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Work on an OS X version of OpenOffice/StarOffice has been underway for a good while now. In fact if you bothered to visit the OpenOffice.org web site you'd see that there is already a Developer's Build of OpenOffice.org 1.0 available for download.

You're right, free StarOffice for OS X would be a most excellent idea for educational institutions.

Work on an OS X version of OpenOffice/StarOffice has been underway for a good while now. In fact if you bothered to visit the OpenOffice.org web site you'd see that there is already a Developer's Build of OpenOffice.org 1.0 available for download.

You're right, free StarOffice for OS X would be a most excellent idea for educational institutions.

As I understand it (and I may be wrong) the agreement only relates to the institution's computers. You would need to pay the full price ($79.95 US) for your own computer. That probably doesn't matter because it is unlikely you'll need any features not in the free Open Office.

If you haven't tried Star Office or Open Office, try Open Office. It's free. It's excellent. Of the free word processors, it seems to be the best.

I've had a lot of problems with Microsoft Word being quirky. Sometimes Microsoft Word will move a footer to the top of the following page, for example. I don't have a huge amount of experience with Open Office, version 1.0 was released on May 1, I think, but it doesn't seem quirky.

StarOffice may no longer be free but Open Office will remain free.

I think this is part of some master plan to conquer the problem of corporations who dont like free software because nobody is acountable.

Seems like a win-win situation - we get openoffice, corps get staroffice, microsoft get less sales.

What this does is allow them to actually sue for the money the lost.

How do you figure that? You just ASSUME that someone who bought a pirate copy of Win2K Advanced Server would buy the "real thing" in the absence of pirate availability? There ARE alternatives, alternatives, and (one more time) alternatives.

The problem is that if they sell the pirated software cheaply, the damages will be relatively small, ...

The measure of damages for copyright infringement is disgorgement of the revenue (not profit) wrongfully gained for a reason. It's the same reason that pirated software is cheaper than the "genuine article." The pirated product is regarded (with good reason) as what economists call an "inferior good."

When you install that "\/\/4r3z" copy of a program, you have no idea what ELSE you are getting (viruses, trojans, spyware).

Another reason that disgorgement is the remedy is because there is no way that a copyright holder can PROVE that the purchasers of "\/\/4r3z" would have bought the real "thing." After all, there ARE alternatives, alternatives, and (need I say it again?) alternatives.

even though it may have cost the company a much larger amount of money.

The bigger issue here is one of the cost of enforcing the copyrights. It is a law of economics that sellers will seek to externalize all of their costs that they possibly can. By criminalizing technologies that CAN be used to infringe copyrights, they push the cost of protecting their property onto the (vastly non-infringing) public. Frankly, I do NOT own or use pirated software. Hell, I RARELY use non-OSS software at ALL. Microsoft, et al, forcing me to pay taxes so the government will shield them from the cost of protecting their software from piracy is, in my case, nothing less than a transfer payment to a company I have chosen NOT to do business with since about 1998.

It also takes into account P2P system, where people aren't making money off of it, but they are still breaking the copyright.

If Microsoft, the MPAA and the RIAA want to shut down P2P, let them. Let them pursue every little pissant pirate they want to on their OWN nickel. I have (largely) opted out of their system. Let them stay the HELL out of my pocket and out of my PC.

Exactly. And Open Office seems to be the best word processor for both features and file interchange with MS Turd^H^H^H^HWord.

• Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts)
• The database component (Adabas D)
• Some templates
• Extensive Clip Art Gallery
• Some sorting functionality (Asian versions)
• Certain file filters

• Spellchecker and thesaurus
  
• Database component (Software AG Adabas D).
  
• Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
  
• Select filters, including WordPerfect filters and Asian word processor filters
  
• Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery
  

• Updates/upgrades on CD
• Sun installation and user documentation
• 24x7 Web based support for enterprises and consumers
• Help desk support
  
• Warranties and indemnification guarantee
• Training
• Professional services for migration and deployment

Differences are listed here

Keep in mind that Access XP includes a desktop version of SQL server

This is true, but you need to go back a couple years to get to the root of this (fscking stupid) idea.

Visio 2000 installs it by default as well. I can't remember if anything previous did, but that was my first encounter with this. I would love to buy a bag of whatever those in charge of making this idea a reality, but this is not a small thing. You need to consider the hundreds of thousadns (if not into the millions) that are running software that was created 2 or 3 years ago up to now (and the future holds suit as well).

Can someone please remind me why I have to keep using M$ garbage? OOo is a great package. There are MUCH better webservers out there, and there are MUCH BETTER SQL Servers out there.

I just don't get it...

