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Does it smell? Can for example releasing the same Contribution under GPL be considered as Contributor's own purpose? I doubt it.

6) finally, company license is like the GPL but with a different name.

It is not like the GPL by a long shot.
Under the GPL no other party may sell your contribution (beyond, say, a reasonable price for the media it is distributed on).
If I interpret Sun's new agreement correctly, under the JCA any contribution to OpenOffice.org is still owned (actually now jointly owned) by Sun.
Basically this agreement suggests that only Sun - not a contributor or any other company - can profit from OpenOffice with the work of all third party contributors since Sun alone either owns or jointly owns all the OpenOffice code AND every contributors' contribution.
If the contributor is fine with Sun (and only Sun) making money off the contributor's work, then there is no problem.
Yes, the end result may be that people may be able to use OpenOffice for no cost, but the GPL it clearly ain't.

I've looked at every single office suite out there. None of them - NONE of them, have any type of automation interface.

Apparently, you didn't look hard enough or you are incompetent. I thought about modding you down, but you're already up so high that I have to correct this blatant misinformation.

I have used OLE Automation with MS Office, particularly PowerPoint, developing a non-trivial application here at work.

1) OpenOffice/StarOffice offers a very capable automation interface called UNO. You can even automate StarOffice through OLE if you are running on Windows. I have not done this yet (although I likely will in the near future), but I have used the automation on Solaris (yes, Solaris!) when porting my application to that platform. It was able to handle all my needs admirably, although it would be nice if their online documentation was searchable :(

2) KOffice is built on KParts. In particular, here is a KDE Automation tutorial. This is a rather old document, and things have improved since then, too.

So you, sir, will be needing another ass if you expect to keep talking out of it. Seriously, though, I sort of agree with you're final point: if you actually use one of the missing features, it can be a pain to switch. You just picked a bad example feature, and stated it with too much certainty and vehemence, and I don't want misinformation like that to spread too far.

From the UNO samples page:

This Visual Basic Script creates an empty text document and inserts text, a table, and a text frame.

'The service manager is always the starting point
'If there is no office running then an office is started up
Set objServiceManager= WScript.CreateObject("com.sun.star.ServiceManager" )

'Create the CoreReflection service that is later used to create structs
Set objCoreReflection= objServiceManager.createInstance("com.sun.star.ref lection.CoreReflection")

'Create the Desktop
Set objDesktop= objServiceManager.createInstance("com.sun.star.fra me.Desktop")

'Open a new empty writer document
Dim args()
Set objDocument= objDesktop.loadComponentFromURL("private:factory/s writer", "_blank", 0, args)

'Create a text object
Set objText= objDocument.getText

'Create a cursor object
Set objCursor= objText.createTextCursor

'Inserting some Text
objText.insertString objCursor, "The first line in the newly created text document." & vbLf, false

The last line and onwards is automation - the setup (making it work) is done, the rest is functionality implementation. Not really 50 or 500 lines, is it? In fact, I count 6 lines of code for automation.

From the UNO samples page:

This Visual Basic Script creates an empty text document and inserts text, a table, and a text frame.

'The service manager is always the starting point
'If there is no office running then an office is started up
Set objServiceManager= WScript.CreateObject("com.sun.star.ServiceManager" )

'Create the CoreReflection service that is later used to create structs
Set objCoreReflection= objServiceManager.createInstance("com.sun.star.ref lection.CoreReflection")

'Create the Desktop
Set objDesktop= objServiceManager.createInstance("com.sun.star.fra me.Desktop")

'Open a new empty writer document
Dim args()
Set objDocument= objDesktop.loadComponentFromURL("private:factory/s writer", "_blank", 0, args)

'Create a text object
Set objText= objDocument.getText

'Create a cursor object
Set objCursor= objText.createTextCursor

'Inserting some Text
objText.insertString objCursor, "The first line in the newly created text document." & vbLf, false

The last line and onwards is automation - the setup (making it work) is done, the rest is functionality implementation. Not really 50 or 500 lines, is it? In fact, I count 6 lines of code for automation.

This is a constant problem with free/low cost software. [...] I've looked at every single office suite out there. None of them - NONE of them, have any type of automation interface.

