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If you want to help, you should submit one of these documents to the openoffice.org issuezilla. They're pretty good at getting to filter related issues if you attach a document for them to test with. You'll want to clean it up as much as possible (ie. shorten it and remove any confidential info) before sending it it.

The only surprise here is that Microsoft is acknowledging how overpriced Windows is. I loaded OpenOffice on my son's computer for his homework last night. For the average user with light word processing needs, Redmond's bloatware much too expensive as well.

....that OpenOffice made this a non-issue. Yes, I used to run SoftWindows, etc. but never on a regular basis, and not in the last two or three years. Now that OO is available, I can run it on my Mac and/or Linux boxen and be happy.

No need to check pricing for MS emulator cloaking devices.

If I can't help you, someone can.

Did you try looking through the closed compile bugs to find the resolution to your problem? What makes you think that if you submit a compile bug then it will be ignored? Most of the other's seem to have been resolved.

Once you get it to compile, run a profiler. You will see the ghost of Pascal array bounds checking staring you in the face, on start up and during interactive execution.

If I can't help you, someone can.

Did you try looking through the closed compile bugs to find the resolution to your problem? What makes you think that if you submit a compile bug then it will be ignored? Most of the other's seem to have been resolved.

Once you get it to compile, run a profiler. You will see the ghost of Pascal array bounds checking staring you in the face, on start up and during interactive execution.

If I can't help you, someone can.

Did you try looking through the closed compile bugs to find the resolution to your problem? What makes you think that if you submit a compile bug then it will be ignored? Most of the other's seem to have been resolved.

Once you get it to compile, run a profiler. You will see the ghost of Pascal array bounds checking staring you in the face, on start up and during interactive execution.

I've been using WordPerfect since 1986, and Paradox since 1991, so I'm a customer. But bugs haven't been getting fixed in the last few years. The products are pretty stable as they are, but there are well-known bugs that keep showing up in every new version.

A few weeks ago I needed a spreadsheet with a formula in 1-2 million cells. Since Quattro Pro was on my machine, I fired it up, defined my rows and columns, created my formula, gave the copy command, and Quattro Pro crashed. I checked the docs for any limitation I'd exceeded, but couldn't find anything. I tried copying one column at a time, and that worked for a few columns, then it crashed again. It just didn't work.

So I downloaded Open Office, installed it, and made my spreadsheet. No problem.

If Corel can't get its products up to the quality standards of open source software, it has no business charging money for its products.

Anyway, the difference between C and Pascal has always been about how easy it is to trap array out-of-bounds conditions, which has to do with what the MMU can do, which these days I think the important part is out of patent.

Perhaps after the courts give them another go, the bug fix rate will go up.

In this case, other sites that covered this week's pair of Microsoft worms first -- and they'll cover next week's first, and so on. ZDNet, eWeek, Infoworld, Reuters, the Register and others covered it first. ZDNet has the bad habit however of sliding stories that reflect badly on MS quickly off the top pages and into obscurity.

Worms like sobig and bugbear only affect products with design flaws. Brian Valentine, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, said it best:

Our products just aren't engineered for security.

• office suite
• browser
• mail client
• operating system

Well, there goes my excuse for not being able to view corporate memos and write desings and reports at home

Actually, that that excuse went away some time ago.

Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux

Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)

Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.

The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.

About 14000 client computers are involved.

The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.

The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:

• Study suggests that Linux is cheaper than Windows for Munich: - story, Babelfish
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer interrupts his skiing trip to talk to Munich politians: story, Babelfish
• Suddently a new study says that because Microsoft gave huge discounts, Windows is now better than Linux for Munich: story, Yoda
• IBM also modifies their offer (see main story above)

If you think that depending on a subscription to a suite of tools to continue having access to an undocumented, proprietary file format, think again. Look at the DMCA+EEA in the U.S. and the EUCD in Europe. If you think that the format will not be agressively protected, then look at the court cases like Skylarov or Johansen.

Stepping aside from file formats, one suite of tools is plagued weekly by security problems due to inherent security problems. The other isn't.

For either reason, OpenOffice, StarOffice, or something with comparable levels of flexibility is the obvious choice.

You have to consider who would be the best steward of the OpenOffice project. One phone call from the Great Satan of Redmond and the project would immediately lose all of its resources and promotion, if it were owned by Dell or HP. That leaves IBM, who although already has their own office suite, is at least known to be heavily invested in open source.

