions" of Windows XP into countries including India, Russia and Thailand. These versions will be bundled only with entry-level PCs and will not be available for retail sale.

That's the closest he seems to come to linking the issues of software costs -- in this case, the cost of the OS -- to hardware costs. In the linked article, the software is described as being available only in Hindi. Even more significantly, says that linked article, ... The ability to do home networking and to create multiple user accounts on a single PC has been removed, while display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels. More important, users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.

So, is the cost of an OS really the problem? Well, you can get by with OpenOffice software instead of Windows, find open-source chat and email programs, and compute away.

By the way...concerning everybody's favorite free (as in beer) software, the article says

The Microsoft CEO bristled at the suggestion that Linux is gaining in popularity as a client operating system at the expense of Windows. "There's no appreciable amount of Linux on client systems anywhere in the world," he said.

Verification of this assertion is left as an exercise for the reader.

Back when home PCs were an expensive novelty, my dad, who then worked at Texas Instruments, thought that the TI 99/4A ought to be given away for free with every purchase of an arbitrary suite of software -- this was before we all started using them for spreadsheets and word processing, and long before the Internet became commonplace. I wonder if Ballmer would dare to try to give away hardware pre-loaded with Micrsoft OSes and apps, charging people only for the software. If he did, I predict that given rampant piracy and the Open Software initiative, his attempt would flop.

Well Halivar, before you reply, make sure to check your facts (no I'm not new here): http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 3886/

And there's a new version to celebrate: http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.3/index.html/

From the article:

Our Mac OS X build is fantastic, and I use it every day, for articles, presentations, spreadsheets. It never crashes, and it allows me to work with my Linux and Solaris colleagues while maintaining my Mac glow of happiness. It's entirely community built, the work of Ed Peterlin, Dan Williams, Kevin Hendricks, Eric Hoch, Terry Teague, Patrick Luby, and many others (all of whom have day jobs). It runs in X11, in a way that is very elegant and very pleasing to the eye. The job they have done is truly brilliant. The next step is to make the build run natively in Aqua. However, moving to the Aqua interface is an enormous undertaking.

It sure is. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the openoffice.org team, but also to invite OS X developers (and users) to take a look at NeoOffice/J, an effort to port OO.o to OS X-- and make it look good, blue buttons and all.

The project basically has only three developers, but so far they have created an extremely stable office replacement that does NOT require X11. The latest addition-- Native menus.

Although the project is technically still in alpha mode, I know many people who use Neooffice/J for day-to-day use, including myself. (I'm probably not supposed to be saying that yet.. but it's true.) The project needs your support-- if you've got the skills and the resources, please come and help.

(For anyone who has used the OS X version of OO.o, Neooffice/J does not require X11 to be running.)

The Open Office software is OK, but what I actually have high hopes for is the parts of Open Office that's not just code, i.e. stuff like thesauruses, dictionaries, determining prefixes and suffixes, and so on.

In short: I have hopes for this part of OpenOffice, since I can see that it can become incredibly useful for other kinds of applications, search applications especially.

Open Source search implementations are held back because they know little or nothing about grammar or common spelling errors, and until they do they will never get the same quality as Google or Fast's products.

That is enough for me and my small company. I am using Open Office and Mozilla full time now. Adios Bill.

step one is the browser.
you can win this one on the positive user experience front when they experience less pop-ups, spyware and the ilk.

step two is the applications.
you'll win this battle with allies in the finanace department. they'll love not shelling out the big bucks for ms office licenses.

step three is the os.
Win the battles to win the war.

...Wouldn't it be better if they focused on fixing the bugs instead of adding new bells and whisles? I forgot, it's free so...."

"OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 is ready for download. It replaces 1.1.2, and includes numerous bug fixes but no new features..."

50%? Are you kidding? It's rare to see a Windows computer with less than 100% pure, unadulterated, stolen shit in it

That certainly rings true among the people I know - at least with regards to their home computers. 100% of them run pirated copies of WinXP, pirated photoshop, pirated Office, etc...