OpenOffice.org, and by extension, StarOffice, supports a very rich automation interface. Granted, it is not all that easy to use, but the developer support is great. I'd like to know from you where exactly the OpenOffice.org automation interface failed the requirements your company would place on it. At least, instead of just bitching and moaning about what is missing, you can help the OpenOffice.org community help you, by providing the features your require. For more info, a good starting point would be the OpenOffice.org API site.

Again my comments were directed towards development. Not reviewing the project manager's documents, browsing /., or reading email. Yes these are part of a developer's day, but have very little, if anything, to do with actual development. If you really think that they have something to do with it, I would guess you are their manager.

It all starts back in 1991, when I, fresh out of college, got a job in the IT department at Enron. I was basically an intern, fetching coffee for the sysadmins who took care of all the machines. Eventually though, I proved my worth to management, and quickly started moving up the ladder. By 1997, I was the Head System Administrator for Enron Corporation.

Everything was going fine until 1999, when a new Operating System started making waves in the industry. Now, being a seasoned veteran, I usually know how to spot buzzwords and fads, but this time I let myself be deceived. I started frequenting web-sites like SlashDot, and soon I was espousing the "virtues" of Open-Source to anyone who would listen to me. I was a total GNU-head, even being stupid enough to buy software that was available for free!

It wasn't long before I was submitting the necessary paperwork to management to switch all Enron's computer systems to Open-Source Software. I had visions in my head of being a hero, of saving my company millions of dollars on software licenses alone. Little did I know what havoc I had just wreaked on a company and a country that had been so kind to me.

By mid 2001, the planning was complete, and we started the switch-over to Open-Source. We had planned to move all the company's servers, Suns and IBMs, along with a test-bed of 25% of the desktops, to Linux. The problems started immediately. From botched installs that required reinstall after reinstall to undocumented half-assed clones of popular commercial software, we experienced all kinds of disasters. The unlucky employees who had gotten their desktops switched to Linux couldn't do simple things like open Microsoft Word documents or read floppy disks. Due to some bug in MySQL, the financial database servers which had previously run the unbreakable Oracle managed to lose millions of dollars in a matter of minutes. It was a complete meltdown.

When the dust had settled, there was no need for my bosses to fire me. There was no Enron left to work for. Linux and Open-Source Software had completely destroyed one of the strongest corporations on Earth in a short time. Luckily there have been no charges pressed against me yet. I can only hope that those reading this can learn from my mistake; I know I have. The moral of the story: Open-Source Software is an economic disaster waiting to happen. Don't use it!

It all starts back in 1991, when I, fresh out of college, got a job in the IT department at Enron. I was basically an intern, fetching coffee for the sysadmins who took care of all the machines. Eventually though, I proved my worth to management, and quickly started moving up the ladder. By 1997, I was the Head System Administrator for Enron Corporation.

Everything was going fine until 1999, when a new Operating System started making waves in the industry. Now, being a seasoned veteran, I usually know how to spot buzzwords and fads, but this time I let myself be deceived. I started frequenting web-sites like SlashDot, and soon I was espousing the "virtues" of Open-Source to anyone who would listen to me. I was a total GNU-head, even being stupid enough to buy software that was available for free!

It wasn't long before I was submitting the necessary paperwork to management to switch all Enron's computer systems to Open-Source Software. I had visions in my head of being a hero, of saving my company millions of dollars on software licenses alone. Little did I know what havoc I had just wreaked on a company and a country that had been so kind to me.

By mid 2001, the planning was complete, and we started the switch-over to Open-Source. We had planned to move all the company's servers, Suns and IBMs, along with a test-bed of 25% of the desktops, to Linux. The problems started immediately. From botched installs that required reinstall after reinstall to undocumented half-assed clones of popular commercial software, we experienced all kinds of disasters. The unlucky employees who had gotten their desktops switched to Linux couldn't do simple things like open Microsoft Word documents or read floppy disks. Due to some bug in MySQL, the financial database servers which had previously run the unbreakable Oracle managed to lose millions of dollars in a matter of minutes. It was a complete meltdown.

