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Why are we being hardasses about making sure that people agree to licenses? It's a combination of the way the legal system works, and our general conservativeness that stems from being a publicly traded company.

Right, well look: here is an example of an exemplary corporate-sponsored open source project. Rule number 1:

Do not make it difficult to get the source.

Once you're made the decision to go open source, then you have to walk the walk.

Note that Larry's tract is oriented towards end users presumably of binary programs. You're dealing with developers, that's already a big difference. For example, you know the developers intend to pass the licensed material on to others, and you know they won't enforce the same level of documentation as you do on your main page.

Note also, that Larry's paper doesn't say anything about requiring the licensee to identify themself.

Now let me say, I'm disappointed to see the kind of reaction you're getting from many people here to what I see as an important and valuable contribution. What can you do to fix that? Start with your home page. Why is it https, for starters? OK, let's not go there. Just think about this: go out there to any of the thousands of OSS project pages and consider the difference between them and your page.

As an OSS developer, the links I want to see on a project page are:

- What is this
- Who are we
- link to FAQ
- News
- License
- *Download*
- Mailing lists (archives, subscribe)
- Become a registered developer
- Now the PR...

You can leave out much stuff like "Welcome" and "Participating". The people coming into your site already know they're welcome if they see links such as above, and they know what to do with them, i.e., they already know how to participate.

As for assenting to the license agreement, just link the agreement from the download link, and link the tarball page from the license. Nice and easy, and normal.

Don't require anybody to fill out questionaires to get the source. That's a guaranteed way to get off on the wrong foot. Instead, save the questionaire for people who want to become registered developers. The key point here: you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, make the first one a good one.

Presumably, your job #1 is to get the source code out. Anything you do to interfere with that is just getting in the way of your own agenda. I strongly suggest you go out and start looking at other project pages, and make yours look more like the others.

Let me get this straight... you want MS to stop giving away bundled software for free so competitors (many of whom are free..i.e.Open Office) can compete? Where's the logic in that one?

That Microsoft telling the truth about security would pretty much boil down to: "Please, don't buy our product."

Okay, enough M$ bashing. So what DOES Microsoft do right?

Well, okay, they have developed a pretty reasonable method for getting patches and security fixes out the door. They do so for free (as in prostitutes) and though they could have completely shut out Apple's MS Office line, they continue to develop it.

Apple and Red Hat both have competing systems to the Windows Update schema, and I have to say I like Apple's better. I haven't had much interaction with Red Hat's. Anyone?

Open Office I'm really really really really hoping goes Quartz native soon, but according to this posting it's not likely do to API updates. *sigh*

And they have done a few other things, like contribute code to the GPL, which is more than any other company I have seen. (Compaq? HP? Sun? Dell?)

I'd just like to point out that Sun gave us an entire office suite. Don't knock 'em too hard, they're really trying. They've got a lot of blocks to overcome, but they're coming around.

Ludacris, Michael Jackson, NAS, Busta Rhymes, Keith Sweat and Musiq

Black musicians, eh? Nothing new here. Led Zepplin, Elvis, and the Stones stole music from black musicians for years, making the RIAA companies plenty of money. Now the RIAA is mad that people are stealing music from the black musicians owned by the RIAA slavemasters (1). Turnabout is fair play, baby. Too bad, RIAA.

GF.

1. It is admittedly hard to characterize Jacko as oppressed (2), but the artists come and go weekly, and the fat cats (in the industry) seem to just keep getting fatter (3) (4) (5).

2. Despite his hilarious attempt to do so himself.

3. SNZ.

4. Until file sharing started raping their profits.

5. I feel obligated to use this space to bitch about the fact that, like Open Office (6), /. makes it needlessly difficult to add footnotes to my posts.

6. http://www.openoffice.org/

Free. Gratis. Libre.

Software y Libertad!

La computadora es de quien la trabaja!

I've been using Thunderbird on Windows now for about 3 weeks and I haven't had a single problem. I much prefer it to Eudora, my previous email client.

By the way, something useful for non-US English users that took me a while to figure out: Thunderbird uses MySpell dictionaries which can be downloaded here.

And lots more tips for Thunderbird here.

This allows Sun to defend against licensing violations as they come up (since there is no ambiguity as to who owns what). They also sell a commercial fork with some proprietary extras (more fonts, extra file filters) to the business community with no worries.

$1550? That's nothing. Chump change.