IBM is also the obvious choice because of its commitment to Java.

Below is the MPAA lawergram, I think the important phrase in it is that they have 'good faith' that the files are copyright and being illegally distributed. So they assume that a file with the name of their property is their property. Which is, to be honest, a fair assumption.

Do you are saying it is a fair assumtion the filename OpenOffice.org-1.0.1-9mdk.src.rpm is infringing Microsoft's copyright? Is it fair to assume "harry_potter_book_report.rtf" is a copy of the Harry Potter movie?

If I made a rant about crappy music and called the file "Celine Dion Kid Rock R Kelly and Eminem suck.mp3", and the RIAA's serch bot flagged this as one of their songs. Then they sent a DMCA complaint to my ISP, which gets me kicked off. Aren't they violating my free speech rights?

Oh, I forgot. I don't have any rights if I'm criticizing an American product.

Okay, what if I write a song called "Stripped"--a theme for creating small ELF executables. My friend named Christina sings the song, therefore I call it "christina-stripped.mp3". Should the RIAA be allowed to sue me for copyright "infringement"--even if the song was recorded and distributed long before Christina Aguilera even thought of hers?

Exactly, they need to move to Windows where everything has so many features duplication is near impossible, not matter how hard people try

The new licensing tactics are working against them here as well. The cost of licensing, or going through an audit, to confirm compliance for all users having office is just much too high compared to rolling out openoffice. OO doens't have all the features, and can be broken, but the cost is just too high to *not* do it.

From what I've seen MS has gotten greedy.... they now have pretty much everyone in their pockets (90% or whatever) and they now can go to $random_large_company and simply say "here is a bill for either a) licensing for the next year for our $product licenses or b) the cost of an audit to ensure you are in compliance with our licenses". There've been more than one story on /. about this sort of thing, but it's definately here, and at least here (in our canada/us wide insurance brokerage) this sort of thing means that OO.o is being rolled out this summer.

I'm not very sure it's a good thing that Microsoft's applications run under a Linux operating system. This might increase the use of MS's closed document formats (doc, xls,...) by Linux users.

I think that alternative office environments, like OpenOffice.org, are far more important. These apps import MS documents without a lot of trouble, and save the documents by default in a documented file format.

If only more people knew about (and trusted) the cheap alternatives for MS Office, then the number of closed document formats in digital communcation might reduce at last.

This is a valid point that I've not seen brought up, and is the reason I do not include OpenOffice in Slackware (believe me, there are a lot of requests). I'd love to be shown how I'm wrong about this.

Feel free to Google for OpenOffice's build requirements, and then follow the link to the gpc site.

You have so much problems - Emails with the wrong date which make you look stupid (and may cause to not be read at all), programs complaining about files made in the future, confusion about which day is today ("but my calendar said that the 8th was saturday") and lots of other problems.

Just download openoffice or get a warez MSOffice from mldonkey.

Do you know why a problem like this becomes such a worldwide crisis instead of just an annoying glitch? It's the same reason an IIS bug results in most of the world's networks grinding to a congested halt: everyone is using the same software.

But there are alternatives. WordPerfect Office 11 was released yesterday (interesting, eh?). And if you want something free, why not use OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 released earlier this month. It works great; I use it for everything. I haven't used Corel's product since office 9 but I used to really love it, especially the "reveal codes" feature.

The only area in which OpenOffice lacks is ease of installation for multiple users on a windows machine (use: setup /net)

That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively. It's been a year since we switched over from Microsoft Office, and there have only had a handful of documents that have had MS Office/Open Office incompatibilities.

Plus, OpenOffice is totally free. Retraining was a non-issue. We told the employees when we switched over that they were welcome to use MS Office, but they would have to buy the software themselves and keep the licenses handy. There were no complaints about switching over after that.

So we can sit back smugly as all of our branches are unaffected and read stories like this without blanching :) If you haven't checked out OpenOffice, I highly recommend that you do.

Imagine the savings this company could reap by switching to [snip OS to make this more a real issue (yes, I love Linux but that obviously doesn't apply in this topic)] and some kind of OpenOffice product.

I thought the exact same thing, brother. I'm *really* trying like hell not to forward this story to my Upper-Aboves and include a link to OpenOffice in the message body...