Personally I think the likes of Abiword make a perfectly acceptable replacement for Word, at least for home users - and often times businesses would do just fine with it. I think Abiword is an upgrade from MS Word - others my not agree. But it's definitely faster to load, looks just as good (better in my opinion), uses less memory, and has more than enough features to keep home users, college students, and business people happy.

I'm not a huge fan of Open Office - not because there's anything wrong with it. It's just that I don't really need an Office Suite. (I imagine most home users don't.) But for those who do "need" it, I think it's a great substitute for the $300+ MS Office Suite.

For my own spreadsheet needs, I prefer Gnumeric because it feels very light weight while still having all the features I need. Plus I think it looks great and it's a heck of a lot faster to load up than OOo. The only problem with Gnumeric is that there isn't a Windows port (that I know of).

I also have several friends who pirate the "Pro" version of Trillian. I finally convinced my friend to give the Windows Port of gaim a try and he has been using it ever since. Bonus - download the encryption plugin for gaim and have secure messaging.

I don't know enough about Photoshop and image editing to know if The Gimp is an acceptable replacement. I've read several posts where people say it is *not* (an acceptable replacement.) I'll have to take their word for it. My image editing needs are very basic so gThumb is about all I really need.

I have another friend who pirates FTP software. With the existence of FileZilla, I fail to see the point. What can't FileZilla do?

A lot of people pirate WinZip. I have to admit that WinZip does have a pretty interface (if you use Windows), but if you don't want to pay for it, and you don't want to take the risk of infecting your Windows computer with a virus when you download a WinZip crack of Kazaa, then I recommend 7-zip as a free alternative. Also, the last time I saw WinZip (which admittedly was years ago) there were a few archive types it didn't handle.

There are so many great Free and Open Source alternatives available, even if you use Windows.

Get FireFox now

The Mac is the only true desktop replacement contender. When Microsoft Office becomes available for Linux, that's when Linux will become a serious contender.

I would love to sample some of that iCrack you're smoking. 1) not everybody needs or even wants an office suite. even counting "business machines" which are the vast majority of windows licenses, only about 30% have any sort of office suite installed. I can't cite a source, but my company does very large scale samplings of global business machines annually. 2) microsoft is not the only source of excellent office suites.

If I could run it 100% Windows Free I would, but the University I'm due to transfer to next year insists on everyone running Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP, Office2000 or XP, and SPSS. Aside from SPSS I'd be totally fine being Windows Free but so far I have found no way to either run SPSS in Linux (neither Codeweavers nor the regular WINE project can do it at this point) but there are SPSS workalikes that are Linux native. Hopefully by the time I have to deal with stats I'll be able to convince my math prof to let me use either RProject or PSPP instead. I am so ready to ditch Windows once and for all.

So hand them a CD.

It costs about AUD$0.40 in eaches something less than 30 US cents), you can be pretty sure it'll run on whatever they've got at home, there are no macro viruses and no signing away of your firstborn in blood before you start, nor mortgaging of the house if you miscount users, machines or CPUs.

Try that with MS-Office.

The other question is: what training?

I have one customer who uses MS-Office extensively (he calls his operating system "Word"), and he didn't notice any difference in OpenOffice except that the templates weren't there. In fact, since the machine had an empty document open full-screen when he walked up to it, he didn't even realise it wasn't MS-Word on MS-Windows.

There are fundamental differences between the packages, but 90% of your users will never stumble over them.

There exists a technical committee at OASIS to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice).

The OASIS format is not simply the OpenOffice format. It contains a number of changes to make sure it works well for other office suits as well.

Two office suits are currently implementing to support OASIS as their native files format: OpenOffice/StarOffice and KOffice. I hope others will join in as well.

When someone sends a M$ word document to someone who does __NOT__ have M$ word, can they read it?

NO THEY CAN'T, unless they have M$ software of course.

Now there is software that does read M$ formats but it's because the formats were reverse engineered not because M$ said, "Oh, I am sorry here's the official M$ format".

File formats are by definition a particular way to encode data for storage or transfer.

Every single file that resides on your hard disk is encoded so that some application can use it.