The problem is not that QT/Win is not free-as-in-beer. The problem is that QT/Win is not Free-as-in-speech.

Trolltech released a Non-Commercial edition of QT/Win 2.3. The license basically said you couldn't make one thin dime off anything built with the Non-Comm edition, and since it was incompatible with the GPL, you had to add an exception to your license. Nobody took that license seriously, and Commercial license sales dropped. Trolltech was forced to end the line after that one release. (IMHO, had they gone GPL in the first place, they wouldn't have had that problem. The GPL gets respect.)

Not that you could find that out from their FAQs. You have to go digging through the QT-Interest mailing list archives. All the FAQ has is flippant sayings like "When Windows is completely Open Source...". Bah. Like Microsoft really cares about Trolltech. Windows-based developers are the only ones getting screwed.

In the end, Trolltech decided that "Windows compatible" and "Free/Open Source" are mutually exclusive. (Pay no attention to the cross-platform Open Source projects behind the curtain.)

But I'm not bitter.

OpenOffice 1.1 supports exporting to Macromedia Flash, among many other new features.

WTF is up with them using their TLD in their program name? OpenOffice is fine, if a bit unimaginative, but OpenOffice.org just sounds stupid.

Actually never mind, I just found the answer on their web site. Of course that doesn't change the fact that it's a dumb name. If Open Office is trademarked by someone else, show a little creativity and come up with a new name, for god's sake!

Yeah yeah, I know, -1 Offtopic.

Try out OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X; I've got it, and it works really, really well!

Sun plans to kill everything but java in future releases so who knows. But go to for the free online docs if you want to create macro's with it or get a free peak.

What we need is a really inclusive formatted text file format. If companies like Sun, IBM, Redhat, and Thinkfree would just get together to come up with something, then there could be a competitive force.

How about this one? IBM already seems to like it.

If you're looking to get OpenOffice.org for the Mac, you should get the GM from the official download site and not use what's on the CD with this book. As the "GM" implies, there were lots of bugs fixed between the "Final Beta" and "GM", and definitely lots of serious issues were fixed since the alpha.

If you're on another platform, you should probably check the version on the CD as well. Even though it's now being called a "legacy build", the latest stable version is 1.0.3.1 which fixes nasty printing errors in 1.0.3 on other platforms (didn't happen on the Mac! woo hoo!). The "RC" in 1.1 RC stands for "Release Candidate", so if you're thinking of going the whole way to 1.1 you may want to wait until the RC is dropped from the name.

I guess, in short, don't buy this book just to get OpenOffice.org on a CD since you'll probably have to download a newer version anyway.

If you're looking to get OpenOffice.org for the Mac, you should get the GM from the official download site and not use what's on the CD with this book. As the "GM" implies, there were lots of bugs fixed between the "Final Beta" and "GM", and definitely lots of serious issues were fixed since the alpha.

If you're on another platform, you should probably check the version on the CD as well. Even though it's now being called a "legacy build", the latest stable version is 1.0.3.1 which fixes nasty printing errors in 1.0.3 on other platforms (didn't happen on the Mac! woo hoo!). The "RC" in 1.1 RC stands for "Release Candidate", so if you're thinking of going the whole way to 1.1 you may want to wait until the RC is dropped from the name.

I guess, in short, don't buy this book just to get OpenOffice.org on a CD since you'll probably have to download a newer version anyway.

"So instead MSFT pours money into MSN and leverages its dominant products of Windows, Office and Explorer to subsidize MSN. As AOL dies slowly over a few years, this will be viewed as "OK", the marketplace in action."

This is why Ximian and Sun are going for the jugular.

It's strange that almost no one has mentioned Glow [openoffice.org]. As it is, Openoffice can't compete in a the small-medium office environment because of its lack of an integrated PIM/groupware client. Glow is what will make OO a real competitor to MSOffice, not faster startup times or an Access replacement.


...though they could use a new dictionary and thesaurus (both of theirs are easily the worst out there).

OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC Features:

Support for mobile device formats like AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

That's close to what you want.

The importance of a Python bridge for UNO is that now individual parts of OpenOffice.org can be implemented in Python. While this is not likely (though it couldn't make OOo any slower...), the reverse direction is the most beneficial. Any Python program can now interact with a specific component of OOo, such as the Word filters, on a code level. In essence, you can now use Python to script OOo and also use parts of OOo in your own Python apps. This is good news for Python programmers.