When the dust had settled, there was no need for my bosses to fire me. There was no Enron left to work for. Linux and Open-Source Software had completely destroyed one of the strongest corporations on Earth in a short time. Luckily there have been no charges pressed against me yet. I can only hope that those reading this can learn from my mistake; I know I have. The moral of the story: Open-Source Software is an economic disaster waiting to happen. Don't use it!

http://installation.openoffice.org/ Tells you everything. Ask on the mailing lists for more clarification. Lee's mainly a Graphics guy through he did some cool hacking for dictinstall.

From the official "Instructions for Installing and Setting Up OpenOffice.org 1.0"

"If you have multiple users set up on your machine, then each user who wishes to use OpenOffice.org 1.0 will need to install separately. This uses up a lot of disk space. As an alternative, you can use the multi-user option instead, though installation is a little more complicated:

Unzip the downloaded file into its own folder. If you have Compressed Folders installed, the easiest way to do this is to right click on the file and then choose Extract All...
Open Command Prompt (if you have Windows NT, 2000 or XP) or MS-DOS prompt (for other versions of Windows). You should find this on the Start Menu somewhere under Programs (on some versions of Windows, it is in the Accessories folder).
You should then type the location of the folder followed by "install\setup /net". For example, if you unzipped the files to "C:\OpenOffice Setup\" you would type C:\OpenOffice Setup\install\setup /net followed by Return.
Then follow the on screen prompts ... make a note of the folder in which OpenOffice.org 1.0 is installed onto your computer.

This will install a shared version of OpenOffice.org 1.0 on your computer. Now each user who wishes to use the program can double click on the program setup.exe that was created in the folder you have made a note of in step 4 above - this will install the files necessary for that user and use only a few additional megabytes of disk space."

Wasn't that hard, was it?

Cheers,
-max

I believe the original poster stated that the Sun and Apple programmers that worked on it were volunteering time (not getting paid).

I don't know who works for who on the dayjob side but it wouldn't particularly surprise me if employees from Apple and Sun were contributing.

If you look at The about page It's clear there is participation from at least Sun employees.

I think it's cool. I like OpenOffice. If people are looking for an alternative to MS Office, that's one of your better bets.

The whole "problem" here has nothing to do with Sun or Apple, but it has everything to do with CNET running an inaccurate story that was picked up by the other "news" sites like Newsforge and Slashdot, thus furthering the rumors. This in turn created quite a fuss with the OpenOffice programmers who thought it would have been nice for Sun to tell them directly rather than getting the word through a news story.

The really interesting part of this little mixup is how quickly misinformation travels. While this episode might not be all that serious in the grand scale of things, I wouldn't be surprised if one day this same sort of mix up (ie- online news sites reporting some rumor story that spreads like fire through blogs and other online portals) will create a real problem or crisis. You watch. Information (thankfully) travels much faster and more freely these days, but that means the consumer of the information must pay more attention to filter out fact from fiction.

For those looking for more facts, check out the FAQ at
OpenOffice.org about the OS X port.

I hope this gets moderated up so people will read it.

This article is false.

Sun is currently in the process of creating a press release denying any involvement with Apple on developing a version of StarOffice for MacOS X.

I don't know when the press release will go out as it depends on how long it will take for the VPs to approve.

You'll also notice that the webmaster of OpenOffice.org is purposely NOT linking to any of these false articles from the OpenOffice news page:
http://www.openoffice.org/news.html

I believe this was because it was a Java application (CD came with Sun's JVM).

It looks like, and from other peoples comments here, that Openoffice is a Java/C++ jumbalia.

Then your beliefs are wrong. If you wish to check things out you can go and get the source. Java is not used for the suite (and was not for StarOffice either), but instead is merely hooked up in case you want to show Java applets in the browser, or to have an API so that you can write Java programs that interface with OpenOffice.

I believe this was because it was a Java application (CD came with Sun's JVM).

It looks like, and from other peoples comments here, that Openoffice is a Java/C++ jumbalia.

Then your beliefs are wrong. If you wish to check things out you can go and get the source. Java is not used for the suite (and was not for StarOffice either), but instead is merely hooked up in case you want to show Java applets in the browser, or to have an API so that you can write Java programs that interface with OpenOffice.

I'm hopeful that StarOffice will be good for the Mac. (Either that, or I'll have to go write another integrated app - I won't use MS software.)

If you want to help out, join the development team.