That's not such a big drawback: XFree86 and Squeak both have handwriting software availble for them. For XFree86, you can even get OpenOffice. Why would you want to pay for XP software and struggle with MS Office instead?

If you are looking for cheap, maintainable, stable software to replace your current Windows environment, then look into this :

Slackware Linux.
KDE.
OpenOffice (maybe StarOffice or Hancom Office or KOffice).
Mozilla (or maybe Netscape 6 or Opera).
The GIMP.
XMMS.
MPlayer.
GNUCash (or maybe Kapital).
Evolution.
NEdit.

Or if you need anything else, check out Freshmeat.

Plan ahead. Change MS Office default file formats to friendly open formats now. Setup all servers to linux. Test users interest with Knoppix bootCD-OS. If Knoppix goes well with users install Win32 versions of favorite Open Source apps. Run your own audit of the company's win32 systems. Duplicate and convert propietary data files to open files (e.g., .doc to .rtf) by hand if you have to, but some folks may have automated it. Find special case win32 software needs, and see if wine will support. Then convert several users at a time, starting with the tech savy, and see if you can avoid mutiny. People have invested a lot of time learning one way, they hate upgrades, (remember the last of many Microsoft and Adobe upgrades?) so be patient when you upgrade your users to Linux desktop.

Changing MS Word users default Save file format to .rtf is easy. It will make all upgrades to OpenOffice much easier, and allow several version of MS Office to play nice, even if you don't upgrade. Years later you will be able to read old MS Office files, hooray!

As many have said:
Setup servers for windows file and print, web hosting, DNS, DHCP, and SMTP (samba, apache, bind, DHCPd and sendmail) in the back office. LEAF, LRP and CoyoteLinux firewalls are an easy place to start the conversion.

Try Knoppix BootCD-OS (debian) on every box, see if users can deal. It is complete Desktop with OpenOffice, Xmms, ogg-vorbis, Gimp, FreeCiv, and tons more on 700Mb CD-R. It auto-detects a ton of hardware, such as sound at each boot, and does not get installed to harddisk. It needs 128Mb Ram, or pagefile/swapfile/scratch disk on a box with less ram. If the user can't deal, eject the CD, and reboot back to MS Windows.

Setup each Win32 computers to run a script stored on a central server, at each boot. It saves a ton of work later.

Getting Win32 users into the OpenSource thing by installing Win32 OpenOffice and Mozilla on your current MS Windows install base. See how that goes with the users.

Convert your existing data from .rtf to .doc is critical. The user is a tease, no email or code! But it is an idea that should be packaged.

Run an audit on your Win32 systems. Get a file dump e.g., "dir /AH /ON /S > m:\filetreedump\box2tree.txt" on Win98, and goto to regedit and dump the registry to text file e.g., m:\filetreedump\box2reg.txt. Someone needs to write a nice perl based evaluation tool to audit what apps and software keys everyone in the Windows network is running.

Converting data is essential. Collecting data from users computer and registry, and inserting it into new email client, and Office apps should be automated, but no one has done it yet.

Wine testing for special apps is important.

After careful planning start rolling out conversions. This way you can convert data, support all the apps, and not loose users.

-Nathaniel

The show will demonstrate how small-mid sized businesses can save money and take advantage of the latest technology showing off such goodies as Bayonne, LTSP, X Terminal services, OpenOffice.org, and Evolution

If you are interested in what GNU/Linux solutions are out there for your small to mid sized office, come over to Segal Theater at CUNY Graduate Center, 34th St. and 5th Ave from 10am-5pm next Friday the 24th. [Free and Open to the Public]

This is a volunteer demonstration. With work like this, we are changing the face of New York. If you are interested in coming or helping, contact paulr at nylxs.com.

OpenOffice FAQ's - I've checked out powerpoint presentations in OO as well as Word and Excel doc's in OO, and they all perform exactly the same - nearly perfectly (sometimes OO formats documents BETTER than MS apps). The only thing it doesn't have an equivalent of is MS Access, but that program is kinda pathetic anyways. It would do the kids more good to actually learn real database creation and management through a program that's actually used to run production environment web-based databases, like Apache or MySQL.

In short, use OpenOffice. It performs exactly the same as MS Office.

At some point, Scribus will be ready to do serious desktop publishing. StarOffice/OpenOffice (see the OpenOffice marketing brochure here) can do PowerPoint. What exactly do 'yall use Access for? (we've got very good databases, but the Access-like DB frontends I've seen just aren't end-user ready IMHO).

Also, you should find lots of useful school-targeted Linux resources here.