You can read up more about UNO here.

To commit code back into OpenOffice.org, three things must happen:

1. The code must be released under both LGPL and SISSL (the "closed source is fine as long as you use the same XML schemas" license). Right now Ximian's source is available under LGPL only.
2. A Joint Copyright Assignment form must be on file giving copyright to your changes to Sun Microsystems.
3. You need to go through the fun patch submission process and politics of forcing your patches down Sun's throat.

As an example, all y'all linux, *bsd dudes could have had three-modifier (e.g. use Alt, Control, and Meta for keyboard shortcuts) but project politics kept these patches from being accepted into the source base. Silly that such a simple community-contributed feature wasn't accepted, no?

This patch submission difficulty is one of the reasons why Ximian icons and patches are not within OpenOffice.org. It's also one of the reasons the Tru64 patches never made it back into OpenOffice.org. The Tru64 team got 1.0.0 compiling, but the patch submission/approval process was so daunting they just didn't bother.

I do know that due to OOo's dependencies on Java for building and compiling, not for running (it's C++ code, already. christ, look at the code you java complaining wankers), it may not move into the core Debian product until it can be built using Kaffe. I believe part of the difficulty (aside from the fact Java is, nor ever will be, free software) is that some of the Java-based build tools are using the 1.4 XML classes now as well as linking against the Java Accessibility Bridge. This makes it impossible to build on a pure free software system, even though it runs on pure free-software GNU/Linux systems.

FWIW I think that you should look at the Ooo bibliographic project that I ran across. It looks like it is all way in the future (2005), but at least it is being addressed.

Cheers,
--chris

1. OpenOffice.org 1.1 RCs are not available for OS X. We just got it compiling a few days ago. And it'll require much more work then simply compiling it, such as testing, integration with the asian fonts and input methods, etc.

   Want it faster? Well, there's only so much two guys can do. We just finished our first full Gold Master release just two weeks ago and man, we need a vacation!

2. Our OpenOffice.org Mac version is X11 based. It looks identical to using the Win32 version. It's functional, not pretty.

   Its installer will help a Mac X11 neophyte through the process of setting up an X11 environment. It's also got the Start OpenOffice.org project to allow you to launch it like a normal Mac application and do document associations (e.g. double clicking an OOo doc opens it up!).

3. The Aquanative porting work is being undertaken in the NeoOffice project, not within OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is a free software GPL version of OpenOffice.org.

   Two native versions are in the works, NeoOffice (Cocoa) and NeoOffice/J (Java2D...only for UI, it's still 99% C++! It's the shoddy C++ that's slow, not Java!).

   Because of political issues of submitting patches and difficulty modifying code owned by the gsl project, it's difficult to do this work within OpenOffice.org. We're also trying to take the project in directions that Sun doesn't want to take StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org really is just the StarOffice development team with its own motivations needed to keep their jobs...and helping a bunch of free software dudes isn't one of them. As sucn, there may unfortunately never be an official OpenOffice.org Aqua port with a true Mac UI.

4. We're moving NeoOffice up to 1.1, but have to get OOo compiling first. Not enough people are helping out to allow us to focus on the fun stuff, so we've got to do the grunt work as well.

5. We're working as hard as we can (c'mon, we're not paid!), and you should keep your pantyhose on. OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer Preview for MacOS X shall be coming soon (e.g. we've had time to stop committing patches and make a really rough really untested binary). And also coming down the pike is another binary of NeoOffice/J with full Japanese support, both for input as well as localization!

1. OpenOffice.org 1.1 RCs are not available for OS X. We just got it compiling a few days ago. And it'll require much more work then simply compiling it, such as testing, integration with the asian fonts and input methods, etc.

   Want it faster? Well, there's only so much two guys can do. We just finished our first full Gold Master release just two weeks ago and man, we need a vacation!

2. Our OpenOffice.org Mac version is X11 based. It looks identical to using the Win32 version. It's functional, not pretty.

   Its installer will help a Mac X11 neophyte through the process of setting up an X11 environment. It's also got the Start OpenOffice.org project to allow you to launch it like a normal Mac application and do document associations (e.g. double clicking an OOo doc opens it up!).

3. The Aquanative porting work is being undertaken in the NeoOffice project, not within OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is a free software GPL version of OpenOffice.org.