As for OO not being "native" on OS X because it requires X Window - well, that depends on how you define "native." Are "cp", "ls", and "pico" not native OS X apps because they don't use Quartz?

Frankly, I consider the unix-text based apps, the GUI Quartz-based apps and the GUI X Window-based apps all native. It's just that the X Window-based ones require an X server to be installed before you can use them.

It's very unlikely that someone tries to build a GUI via Java. People are not that stupid.

OpenOffice.org hit 1.0.1 about a week ago. Release notes, etc, changelog, etc, available also.

My suggestion to you was and is download OpenOffice for your windows machine and let your secretary play with it. Let her determine for herself how hard it is. That is the best way to make an informed decision as to the viability of linux based or Open Source software is for you and your company.

Taking my word or my examples (or anyone else's for that matter) as gospel would be foolhardy at best.

While it is true that the majority of people who use computers are not experts or advanced users, most of the people who use a computer in an office enviroment will be able to make the switch with little to no help.

BTW Most office software for Linux reads MS documents just fine. And I routinely print documents in PDF format directly from my office applications.

I suggest reviewing OpenOffice and trying out some of the software. You can even download them for windows I believe.

Sig lines are for wimps with a sense of humor

• Yes, but have you ever seen a Windows PC preloaded with that software?

Not as such. I bought a Win98SE laptop with (IIRC) Lotus Workwise (crappy Office suite) on it, then took it straight off (and I'm still waiting for my refund for the Win98SE I was forced to buy). If it had been OpenOffice 1.0, I would have kept it and loved it (I'm using it right not in preference to Microsoft Office on a work PC). If I was Joe Consumer, I might not even have realised that OpenOffice is different to Word. If you haven't tried it, I can heartily recommend it.

• It might not be feasible, license-wise -- I don't understand the GPL well enough to know for sure, though...

There is absolutely nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada in the GPL that would prevent it. All of these products are free speech and free beer (if you use OpenOffice instead of StarOffice). The GPL adds rights, it doesn't take them away.

However, there may be, or may come to be, terms in the WinXP OEM license that prevent it. Pure speculation, but then if you actually read the EULA modifications that they're so fond of writing into critical security updates, nothing's unthinkable any more. Microsoft have declared war on the GPL, they just haven't come up with a decent strategy yet.

yup, just saw it, on the right side of the page:

link

i am an official MORON. but again, buying a CD from one of the distributors is fine, but again, how to directly contribute to the project financially? i'd rather my $9.99 would go directly to OpenOffice.org than through some CD distributor.

OpenOffice is coming along, but it isn't ready for prime time on macs yet. 638c is the first working version, and is currently only stable in its XFree86 incarnation, which requires a separate install of XFree86. This version is currently being migrated to OpenOffice 1.0 (638c is a couple of revisions behind release 1.0).

The native Quartz version of 638c is building, but is unstable and still needs quite a bit of work. If you're an OS X developer, the OpenOffice team is looking for help - see the OpenOffice mac port website for details.

The printing problem won't automagically go away by using OS X, especially if someone hasn't changed the code to use the OS X printing API (something I've never looked at, so I'm not sure what's all there). The UNIX (XFree86) version probably relies on ghostscript or CUPS to do it's printing (I'm guessing, so punch me if I'm wrong), which currently require additional installs if available at all (CUPS, or Common UNIX Printing Services is slated for Jaguar, I think, ghostscript can be downloaded).

As much as I'd like to advocate OS X, I'd say Linux is the better OS for OpenOffice or StarOffice, currently, with Windows a close second. Maybe next year I'll like the OS X version better :)

OpenOffice is coming for Mac OS X. In fact, they recently announced a Quartz port. since Piers is already using OpenOffice... this would probably kick the crap out of his "unable to print" problems.

after reading the article, it sounded like OpenOffice was worth a try. so I headed over to OpenOffice.org to take a look. there was the download link, yay, but 50 meg downloads are a bit much for my net connection. I looked for a "buy this on a CD", but not a link to be found. I even clicked the "Contributing" link, but that was only contributing code, not buying CDs.

maybe this is one reason open source companies fail?

I set up a box for my mom to use. She's a teacher, she types papers, prints them out; occasionally browses the web; and checks email about once a week (now that she can). The box runs Linux.