To OpenOffice.org(No Reg Required). Openoffice is now to the point where it is more than adequate for 90% of MS Office users, especially those who just use word and powerpoint. For the other 10%, just keep using MS Office.

Who told you that? It's actually C++

TWW

does anyone know for certain if the xml output is going to be published?

Is the file output in a readable format?

I would be interesting to see if they allow for reading the file like openoffice and allow text processing.

This is one reason I use openoffice (openoffice.org at home as it supports most word versions flawlessly, without promting me to "insert office cd 2" to install the feature.

but XML support in OpenOffice is.

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This is guarenteed to not be the first post.

Now, step back for a minute and think why Suns UltraSparc and Solaris solution is so strong. Simple, at the risk of repeating the marketing guys the lure is that you can give your development and deployment guys a bunch of cheap Sunblade 150s or some cheap UltraSparc blades and whatever they come up with can be moved straight onto anything up to and including an F15K without recompiling. Put yourself in the place of a big corporation. Your putting together a new system, you have no idea just how big a load it will eventually have to take (say in 5 years). Today, sure you could run it on high end Linux box, but what happens if 6 months in the system needs a bigger box? If you chose Sun in the first place you simply buy the bigger box and move over. No porting, no redevelopment, and you know there is always a bigger, faster system you could move to. It buys you severe scalability that Linux isn't placed today to provide.

Now, about not supporting Linux, what about the LX50, the Sun Open Desktop that is coming soon, the Lintel blades (Coming Soon(TM)) the fact that the entire Sun One stack (web, directory, identity, etc, etc, etc) is either available now for Linux or coming soon, not to mention Star/OpenOffice.

So what is the perceived issue? I think people don't see Sun offering Linux on the UltraSparc range and thing they don't get it. Sun does get it, but look at their selling point for the last 10 years, total scalability. Linux doesn't provide this yet so they can't buy into it. What they are doing is making Solaris as compatible with Linux as possible, whilst at the same time helping Linux by providing software (openoffice, SunOne and much more) and I believe some kernel code too.

Believe me, when Linux is ready for the F15K class systems Sun will be ready for Linux to be there.

Disclaimer - I work for Sun, but nothing I have said here is not already public information.

10. How should I refer to OpenOffice.org in my documents?
[...]
Now for the obvious question: Why? The reason is: Someone else owns the phrase "OpenOffice", and we want to make sure we do not get into trouble.

You do not believe me? Check out this bug report #1820

All people using the following locales are affected: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, French (all except Switzerland), Galician, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian (Latin) and Spanish (all variants). This list might not be complete.

Now try to convert someone using Excel to use Calc by telling them that they can not use the numeric pad anymore...

May I suggest OpenOffice 1.1 beta with footnote support? Never hurts to peruse their feature list from time to time. Works just fine.

What could be easier ?!

There is a bibliography project underway for Open Office. In fact, one of the early tasks of the project is to develop a detailed list of user requirements, so I'm sure they would welcome input from heavy users of bibliography features.

Just as the roadmap talks about embedding Minotaur into Phoenix, the way forward for the calendar could be as an embedded extension for Minotaur.

Some people like a standalone mail/news client that isn't your jack-of-all-trades Outlook/Evolution replacement. That's going to be Minotaur.

But Minotaur could also be an Outlook replacement for those who are looking for that sort of solution. Allow the calendar to be installed as an extension (like Phoenix's extensions) and you've got three of the main features of a PIM (mail, address book, calendar). Develop some sort of stickynote-style scratchpad extension and you've mostly got the whole thing.

Evolution at the moment is only available for Linux and friends, and it seems as if there are no plans for a Windows port any time soon. This would provide a lever for those on Windows to abandon MS Office entirely. I mean, OpenOffice.org replaces much of the rest of MS Office bar Outlook; a Minotaur that can be extended to be that Outlook replacement would finish the job.

Not to mention having a further competitor to Evolution on Unix and Linux, particularly once Kontact gets going.

Going the extension route makes far more sense than adding the Calendar to the monolithic Mozilla suite, slowing everybody down.

And anyway, does a stand-alone calendar really make sense? A stand-alone Composer perhaps. But a calendar naturally fits into a PIM environment - surely this is the way forward?

Thexder.

It bothers me that a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship. StarOffice is this.