   Two native versions are in the works, NeoOffice (Cocoa) and NeoOffice/J (Java2D...only for UI, it's still 99% C++! It's the shoddy C++ that's slow, not Java!).

   Because of political issues of submitting patches and difficulty modifying code owned by the gsl project, it's difficult to do this work within OpenOffice.org. We're also trying to take the project in directions that Sun doesn't want to take StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org really is just the StarOffice development team with its own motivations needed to keep their jobs...and helping a bunch of free software dudes isn't one of them. As sucn, there may unfortunately never be an official OpenOffice.org Aqua port with a true Mac UI.

4. We're moving NeoOffice up to 1.1, but have to get OOo compiling first. Not enough people are helping out to allow us to focus on the fun stuff, so we've got to do the grunt work as well.

5. We're working as hard as we can (c'mon, we're not paid!), and you should keep your pantyhose on. OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer Preview for MacOS X shall be coming soon (e.g. we've had time to stop committing patches and make a really rough really untested binary). And also coming down the pike is another binary of NeoOffice/J with full Japanese support, both for input as well as localization!

1. OpenOffice.org 1.1 RCs are not available for OS X. We just got it compiling a few days ago. And it'll require much more work then simply compiling it, such as testing, integration with the asian fonts and input methods, etc.

   Want it faster? Well, there's only so much two guys can do. We just finished our first full Gold Master release just two weeks ago and man, we need a vacation!

2. Our OpenOffice.org Mac version is X11 based. It looks identical to using the Win32 version. It's functional, not pretty.

   Its installer will help a Mac X11 neophyte through the process of setting up an X11 environment. It's also got the Start OpenOffice.org project to allow you to launch it like a normal Mac application and do document associations (e.g. double clicking an OOo doc opens it up!).

3. The Aquanative porting work is being undertaken in the NeoOffice project, not within OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is a free software GPL version of OpenOffice.org.

   Two native versions are in the works, NeoOffice (Cocoa) and NeoOffice/J (Java2D...only for UI, it's still 99% C++! It's the shoddy C++ that's slow, not Java!).

   Because of political issues of submitting patches and difficulty modifying code owned by the gsl project, it's difficult to do this work within OpenOffice.org. We're also trying to take the project in directions that Sun doesn't want to take StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org really is just the StarOffice development team with its own motivations needed to keep their jobs...and helping a bunch of free software dudes isn't one of them. As sucn, there may unfortunately never be an official OpenOffice.org Aqua port with a true Mac UI.

4. We're moving NeoOffice up to 1.1, but have to get OOo compiling first. Not enough people are helping out to allow us to focus on the fun stuff, so we've got to do the grunt work as well.

5. We're working as hard as we can (c'mon, we're not paid!), and you should keep your pantyhose on. OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer Preview for MacOS X shall be coming soon (e.g. we've had time to stop committing patches and make a really rough really untested binary). And also coming down the pike is another binary of NeoOffice/J with full Japanese support, both for input as well as localization!

So, what kind of developmet does Open Office allow?

Read all about it. api.openoffice.org udk.openoffice.org

Go over to OOoForum.org , go into the Macros and API section and read what people are doing.

Go over to OOoDocs.org , they also have a Macros and devlopment section.

You can write StarBasic code directly into OOo documents. You can write programs in Java to drive a running OOo, even on a different computer. (For example, a Java program on, say, Windows, telling an OOo running on Linux what to do.) You can write components in C++ or Java or Python.

The Python UNO bridge is new. I haven't tried it yet. I believe you can do anything with Python that you could do with Java or C++ in OOo. StarBasic is limited in that you cannot create new components, it lacks sophisticated data structures, and you can only embed it within documents. The other languages cannot be embedded within documents (yet). I'm hoping to someday be able to embed Java classes or Python within an OOo document, just like I can with StarBasic macros.

Be sure to download the SDK. Read the documentation, especially the developer's guide. The first big learning curve is to understand UNO. This is pretty much a prerequisite for everything else. Once you do though, you're on your way.

Oh yeah, on languages that can access OOo. If you're on Windows, you can use Windows Automation. This means you can access it from, say, Visual Basic. I have seen OpenOffice.org programmed from Visual FoxPro.

So, what kind of developmet does Open Office allow?

Read all about it. api.openoffice.org udk.openoffice.org

Go over to OOoForum.org , go into the Macros and API section and read what people are doing.

Go over to OOoDocs.org , they also have a Macros and devlopment section.