Someone suggested that DeCSS may not exist if there were a DVD player available for Linux. The MPAA guy argued that all programs written for Linux must be open-sourced, which would compromise what is essentially their security-through-obscurity scheme of handling CSS. And Siva AGREED! Now correct me if I'm wrong - isnt it possible to write programs for Linux that are closed-source?

but is the Spreadsheet more Excel compatible yet?

Patience, bigfatlamer. OSX is relatively new to Open Source scene. It will happen. In the meantime you can use the OO beta for OSX.

The major differences are explained in the FAQ links (to openoffice.org text) at the Sun site.

FAQ question #7 explains the most significant differences between Open Office and Star Office.

Seems that there are a lot of "Why StarOffice, and not OpenOffice.org?" posts out there. To make things easier, here's where you can find the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.

The one feature which I need in StarOffice which is not available in OpenOffice.org is the templates. As someone who frequently needs to do quick presentations, templates are a must. Now if there's some project out there that produces templates specifically for OpenOffice.org, that'll really be sweet. Any takers? :-) Perhaps there's a need for a new SourceForge project.

BTW if you're interested, the diffs between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are available here. That may contain other reasons why people would prefer StarOffice instead of OOo.

Seriously, can somebody please tell me why anybody would by StarOffice when it's based on OpenOffice, which is free?

Seriously, can somebody please tell me why anybody would by StarOffice when it's based on OpenOffice, which is free?

Seriously, can somebody please tell me why anybody would by StarOffice when it's based on OpenOffice, which is free?

A measly $75.95? Phew, surely there can't be a comparable office suite that's any cheaper than that!

I don't personally use it, but OpenOffice claims that they support WebDAV natively.

An OSX Xwindows version of OpenOffice is also available for download (as of like a few days ago) here

This and Abiword, once Aquified, will be a good first step towards some real competition for MS Word.

Has anyone used both Abiword and the OpenOffice word processor on OSX? How do they compare?

W

where as the openoffice source is 128 MB accourding to there site

on my modem I find downloading 15megs much more appealing then downloading 128 megs. but then thats could just be me.

'nuff said.

I know this is probably going to get marked as a troll, but come on, look a that. That's just terrible.

One thing is good to keep in mind about Microsoft. By its anti-customer actions, Microsoft is buying itself an unprecedented amount of bad feeling. At present feelings against Microsoft are so negative that the company has business only because it has a virtual monopoly. If there ever becomes a real alternative to MS software (like the Open Office suite, for example), Microsoft will rapidly collapse.

(I have written this comment so that it includes information that most readers here already know, but that the average computer user needs. That way, if you like the comment, you can pass it on to your less knowledgeable friends.)

The first paragraph may sound like an exaggerated opinion, but collapse of a computer company's business has happened before. IBM had, at one time, almost 100% of the personal computer business. But it was surprising at the time how much people didn't like IBM. People who supplied cement to the building industry and people who ran dry cleaners and students who played with Basic all knew that IBM was in court for anti-trust violations. It was often shocking how much negative feeling toward IBM there was among people who had little understanding of the technical issues behind the violations.

As soon as an alternative to buying PCs from IBM was available, IBMs business dropped rapidly. The magazine articles at the time exaggerated IBM's percentage of the market because they failed to count the computers that were made by very small businesses. The alternatives to IBM PCs were called clones, and thousands of companies built them. IBMs business quickly dropped to 8% of the market, and then below that.

Now history is poised to repeat itself, this time with software. Linux is still not easy enough to configure. Open Office has, for the needs of many people, arrived. The Mozilla browser will soon be released, but it doesn't have a calendar or a spell-checker yet, and these are important to many people who use Microsoft Outlook. Events are moving fast, and it won't be long before the selfless love of the open source programmers overthrows the world's most abusive software dictator.

Often people with little technical knowledge don't understand that underlying the negative feeling toward Microsoft are strong technical failings. For example, Windows XP, Microsoft's newest operating system, has a file called the Registry. This file contains settings for the operating system and almost every other program that is installed. The registry file is a single point of failure. If something goes wrong in the registry, as it sometimes does, the only method of recovery is to re-install Windows XP, all the programs, all the drivers, and all the patches again. This can take days, during which the user is not able to work normally.

Why does Microsoft have such a flawed design? Why put information for many programs in one file? Why not put each program's settings in separate files, so that one cannot destroy the others? Apparently because having all the settings in one file accomplishes a kind of copy protection. Someone who copies a program's folder will not be able to operate that program on another computer because the settings are hidden in Windows XP's registry file. So, all the honest customers suffer because of Microsoft's desire to extract the most money from the world. That kind of offensive defensiveness actually lowers long-term profit, something the company executives have not learned.