Bull. Sun bought StarOffice from the German company StarDivision, improved it, gave it as a gift to the community and in return bases its future StarOffice version on the OO code. Sounds like fair deal to me. Java is another matter, but then, they wrote it and it's theirs and they can do whatever they want with it.

Seems plausible.

I saw nary a Sun logo on the eclipse.org page of consortium members.

With IBM, HP(Compaq) and several other *nix vendors - as well a several application vendors that drive Sun harware sales - in the consortium, you'd figure they'd be in from the get-go.

IMHO, this just goes to show that Sun doesn't truly get what OSS is yet (Open Office being the exception to the rule), and what it could do for them. If they would release Java as a true open standard, they'd end up looking like the proverbial cat in the bird cage.

Soko

Although far from ideal, I found a solution.

As I pointed out earlier, Sun has very little commitment to Linux/Open Source.

And as other people pointed out you are an idiot.

The folks at Gnome need to watch their backs. Sun only looks out for itself.

Wrong again.
Sun is the one that needs to look out for itself in this relationship.
Miguel de Icaza(a gnome founder) has got a hard-on for C#, which if you haven't noticed is microsoft's brand of java, and is in direct competition for developer mindshare with Sun.

Sun has very little commitment to Linux. It has a fairly substantial commitment to open source (not withstanding the stuff they did before the phrase was even coined - NIS, NFS, OpenLook, etc...)

Yes nothing more innovative than that 1337 Paperclip. Oh I forgot Office is so easy to use that he's out of a job. Like how easy it is to get it to stop putting in numbered lists after you've started one.. and how easy it is to get it to start a new one at "1" if you have another one in the document (even if its 30 pages up). How innovative and awesome the power of Office which always presumes to know what I'm doing and writting. Yes Office is so cool.

Thanks but I'll use OO even on Windows where Office is availiable. I can't stand Office's autocorrect "features" I like thinking for myself. Finally an office program that stays out of the way.

Whatever happened to choice in this debate?

We can choose between various window managers, various linux flavors, and even office suites. Why don't we have a choice with our window system?

Why would it be any different for a fork of X for a choice between client/server and direct rendering, if backwards compatability was kept?
Would that not help the the people who only use Linux on their desktop, while allowing people with networks to use the tool, as it is now, that works for them?

OpenOffice

Mac-On-Linux (If you really want to run MS Office.)

OpenOffice and other OSS with M$ compatibility . How many commercial apps are a true replacement for Office? StarOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, doesn't count.

We just need a talking penguin that harrasses you while you're trying to work and the market will be ours!

Netscape is based on Mozilla

SUN has something called StarOffice, based on OpenOffice

Here's a better one;

Install a minimal distribution on a small machine, grab the image, and install the image on the hard drive of any new systems as needed.

When the system boots the first time, it will configure itself.

What to use as a base is up to you. Consider Peanut Linux, Knoppix (which can be installed to the hard disk), or a very promising distribution named RULE.

What makes RULE interesting is that it is not really a distribution by itself, but a set of packages and an installer that are added to Red Hat 8.0 that allow you to run Red Hat's distribution on more modest hardware. For example, a 486 with 32MB of RAM will use the same kernel with RULE as a stock Red Hat 8.0 system will.

Take a look at the screenshots showing RULE running on 486s with 16MB of RAM. If you want to add other packages, such as OpenOffice, you can just like a full Red Hat 8.0 installation.

What is Red-Hat Office

And why do I have to buy a termianl services licence in windows just so I can do a remote desktop.

And its Linux. no LUNIX or whatever you said, and lunix would not even run OpenOffice

Thank you for showing that only retards dont like Linux :)

There have been several comments that the BSA claim to represent the copyright owners is false because OpenOffice.org is not a member of the BSA. I wanted to point out that while it is true that the OpenOffice.org is not a member of the BSA and has probably never asked the BSA to represent them, they also still are not the owners of OpenOffice. Rather, anyone that contributes to OpenOffice is required to sign a Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) which assigns the Copyright to Sun Microsystems. While this might seems like a simple symatics, you should also take not that the JCA does not require that future version be provided under the GPL or even under the SCSL. I raised this issue over two years ago and was told that the JCA would be changed to assign copyright to OpenOffice when they became a legal entity. Since then nothing has changed. While Sun MicroSystems has had a history of avoiding membership in the BSA, they still may change their minds.