You can write StarBasic code directly into OOo documents. You can write programs in Java to drive a running OOo, even on a different computer. (For example, a Java program on, say, Windows, telling an OOo running on Linux what to do.) You can write components in C++ or Java or Python.

The Python UNO bridge is new. I haven't tried it yet. I believe you can do anything with Python that you could do with Java or C++ in OOo. StarBasic is limited in that you cannot create new components, it lacks sophisticated data structures, and you can only embed it within documents. The other languages cannot be embedded within documents (yet). I'm hoping to someday be able to embed Java classes or Python within an OOo document, just like I can with StarBasic macros.

Be sure to download the SDK. Read the documentation, especially the developer's guide. The first big learning curve is to understand UNO. This is pretty much a prerequisite for everything else. Once you do though, you're on your way.

Oh yeah, on languages that can access OOo. If you're on Windows, you can use Windows Automation. This means you can access it from, say, Visual Basic. I have seen OpenOffice.org programmed from Visual FoxPro.

...is the addition of a progress bar to the splash screen. (See this page, under "Other Enhancements", near the bottom.) This would normally be a sign that your code is getting a wee bit bloated.

That said, I use OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 a lot at home, and am very pleased with it. It is slow to start, but is quite fast afterwards, and normally I have it running all the time. (This is on a 1.3GHz Athlon with 512Mb, running Mandrake 9.1.) I use mostly the wordprocessor, with a bit of the spreadsheet, and for my relatively simple needs, I've yet to find anything it can't do.

I've never owned a copy of MS Office, so the improvements in compatability with it will pass me by. Occasionally, lusers send me Word documents, and OOo already does a good job of getting the gist across. Most of the time, they're not saying anything that couldn't be said just as effectively in plain text. If the formatting is too complicated for OOo to unmangle, well... the document probably wasn't worth reading anyway :-p

New features in OpenOffice.org 1.1rc over OpenOffice.org beta2 release:

• a "talkback" style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information
• new command line parameter -start to automatically start a presentation after the document is loaded
• ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x single user installations
• support for drawing objects in headers and footers
• an example XSLT filter for Office 2003 XML format
• support for MS Excel 95 and older form controls
• UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org
• built in spell checking dictionaries for English (UK) and Italian
• built in hyphenation support for Danish, English (UK), German and Russian
• integrated Bitstream Vera fonts
• improved spelling suggestions using n-gram scoring

For full list of features please see the OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC features list.

New features in OpenOffice.org 1.1rc over OpenOffice.org beta2 release:

# a "talkback" style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information
# new command line parameter -start to automatically start a presentation after the document is loaded
# ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x single user installations
# support for drawing objects in headers and footers
# an example XSLT filter for Office 2003 XML format
# support for MS Excel 95 and older form controls
# UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org
# built in spell checking dictionaries for English (UK) and Italian
# built in hyphenation support for Danish, English (UK), German and Russian
# integrated Bitstream Vera fonts
# improved spelling suggestions using n-gram scoring

But bug #1820 remains unresolved. In all fairness though, things are a bit moving for this showstopper. Hopefully there will be a solution for it in the near future.

For the few unaware of this bug, in Calc, if your locale uses "," (comma) as a decimal separator, your numeric pad is worthless because the num pad "." (dot) is interepreted as something else than a decimal separator. You imagine how difficult it is to convert people using Excel when you must explain that they cannot use their num pad anymore. And before you suggest remapping keys, please read the bug report. Many non english locales are affected by this bug.

And what if Pirate Pete would have never purchased those even if he didn't steal them. Perhaps Pete would have made due with using OpenOffice(TM) and got his Brittany fix on MTV.

Then his theft actions did not actually rob the IP holders of any money, because they would not have gotten the revenue anyways.

So tempting to mod you down like the troll you are but why not bite instead.

If you just go to this little link right here you'll find a very easy to use Office app that you can install in a few clicks on Windows, Solaris or Linux. And not only does it not have to be compiled, it doesn't cost your money or freedom either!

Or perhaps you'd like the entire linux OS, free of licensing, without having to compile a single thing. Here are just a few examples.

Part of the problem is that people are looking at writing this from scratch, which is a lot of work.

However, in April 2003 the OOo Groupware team and a few Apache James developers discussed building groupware functionality into AJ.

Apache James is already a production ready POP, NNTP and SMTP server, and has partial IMAP support. It is highly componentised, being based upon the Avalon Framework.