It would be a lot nicer if they could use the Aqua UI.

Sure it would. And they are asking for help with this. OpenOffice.Org is tremendously limited on resources, especially considering the scope of the project.

Of course, they'd probably have to rewrite all of their UI code.

This would be on the scale of porting the app to Windows. Luckily, Sun/Staroffice had done a great deal of work for the Windows port even before OpenOffice.Org got started. No such established codebase exists for an Aqua version. I am not sure what levels of the architecture can be reused.

Yes. It collects megabytes of garbage in files with the extension ".DOC".

Some nice dudes wrote a garbage collector for Word. Open a .DOC file with it and re-save it, you'd be surprise how the original file shrunk without losing any content. :)

Now how am I supposed to tell my boss that Linux/Evolution/Open Office, will free us from the licensing costs and license tracking overhead of closed proprietary software? The OS academic open license for Windows XP costs $40.00/seat and the Office suite costs $60.00/seat...for a total of $100.00 per seat.

The exchange connector for Evolution costs $69.00! This doesn't give me an entire office suite....just an Exchange connector! And I still have the license tracking overhead of closed proprietary software.

I understand where you're coming from, but you're missing a couple points.

1) If you talk to Ximian, I'm guessing they may have an "academic discount" for Connector - and I KNOW they have a discount if you buy licenses in bulk.

2) You ARE getting a full office suite. Go grab OpenOffice.org 1.0 :)

Maybe I spoke too soon! Here's a PDF that seems to document it. At least the API. You're expected to know BASIC, but that can be picked up from the examples, and there are also a lot of samples under OpenOffice.org1.0/share/basic/

Link to The API Project -- at the bottom of the page is a link to the programmers tutorial PDF and an online reference guide.

Have fun!

here

------ Additional Comments From of@openoffice.org 2002-02-01 03:10 PST -------
The soffice process can only be started once.
It's not possible to start a second process on a second teminal. This process will be automatically associated to the
running process. In this way you are provided for destroying your configuration files.

We don't see this as an issue, it's the implemented behaviour of OOo.
I don't se that we will change this in the near future, but I will reassign this to the
responsible person as a new 'feature'.

IIRC, it's been adapted from ispell, the UNIX spellchecker, by Kevin Hendricks. Bravo!

--

the OpenOffice site has been slashdotted! Not opening any more.....:-)
I still get a tingle whenever a site is slashdotted.

Is there any other site, which is capable of "slashdotting" other sites just because of one link to it??

actually, i guess it is:
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac
os x makes a distinction between a shared library and a loadable module ( "plugin" ). It's quite a different platform to target. the open office team would love people familiar with it to help out.

read the macslash discussion on this topic here

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From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

download

Screen shots

List of changes

Marketing flyer

From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

download

Screen shots

List of changes

Marketing flyer

From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

download

Screen shots

List of changes

Marketing flyer

From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

download

Screen shots

List of changes

Marketing flyer

From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

download

Screen shots

List of changes

Marketing flyer

From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

download

Screen shots

List of changes

Marketing flyer

From Q&A section:
Q. Is OpenOffice.org 1.0 100% Microsoft Office file compatible?
A. As Microsoft rarely publish their file specifications, no-one can answer that question. However, there are plenty of users who regularly edit and exchange documents, spreadsheets, etc with Microsoft Office users without any problems. Indeed, some users claim they've seen bigger compatibility problems moving between versions of Microsoft's own products.

Q. I've just saved a file from Microsoft Office in OpenOffice.org format, and it's much smaller - yet it hasn't lost anything?
A. Good, isn't it?

Q. Has this suite got that annoying paperclip?
A. No. Never has, never will. No. No!


Testimonials

Timeline

Credits

OpenOffice.org 1.0.0 is the result of development on the cvs branch tagged "OOO_STABLE_1". Some snapshots have already been released from this branch, namely the snapshots 641, 641C and 641D. Almost no more features were added since 641D, development was focussed on bug fixes instead. Thus, in these release notes, the 'features' section which used to be rather big in release notes of other (snapshot) releases is small.

OpenOffice.org 1.0.0 is the result of development on the cvs branch tagged "OOO_STABLE_1". Some snapshots have already been released from this branch, namely the snapshots 641, 641C and 641D. Almost no more features were added since 641D, development was focussed on bug fixes instead. Thus, in these release notes, the 'features' section which used to be rather big in release notes of other (snapshot) releases is small.

Also find out which of your users are Linux friendly and are willing to use it solely on the desktop (with the old 400MHz machine for Outlook and Word, if necessary).