When a files encoding is not made public only software allowed by the author may __properly__ access the file.

And Microsoft has not made those file formats public, why? M$ intentions are purely commercial. Because to access or create __proper__ M$ documents you must have M$ software.

This is called software lock in.

Now the least you can do to thank those people who have strived to make M$ formats readable by other software is to __use__ their software (download OpenOffice), otherwise just keeping paying M$ every year.

"Components implement StarOffice API services. You are never dealing directly with them when you program in StarOffice API. They are accessible as beans which you can incorporate into your own programs."

"Components implement StarOffice API services. You are never dealing directly with them when you program in StarOffice API. They are accessible as beans which you can incorporate into your own programs."

ms patented?

the article is talking abou OO.o's xml format not the ms-proprietary one

Things licensed as Open Source do better on "just the facts" vs hype. Maybe it's because their audiences would take them to task if they did otherwise, but description of things such as GCC, Wikipedia , the Linux kernel, the GIMP, to name just a few, are completely factual. Not entirely free of marketing but tolerable are the Linux site's description of Linux, OpenSSH, bzip2, Project Gutenberg, and an XWindows organization X.org.

Particularly note Wikipedia and Google. The description of Wikipedia was made and chosen by the users. I can't think of a better testament that what users really want is just the facts. And Google understood that the last thing a person wants to do when anxious to find something quick is be forced to wait for a bunch of pointless graphics and generic ads to load. Really aggravating when on dial-up. Before Google, I got to where I knew just when to hit the stop button when loading Yahoo's main search page so I'd get the text input line and search button and miss all the extra crap they used to put on their main page.

Of course open source isn't totally above marketing. FreeBSD, Mozilla Firefox, KDE, Apache, OpenOffice all lay it on. They can point to all kinds of statistics to justify their hype, but the hype is still irritating when it catches my attention. These are easy to accept in spite of the marketspeak because I've heard from elsewhere that they're good.

Bad though some of those are, Microsoft is worse. Maybe what MS does should be called extreme marketing? In a few moments of searching, I was unable to find even a badly overblown description of just what Windows XP or MS Office is and during the search was wading through hype about MS's latest whatever: "Try the new digital music experience from Microsoft. You'll love it!"

As for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I will spend a little time trying not to do that, but when it does happen I hope it clues the promoters in to realizing they made the waters too murky. Accepting something in spite of murk is not the way to persuade them to clean up. I like to tell them about it too. You never know when commentary might actually be heeded. I'm sorry if a good thing gets short shrift, but when time is limited, books will be judged by covers. People are often asked to try to word emails so spam filters will pass them. I feel I'm not asking too much of marketing to do the analogous.

Just inspect the source of OOo instead.

MS are hypocrites, claiming that Open Source is a problem, yet trying to reap its rewards on their own products.

Why bother? Why would anyone want to work for MS for free?

Allowing you to see bits of the code does not change the fact that MS owns all the rights to it and you still have to pay for MS Office.

If one wants to inspect Office code, OpenOffice is much better way to go.

That's what I love about Microsoft, they always come up with these new and innovative ideas! I can't believe that no one ever thought of this before! :-/

Expenses for file-server workloads under Windows, compared to LinuxOS

They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver

Application development and support costs for Windows compared to an opensores solution like J2EE

A full Windows installation, compared to installing Linux, on an Enterprise Server boxen: Is nearly three hours faster; Requires 77% fewer steps

Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:

Reliable companies with tried and tested products, or that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???

MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan

In order to contribute code into OOo that gets committed and incorporated into the main product, you (or your company) must file a Joint Copyright Form (warning: PDF. No HTML version is available). It is essentially dual-copyright assignment. Both you and Sun have a copyright to your contributions, so Sun can continue to do whatever they want with your contributions including relicense them under different terms.

The work I've done in my projects outside of the OOo source code repository falls outside of the jurisdiction of the JCA. I and I alone own the copyright to that work and choose to license it as I wish.

So no, I can't get recompense for anything I've contributed back into the OOo source code repository itself since Sun owns it too. If I find any of my other outside code in the repository and I myself haven't committed it there, then it's a violation of coypright provided it's not compatible with SISSL licensing.