Basically, it was determined by OOogw and a few Apache James developers that it was more than pheasible to complete the IMAP support and add iCal and iCAP, plus the necessary authentication modules (LDAP is partly there iirc, and others). This is not a difficult task because most of the foundation work is already done. It's just a matter of implementing the few protocols that are missing.

Sadly it has not been followed up by the OOogw or AJ developers because nobody really has the time - ever the problem with OSS and volunteers. If I were a Java programmer, I would make an attempt, but I'm not.

I guess this post is a feeble attempt to lure some actual Java developers to the cause.

The computer industry has finally finished its buyout phase, and is now in a replacement (i.e. mature) phase.

That's the best summary of what's going on that I've seen on this thread.

As for the contention that this helps OSS, I'm very skeptical. Businesses have been slow to adopt OSS out of fear. They know about the cost savings, but they don't want to gamble their entire infrastructure on an unknown. A lack of a reason to buy new hardware won't change that basic fact.

I don't think you are right on this, though. Businesses are likely to to begin adopting OS initiatives like Linux and OOo when they see that these allow them to get more functionality out of their old equipment. For example, migrating select executive secretaries to OOo would enable those persons to accept and generate documents in MSOffice2000 formats while continuing to use the existing hardware and with little additional training.

In hard times such as these, that kind of approach is seen as an economy measure. And that shift in viewpoint changes the whole risk management picture. It becomes a matter of planning for gradual changes, rather like a gradual migration of copying machine service contracts from one vendor to another whose got a better deal. You introduce a few copies of OOo v1.1 (expect its release in August) in Purchasing, and you track the maintenance and support costs, and you develop a body of data that will allow you to compare TOC of this approach to the costs of a Windows upgrade of all your 486 NT machines that are running MSOffice97.

Oh, here's OpenOffice.org (Yeah, they've named themselves after their web address).

1. The first is to get the whole thing to compile and work under X11 on OS X as it would on any other *NIX. This is the one that was released today.
2. The next stage is to replace the X11 code with native Quartz code. It will still feel the same, probably look the same (although they may introduce some more Aqua-like graphics at this point) but it will be a native OS X / Quartz app, with no need for X11.
3. The final stage (and I'm really hoping that Apple will get involved at this stage and bundle the resulting office suite with the OS as iOffice, or something) is to redo all of the menus, dialogs etc. so that they look just like a real OS X app. Once this is done (The roadmap says Q2 2004) then it should be a competitive office suite on the Mac.

...starts here and here.

The real question is if governement agencies should be allowed to use expensive licensed software for which there is a viable alternative in the OS/FS community (read without paying required license fees). I think we have since long passed the time that we should believe that e.g running GNU/Linux in combination with OOo is at least as expensive as well know commercial products and can dismiss these statements as FUD.

I for one think they should not buy those products, though it is not any better where I live. In those cases, they are not only throwing our hardly earned (and often reluctantly paid) tax money out the window, which could be used for far better alternatives, they are also increasing the power of a monopolist, a self fulfulling prophecy.

I think this is the strength of the Australian proposal and the ISC tries to oppose (instead of using the money 'equally' (?) for the own population, it would now go to a few companies, from which a lot of them are foreign (not Australian).

The WV settlement is fair enough to the state (their attorney's fees are covered, and they get several million in free products from Microsoft and other companies, though the article didn't say from whom).

The sad irony, though, is that WV can already get free OSes, office software, and other products, even without the settlement. Because of that, this is an even huger win for Microsoft, and an unfortunate result for high school kids in WV who will continue to graduate while under the thumb of Bill.

Question: What would you substitute for Powerpoint?

"Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC."

So, what are our alternatives?

Media Player: VLC, MPlayer for OS X

MSN Messenger: Proteus, Fire

Office: Apple Works, Keynote as Powerpoint Replacement, Open Office, AbiWord, Gnumeric

Outlook: Apple Mail.app, iCal, Evolution,

Virtual PC: Ya, well, maybe sometime RealPC will appear after they settle with Microsoft. But who uses that stuff anyway?

Last but not least, Internet Explorer: Safari, Camino, Mozilla and maybe soon again Omniweb, thanks to WebCore. (Yes, i left out Opera & iCab)

Okay, did i miss something? ;-)

Sun's contributed a lot to UNIX over the years (RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenOffice) . . .