For awhile, I had her running KDE, but the box was as Celery 400 or so with 128MB of RAM, and KDE 2.x is a dog for performance. So I switched her over to ROX (RiscOS On X) and sawfish with a pretty theme (much like one I use).

She has icons for printing, trash, logging in, and OpenOffice, in addition to folders for her documents and public_html (which I explained to her was the place to put documents she wanted to share, so my Windows-using dad had a way to get at them). It works great. She loves it. I can modify it remotely. It doesn't break. It runs Linux.

Hats off to the staroffice teams for a nice job well done.

• http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html

• http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/source/browse/whi teboard/doc/SETUP_GUIDE

• http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html

• http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/source/browse/whi teboard/doc/SETUP_GUIDE

I am not Chinese and do not speak Chinese, however I am working in China and was trying to introduce Linux. The following text treats Chinese == simplified, however most of the stuff should be valid for traditional too.

First of all, Chinese under Linux is hell. There seem to be no people being interested in developing open source in China. And if they do then it's difficult to find, crappy and unfinished. Just look at the Mozilla 1.0 simplified Chinese translation, it's not there, the guys did not move since 0.9.8. The Chinese HOWTO is quite old (1998!) and most of the links are dead and the information inside useless (practical experience).

You have several alternatives, I suggest you forget about them: RedFlag Linux (Experience based on 3.0, Redflag 3.2 beta ISO)
I had to use the text installation: I guess it was unicode without unicode support, so all I saw was messy characters but not Chinese. Somehow it's similar to redhat so I was able to click through. After the installation: whoops, the system is asking me for my registration key otherwise I can try RedFlag linux for 40 days (? do not remember how many exactly). It was not just a key, it was one of the Microsoft dimensions. After choosing the trial I ended up in Kde trying to look like windows. It had a tray, and a start bar, the Control Panel and so on. But I had a feeling it was there but it could not satisfy me, and I could not stand the little penguin patriotically holding that red flag up. The Chinese input seems to me to be the most advanced, but the system it self seemed to me unstable. Most modifications were in the interface and trying to lock down the system so you need to get that key after the trial period.

Office: RedOffice different company, same red. It's OpenOffice 1.0 looking like Office XP, that's all except there is no source code, no binaries, only a trial version and a price of 398RMB (~50US$) for the full version. Stick with Chinese OpenOffice.

Mandrake has in my opinion the best Chinese support. You only need to install it using the Chinese language. If you install it using English and then switch to Chinese you will have several problems, like you desktop disappearing etc. Do not use Unicode, use gb or big5 only, I was not able to see anything by switching to Unicode.

After the installation you should have a Chinese kde, Chinese Mozilla 0.9.8 and some more software in Chinese. The best input for simplified is Chinput, for Big5 Xcin and that's how Mandrake is doing it, if you use gb you will get Chinput by pressing Ctrl+Space and Xcin on a Big5 system.

Turbolinux seems to have taken over the Chinput project, therefore you will find no info on the net. They made an extension to Chinput called ZWinPro (ZWinPro-3.2-11.i586.rpm) you need to forceinstall it (solve some libary deps, install unicon but do not uninstall Chinput) and forceinstall Mandrakes Chinput again. This will give you Mandrakes Chinput with a configuration toolbar and some binaries which allow you to use Chinese input for all applications. There are some minor probs you will need to fix (font alias missing, etc), if you have trouble contact me.

The only problem about Chinput (and probably Xcin) is: it's dumb, the windows input tries to guess what you are typing. Means, you need to write character by character on Linux, does not matter if you use Pinyin or Woubi (or what ever you call it). This is very unconvenient and a killer for every Chinese linux desktop. Nobody will want to type 10 min on Linux when he can be finished in 2 on windows.

Next get the Chinese version of OpenOffice1.0 and English Mozilla 1.0. If you want to use a Chinese browser stick to konqueror, Mozilla 0.9.8 is not stable and crashes randomly.

You will want to get some Chinese ttf fonts from windows, as the fonts on Mandrake are quite ugly.

paul

What the House of Representatives should do is adopt an open source solution, instead of feeding the monopoly that Microsoft currently enjoys around the world. If they had any sense of patriotism, they would recall the Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt, and his crusage against big business. If Roosevelt were alive today he would be running 7 Linux boxes in his house, all backing each other up for 100% redundancy, and 100% uptime, freeing up the time he would spend rebooting his WinMe boxes to dismantle monopolies for the working man.