As OOo is LGPL licensed, the reverse isn't true...Sun can't do anything to me if I use the code in other outside projects, provided they're compliant with LGPL or SISSL licensing. Submarine patents, however, are a different story. Neither LGPL nor SISSL provide patent protection for derivative works.

ed

According to one of the posts in the article, there is no such product called "Open Office" (4th post down as of 9/15/2004 6:00 GMT). The product mentioned in the agreement (legally speaking) may or may not refer to OpenOffice.org, which is what the news story is referencing. Why can a news story get it wrong and not a legal contract? Because legalese is all about semantics. News stories don't have to be to have a Slashdot discussion.

The post in question states:

Because of trademark issues, OpenOffice.org must insist that all public communications refer to the project and software as "OpenOffice.org" or "OpenOffice.org 1.0," and not "OpenOffice" or "Open Office."

Did Sun's legal department pull one over on MSFT's legal department? Was it a mistake? Was Oo.o defined earlier and then said "referred to herein as 'Open Office'"? Was the agreement between Sun and Microsoft dated before the official communication of Oo.o? I don't know, but it appears to be pretty clever, and raises some intriguing questions.

One way or the other, this won't stop me from deploying Oo.o. It's an excellent product, and saves $400 per PC (nearly 40% of the cost of a complete system).

Perhaps that is why the proper name is OpenOffice.org. To quote:
Because of trademark issues, OpenOffice.org must insist that all public communications refer to the project and software as "OpenOffice.org" or "OpenOffice.org 1.0," and not "OpenOffice" or "Open Office."
Perhaps the Sun lawyers pulled a fast one over Microsoft!

Indeed... the quote comes from here, and it looks like it's been posted there more than a year ago. So technically, there is no such thing as OO or OpenOffice, there is only OOo or OpenOffice.org.

I really wonder how well that can hold up in court.

The next thing to go on my drive will be Open Office. Only one binary (I think), since it's Java-based, but ...

Heheh! Actually OpenOffice is written in C++, not Java.

But it feels like a Java app, doesn't it? Also both Java and OpenOffice were slower earlier and have been speeding up at roughly similar rates. :)

This also reminds me of when the BSA tried to get a university to take down unlicensed copies of MS Office that were, in fact, copies of Open Office. Link here.

Seriously, you'd think these people would bother to at least give files a once over before sending out cease-and-desist letters.

If you have Micro$oft data, bite the bullet and buy their office suite (if you can claim student or educator status, the price for three installs is below $200.00) and you have transparent exchange between platforms.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, OpenOffice.org aka OOo does a better job with legacy file formats than does MS-Office. So, save your money, avoid viruses and ease your transition with OOo.

If you're already using OOo on your old platform, then the transition will be very smooth.

OOo has translations in

Arabic , Basque , Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan , Chinese , Croatian , Czech , Danish , Dutch , Finnish , French , German , Greek , Hebrew , Hindi , Hungarian , Italian , Japanese , Korean , Laotian , Malaysian , Norwegian , Portuguese , Romanian , Russian , Serbian , Slovak , Slovenian , Spanish , Tamil , Thai , Turkish , and Vietnamese.

OOo has translations in

Arabic , Basque , Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan , Chinese , Croatian , Czech , Danish , Dutch , Finnish , French , German , Greek , Hebrew , Hindi , Hungarian , Italian , Japanese , Korean , Laotian , Malaysian , Norwegian , Portuguese , Romanian , Russian , Serbian , Slovak , Slovenian , Spanish , Tamil , Thai , Turkish , and Vietnamese.

OOo has translations in

Arabic , Basque , Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan , Chinese , Croatian , Czech , Danish , Dutch , Finnish , French , German , Greek , Hebrew , Hindi , Hungarian , Italian , Japanese , Korean , Laotian , Malaysian , Norwegian , Portuguese , Romanian , Russian , Serbian , Slovak , Slovenian , Spanish , Tamil , Thai , Turkish , and Vietnamese.