As clumsy at it sounds, the correct name is OpenOffice.org.

It's not an idealistic or political thing; it's a trademark thing.

Oh yeah, despite the doom and gloom of declining revenue everyone is seeing, Sun still makes money. That's more than can be said for many companies, especially ones that don't have monopoly rents to fall back on.

The different components have different strengths. I rate Star / Open Office Writer very highly, it does allow you to structure documents well and it's support for tables is excellent, one of the few areas where it betters Microsoft office.

I'd disagree with that. Table subsystem in OpenOffice Writer has a critical architectural design issue which makes it impossible for a single table cell's contents to flow between pages. Most corporate documents I've seen intensively use tables in their layout and cells that need to span multiple pages are quite common.

Most web pages use tables for layout too and when imported into Writer they suffer badly from this bug.

OpenOffice Writer tries to accomodate each table cell within boundaries of one page. If a cell is too long, its contents overflow below the bottom margin of that page and become invisible, while instead they should be taken to the next page.

This problem has been known in OpenOffice IssueZilla for a very long time in the form of two bugs and their multiple duplicates: issue 2913 and issue 4746.

It was present in StarOffice before OpenOffice.org has been launched and is still present now in OpenOffice 1.1 Beta2 and StarOffice 6.

They plan to fix it with a rewrite of Writer's table subsystem, but it is planned for OpenOffice 2 which stands for undefined future.

The different components have different strengths. I rate Star / Open Office Writer very highly, it does allow you to structure documents well and it's support for tables is excellent, one of the few areas where it betters Microsoft office.

I'd disagree with that. Table subsystem in OpenOffice Writer has a critical architectural design issue which makes it impossible for a single table cell's contents to flow between pages. Most corporate documents I've seen intensively use tables in their layout and cells that need to span multiple pages are quite common.

Most web pages use tables for layout too and when imported into Writer they suffer badly from this bug.

OpenOffice Writer tries to accomodate each table cell within boundaries of one page. If a cell is too long, its contents overflow below the bottom margin of that page and become invisible, while instead they should be taken to the next page.

This problem has been known in OpenOffice IssueZilla for a very long time in the form of two bugs and their multiple duplicates: issue 2913 and issue 4746.

It was present in StarOffice before OpenOffice.org has been launched and is still present now in OpenOffice 1.1 Beta2 and StarOffice 6.

They plan to fix it with a rewrite of Writer's table subsystem, but it is planned for OpenOffice 2 which stands for undefined future.

maybe you should take a look ? OOo Calc has a lot more spreadsheet functions than Excel, lots of chart types too. And above all a nice formula editor/wizard (shows the parse tree structure of the formula, very helpful)

And looking at features in 1.1 beta 2 I might as well ;-)

If you're intrepid enough to compile the sucker (takes over a day) you'll find the icons are simply windows .bmp formatted files that you can replace with whatever you want. This results in the creation of an alternate set of .res files that you can then drop into any OOo distribution. This is the approach that Ximian uses to bundle a different icon set into their 'enhanced' OpenOffice.org included with Ximian Desktop.

It is also possible to use completely alternative widget sets with OOo, as illustrated by the NeoOffice port using Cocoa widgets and Carbon-rendered widgets (screenshots of Neo vs. Office v.X). This approach, however, is still only available to GPL versions of OOo.

If you've got better ideas as to how to achieve cross-platform compatibility and skinning while maintaining the identical look and feel requirement Sun has, stop by the Graphics System Layer project and lend a hand!

And if you're an intrepid graphics designer (who knows a few other intrepid graphics designers...) and would like to make an alternative icon set for the approximately 1000 icons, please pipe up and help us out! Parts of our icon set are the direct result of the truism that programmers are definitely not graphics artists, and others are relics from when Star Division was busy mimicing Win95/Office97. Our community development can only provide the features the community wants if folks volunteer, else OpenOffice.org will continue to gain only the features Sun believes are needed for selling StarOffice, not necessarily those wanted by the user base of its free cousin.

Using Open Office as a WYSIWIG Docbook Editor would be a very cool thing. Unfortunately when I wrote this review, I didn't have time to try it out. Has anyone else tried?

There are OpenOffice ActiveX controls in 1.1 Beta so I imagine file viewers / filters for use within MS Office will be available shortly. In fact, the viewer / filter strategy would be a good "infiltration" technique for the OO XML file type.