On a side note, Santa Cruz Operations (or formally Caldera Systems) *IS* a member of the BSA and therefore indirectly (or directly) contributing to issuing these false positives with strong threatening legal language against Free Software works. As already pointed out the "apology" was not in regards to the claim of infringement being false but rather the apology was in regards to the fact it did not figure out "which property was infringed." Anotherwords, the SCO sponsered group still claims there is a copyright infringement but no longer that they represent the owner. At the same time, the notifiction clearly shows that the site is distributing the source code, thus complying with the terms of the GPL (one of the two licenses which can be used for distribution of OpenOffice). Anyone that does buy products from SCO may wish to let them know that their membership in the BSA helps contribute to activities of threats of legal action against the distribution of Free Software and probably will have a chilling effect on the adopting of Free Software based products if it continues.

Yeah, but it would be too detrimental to Apple to cave in to Microsoft.

Keynote looks to be a great app. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it incorporates a lot of great Quartz technology. This is a comptetitive advantage that the Mac OS has over Windows, and they should absolutely take advantage of it. Also, one of the criticisms of Keynote is that you can't share files with PC users because it's not a cross-platform application; as far as I'm concerned, neither is PowerPoint. Yes, the basic file format is the same, but there's all sorts of weirdness that happens when you try to use PowerPoint in a cross-platform environment.

Second, I think it's more important that Apple has options for office suites than for Apple to court MS Office as the lone Mac office suite. If MS drops Office for Mac, then Apple has Keynote to replace PowerPoint; Mail, Address Book, and iCal are replacements for Outlook; MySQL, et. al. to replace Access; AppleWorks to replace Word and Excel on the low-end, and OpenOffice to replace MS Office in the enterprise. Are these perfect replacements? No, but unless they start receiving more support, they never will be. I'm sure that Apple has discussed myriad times the possibility of MS withdrawing Office for Mac from the marketplace, and I'm sure they have a contingency plan in place. We would probably see Apple either dump a ton of money into developing an Appleworks Pro, as you suggested, or committing a lot of resources to beefing up OpenOffice, in much the same way that they are now beefing up KHTML.

Speaking of that, I initially didn't know how to receive Safari, either. After all, what do we need with Yet Another Web Browser on the market? But Apple is being very shrewd. First of all, they know that the worst of all possible situations is already in place, i.e., Microsoft having near-total dominance over the web browser. This means that many, if not most, pages are being coded for IE compatibility alone. It's virtually handing Microsoft total control over the internet, and they're already taking advantage of it with Windows-only stuff like ActiveX controls. For that reason alone, Apple needs to throw their weight behind ANY browser in the market OTHER THAN Microsoft's. But the Safari strategy is shrewd in other ways. First, Apple went with an open-source browser rather than build their own from scratch; not only does this earn them beaucoup brownie points with the developer community, it also means that most of the great technology that Apple pours into Safari/KHTML is going to find its way into OTHER browsers, making all of the non-MS browsers more attractive. Second, it was smart of Apple not to use Mozilla as their codebase, because the Microsoft/Netscape battle has already been fought, and Apple would constantly be associated with joining the losing side yet again. Third, Mozilla already has a loyal base; again, it's in Apple's best interest to keep the browser market heavily segmented, so going with a relative unknown allows them to create a new browser that has built up an installed base in the millions of users in a very short period of time.

Yes, Apple should treat Microsoft as a valued partner. But they need to take care of their own self-interests, first. Microsoft should be forced to earn their place in the Mac market, it shouldn't just be handed to them by default.

If you need to read Office documents, see OpenOffice. Or even Microsoft's free viewers.

Anyone should have the right to counteract the effects of abusive monopoly practices.

No, those in authority have the responsibility to counteract the problems, just as the Tiwanese government has done. What you are calling for is anarchy.

The copyrights on Windows and Office should be NULL and void.

Why, because they are popular? Granted, Microsoft has abused a monopoly power, but that does not warrant robbing them of the work they have done. The punishment must fit the crime. If you work 20 years compiling a dictionary and it becomes so popular that it's the de facto standard, but you start charging too much for it, should your dictionary suddenly be thrown into the public domain?

Like I pointed out before, there are alternatives that serve the same function. You can use OpenOffice on Linux with WINE and do virtually anything you could do with Office and Windows.