Remember, in the end MS is out there to make money. Ruling the world is just a means to that end.

* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

Created by Finish college student Linus Torvalds, and continually updated and improved by a loose confederation of programmers who aren't paid for their work, Linux is available without the steep licensing fees that come with commercially produced software.

Hmmmm ... it seems IBM pays people to work on the Linux kernel, as we all know already.

High on the list of headaches is incompatibilities with files created with Microsoft products like Word.

Eh? OpenOffice.org reads/writes Word/Excel docs perfectly. Aside from some bullet-point font issues, Powerpoint handles perfectly as well.

I know people have said MSNBC was good at cracking back at Microsoft, but the author doesn't seem to be going anything other than spraying the same ol' FUD we've all grown obvlivious to.

Follow the instructions on changing the interface font from the OpenOffice.org font guide. Be sure to add the changes (with the checkmark) and check the two boxes next to the newly added changes (you'll see what I'm saying when you do it). That should do it for your interface font.

For your other font ugliness problems (i.e. ugly fonts in the documents), the reason this is occurring is because true type fonts are not installed correctly. There are two remedies to this: 1) Do what the font guide from OpenOffice.org tells you (the hard way) or 2) if you have Linux Mandrake installed, run "Drakfont" and add the true type fonts found in your windows partition (c:\windows\fonts -or- /mnt/windows/windows/fonts directory, or if you don't have a windows install partition, just copy all the fonts in that directory from a friend's windows system to a temporary directory and have Drakfont load the true type fonts from that temp dir).

The format is openly available, no reverse engineering is necessary.

So far I'm pretty happy. The UI is okay, and things are pretty nice. However, I've had a lot of problems. (all in OO writer)

• I had serious problems with bullets. They all just changed to bullets with the number 10 in them. After spending about an hour on this, I found it as a fixed bug with a workaround.
• I've had the program crash once and my machine crash once (due to something else.) Both times I've lost work because there is apparently no crash recovery.
• Saving as HTML doesn't seem to work very well. In this directory you can see the HTML file has had some of its graphics messed up pretty badly, while others are just fine. I think that if I group each drawing into one drawing this problem will go away. But still...
• The spell checker is nice, but I can't see away to get it to ignore punctuation. So everytime I have two puncutuation marks back-to-back it calls it an error.
• You can't change the default bullet that is generated by hitting the "bullet on/off" button. You'd think it would use the list1 style or something, but it doesn't.
• If you want to contribute to openoffice.org you have to sign your code over to Sun. As far as I can tell, this means they can use it for whatever they want (StarOffice for example...)

Given all of these complaints I still expect I'll finish this using OOo. It seems to work well enough and I'd like to move away from MS tools if possible.

To my fellow OOo users running under GNOME, you may have encountered a problem where the program will often fail to start properly. This is not a crash. OOo is simply being purged by the GNOME session manager due to its relatively long startup time. I was a bit surprised to encounter this problem in 1.0, having thought it an OO bug. However, this article led me to search Issuezilla for a solution, which thankfully was determined.

There are a couple ways around the purge. The easiest one is to add "unset SESSION_MANAGER" to the soffice startup script. One file, all GNOME users happy. A somewhat more intrusive and wide-ranging solution is to add "exec $PATH_TO_GNOME-SESSION/gnome-session --purge-delay=0" to ~/.gnomerc. Supposedly, this will solve a similar problem with Opera, according to the bug comments.

This is known and fixed on openoffice.org cvs. Just check http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2 199

It's OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice, OpenOffice is trademarked.

From the faq: 8. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"?

It all starts back in 1991, when I, fresh out of college, got a job in the IT department at Enron. I was basically an intern, fetching coffee for the sysadmins who took care of all the machines. Eventually though, I proved my worth to management, and quickly started moving up the ladder. By 1997, I was the Head System Administrator for Enron Corporation.

Everything was going fine until 1999, when a new Operating System started making waves in the industry. Now, being a seasoned veteran, I usually know how to spot buzzwords and fads, but this time I let myself be deceived. I started frequenting web-sites like SlashDot, and soon I was espousing the "virtues" of Open-Source to anyone who would listen to me. I was a total GNU-head, even being stupid enough to buy software that was available for free!

It wasn't long before I was submitting the necessary paperwork to management to switch all Enron's computer systems to Open-Source Software. I had visions in my head of being a hero, of saving my company millions of dollars on software licenses alone. Little did I know what havoc I had just wreaked on a company and a country that had been so kind to me.

By mid 2001, the planning was complete, and we started the switch-over to Open-Source. We had planned to move all the company's servers, Suns and IBMs, along with a test-bed of 25% of the desktops, to Linux. The problems started immediately. From botched installs that required reinstall after reinstall to undocumented half-assed clones of popular commercial software, we experienced all kinds of disasters. The unlucky employees who had gotten their desktops switched to Linux couldn't do simple things like open Microsoft Word documents or read floppy disks. Due to some bug in MySQL, the financial database servers which had previously run the unbreakable Oracle managed to lose millions of dollars in a matter of minutes. It was a complete meltdown.

When the dust had settled, there was no need for my bosses to fire me. There was no Enron left to work for. Linux and Open-Source Software had completely destroyed one of the strongest corporations on Earth in a short time. Luckily there have been no charges pressed against me yet. I can only hope that those reading this can learn from my mistake; I know I have. The moral of the story: Open-Source Software is an economic disaster waiting to happen. Don't use it!

It all starts back in 1991, when I, fresh out of college, got a job in the IT department at Enron. I was basically an intern, fetching coffee for the sysadmins who took care of all the machines. Eventually though, I proved my worth to management, and quickly started moving up the ladder. By 1997, I was the Head System Administrator for Enron Corporation.

Everything was going fine until 1999, when a new Operating System started making waves in the industry. Now, being a seasoned veteran, I usually know how to spot buzzwords and fads, but this time I let myself be deceived. I started frequenting web-sites like SlashDot, and soon I was espousing the "virtues" of Open-Source to anyone who would listen to me. I was a total GNU-head, even being stupid enough to buy software that was available for free!

It wasn't long before I was submitting the necessary paperwork to management to switch all Enron's computer systems to Open-Source Software. I had visions in my head of being a hero, of saving my company millions of dollars on software licenses alone. Little did I know what havoc I had just wreaked on a company and a country that had been so kind to me.

By mid 2001, the planning was complete, and we started the switch-over to Open-Source. We had planned to move all the company's servers, Suns and IBMs, along with a test-bed of 25% of the desktops, to Linux. The problems started immediately. From botched installs that required reinstall after reinstall to undocumented half-assed clones of popular commercial software, we experienced all kinds of disasters. The unlucky employees who had gotten their desktops switched to Linux couldn't do simple things like open Microsoft Word documents or read floppy disks. Due to some bug in MySQL, the financial database servers which had previously run the unbreakable Oracle managed to lose millions of dollars in a matter of minutes. It was a complete meltdown.

When the dust had settled, there was no need for my bosses to fire me. There was no Enron left to work for. Linux and Open-Source Software had completely destroyed one of the strongest corporations on Earth in a short time. Luckily there have been no charges pressed against me yet. I can only hope that those reading this can learn from my mistake; I know I have. The moral of the story: Open-Source Software is an economic disaster waiting to happen. Don't use it!

About the only issue that I can see for the average home user is the problem with Microsoft's proprietary streaming media formats, and financial software. But if we can avoid using quicken or money with a usable version of gnucash then we're all going to be better off anyway.

People, and societies, are slow to defend themselves from abusiveness. Now it finally looks like there will be some effective defense.

I'm very happy with the letter to the OMB. It seems that it will help everyone begin thinking reasonably.

People are saying good things about Open Office. Version 1.0 was just released. Remember that the history of the source code is that it has already been through 4 or 5 major releases.

The lack of a good Office Suite has been a barrier to moving away from Micro$oft Turd ^H^H^H^H^H^H Word.

Governments have a duty not to use proprietary file formats. Governments have a duty not to allow themselves to be locked into an abusive company's money-making schemes.

Same reason you can't have Photoshop for Linux, or Microsoft Office for Linux: because the vendor wouldn't make any money off of a version of their software for Linux.

Yet you can buy Maya for Linux, which costs just a hair more than Photoshop or Microsoft Office. You can buy Star Office, but most people don't, because OpenOffice is nearly the same quality with the definate promise of improvement. There's also Abiword. Gnumeric is a top-notch spreadsheet program that I've come to prefer to excel. There's more like this. There's really very little incentive to buy an office suite when you can get better for free.

In other fields, the Free alternatives tend to kick the hiney of their commercial counterparts. Let's try a few, okay? Pan, a newsreader based loosley on Agent. Pan is the only newsreader to score perfectly on the GNKSA Evaluations. Compared this to its commercial basis, Agent's score really sucks. Then there's Quanta for HTML editing. VIM is fine for most people, but if you need that Dreamweaver-like crap, Quanta does it without getting in your way. And it's REALLY good. Oh yes, it's Free with a capital "EFF."

This is a silly arguement to make against "Linux." This is Capitalism 101. Good products offered under better conditions succeed while inferior products do not. Maya is wonderful under Linux, and there is nothing else in its league available on a Unix-ish (OS X, Linux) platform.

Oh, yes. You can also buy numerous games, of course. Neverwinter Nights in particular will be releasing for all three major platforms in a single box. We'll see what this does for sales.

For infrastructure, it's top notch, for ease of use, it's a lumbering elephant.

I'm not really sure I want to see it spread to the desktop since I'm afraid the process will involves changes that might make it a less effective for "infrastructure". Whether I like it or not, however, it's happening. There seem to be enough projects focusing on the desktop now (like Ximian Evolution, Nautilus, StarOffice/OpenOffice, etc., etc.) that we are reaching some kind of eerie critical mass. I keep hearing about folks who are using those tools to make the switch from a Windows desktop to a Linux one (in fact, I was just talking to a buddy who just switched 2 folks at his site at their request). Installation is not a biggie if the admin is involved since they can make install images for generic Linux desktop boxen as easily as they can for the Windows ones.

Like I said, I'm not sure I like it, but it really looks like it's starting to happen...

Do what I've done. Install OpenOffice 1.0 on your corporate machine. Set it to save in Microsoft file formats by default (I know, but bear with me). Use it to create, read and write Microsoft Office files for a couple of months. Invite your coworkers to use it. See if they even notice that it's not Microsoft Office. Document everything you do with it.

When you have a big healthy list of Microsoft format files that you've touched with it, confront your IS department and demand to know why they are wasting money on Microsoft Office. Tell them that you've already removed it from your machine (that's a $300 saving to the company right there) with - demonstrably - no effect on your or anyone else's productivity. CC people in accounting or cost control. Invite them to try it, to inspect the files (using Microsoft Office, naturally) and to ask your coworkers what they think of it. Request a specific answer about why it can't be used across the enterprise, or at least trialled on a larger scale, in parallel with the existing Microsoft Office if need be. If they bitch that it's unsupported, suggest that they pay for StarOffice. If they whine that it's not guaranteed to create usable Microsoft binary format files, point out that it is creating them, and that Microsoft Office doesn't guarantee it either!

That's step 1, and it's a big step: get your company using Star/OpenOffice. Don't even bring up the issue of file formats until you've achieved this (I made that mistake). This might take years. It might never happen, because your IS guys are idiots or cowards working on the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft" principle. But try for it.

Once you've got everyone using Star/OpenOffice then you can launch stage two. Switch to creating documents in the default XML format. Any Microsoft binary format documents that you touch as part of your normal work should be saved as XML. Make a nice big list of all the documents that you've changed, because (this is the good bit) nobody else should even notice. Then after a few months, back you go to IS with your list, and demand to know why everyone else is still using Microsoft binary formats as the default. At this point there simply no reason to stick with them. Point out that a default Star/OpenOffice document (zipped XML) is significantly smaller than the Microsoft binary equivelant, which should keep the beancounters happy. And that should they ever go back to a proprietary suite (gods forbid) that it's far easier to convert from XML to anything than from Microsoft binaries to anything.

It will be a long and painful process, but OpenOffice 1.0 and StarOffice 6.0 have made it possible to start it now. If you haven't tried these products, do so now. It's your first step into a larger universe. ;-)