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In less time than it took you to post that you could have gone to http://www.openoffice.org and seen for yourself that the website looks good and has a nice big new user & general info link to a useful page with tons of information.

In less time than it took you to post that you could have gone to http://www.openoffice.org and seen for yourself that the website looks good and has a nice big new user & general info link to a useful page with tons of information.

Nice way to keep the mean spirited issue at hand. You piss me off. I'm thinking that anyone whose web site is powered by Joomla http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Joomla!_License_Guidelines/ might actually take the hint if you kindly... KINDLY... ask them to produce the data in ODF formats.

Some of the people involved with this institution are well read and intelligent individuals. Talking like an asshat about them is not exactly an encouragement after all.

The content was put in a modifiable format, that's half the way there.

In case "Canada's non-profit and independent Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics" is reading their press, here are some suggestions:

Start here http://www.openoffice.org/

ARSTechnica http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/3/21/3278
http://www.osrc.org.pk/content/view/248/96/
http://www.fsfeurope.org/
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/10/apple-adds-supp.html
http://www.e-cology.ca/canfloss/report/CANfloss_Report.pdf
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

And this search is interesting reading http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2Bodf+software+training+canada+education&btnG=Search

Nice way to keep the mean spirited issue at hand. You piss me off. I'm thinking that anyone whose web site is powered by Joomla http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Joomla!_License_Guidelines/ might actually take the hint if you kindly... KINDLY... ask them to produce the data in ODF formats.

Some of the people involved with this institution are well read and intelligent individuals. Talking like an asshat about them is not exactly an encouragement after all.

The content was put in a modifiable format, that's half the way there.

In case "Canada's non-profit and independent Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics" is reading their press, here are some suggestions:

Start here http://www.openoffice.org/

ARSTechnica http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/3/21/3278
http://www.osrc.org.pk/content/view/248/96/
http://www.fsfeurope.org/
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/10/apple-adds-supp.html
http://www.e-cology.ca/canfloss/report/CANfloss_Report.pdf
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

And this search is interesting reading http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2Bodf+software+training+canada+education&btnG=Search

http://www.openoffice.org/

Not sourceforge but it's so bloated there has to be an Air Traffic Control System in there somewhere.

Many years ago, word went out over the mailing lists and (then very junior) newsnet about how packets were being dipped and 'The Powers That Be' were recording/snooping/doing all that bad stuff. It turned out that a few people had been playing with the wonderful and useful tracert command (now less useful, due to finger command paranoia). They had noticed nodes which only seemed to have IP numbers, not addresses. They concluded this must be the NSA.

The point here is that none of this paranoia is especially new. Each time I hear it come round again, I enjoy having been on the 'net since before it was the 'net (any old BITNET refugees still out there?). Been there, seen it, got the t-shirt, dyed the t-shirt pink, ripped the arms off the t-shirt and then lost the t-shirt.

Back in the day, folks figured out a response: give the snoopers what they want. Many people (me included) put words like 'bomb' etc. into our .sig files, so that even mundane e-mails about boring crap would trigger the sensors and get recorded. I am certain that Uncle Sam really enjoyed my discussions with my room mate about laundry and coffee ("Take out your laundry you freak, and buy some coffee!").

So, these days there is all this new fangled interweb stuff [engage full fogey/old fart mode], including Second Life, IRC, blogs and god knows what else. If a few public spiritied citizens would send Uncle Sam some more rubbish, he might get bored again. That is assuming he was ever really that interested.

Of course, there are two caveats: First, in the initial instance I mention, there was probably only paranoia and smoke. Second, these days one has to be a little careful about what one says, just in case one gets 'disappeared' on a 'Cuban holiday'.

The thing to keep in mind is that a few buzz terms, 'terrorists', 'communication', in conjunction with a recent technology makes the whole thing no less plausible than it was back then. I'm sure that Osama's folks send their 'secret plans' in Excel files [remember, Calc is better] that are password protected and then encrypted in PGP anyhow. This can all be done with products available at Office Depot anyhow. So, Chill!

Oh, in case you were all wondering -- that would be completely consistent with Sun's earlier behaviour.

You can already use MySQL as the database engine for Open Office.

The development environment in OOo (Base) is a database client, not a database engine. Base does bundle the HSQLDB database engine, but even that is just XML tables, and shouldn't be used for anything serious.

As far as the quality of Base, yep it's rough, but it's also brand new for OOo v2. It's being actively developed, and there are plansto use it to allow users to share data from several FOSS packages within the suite.

* Btw, I know you were just trolling, but I thought this was worth an answer, since desktop databases are a badly misunderstood class of software.

Wouldn't it be possible, at the corporate level, to do quite a bit of customization, more than possible for mere humans on MS Office.

I'm not all corporations, but I've been around a few decades. Here's my 2 cents worth.

All of the OOo code is licensed under the LGPL, and can be freely downloaded, built and customized. So yes, it's possible. The sky's the limit; it's just software. :-) Several factors make it less likely that a corporation would take this approach, however.

One is that such a customization would very likely be deemed a "derivative work" by Legal, in which case if it were distributed (e.g., to suppliers for a given project, or even arguably to contractors working for the corporation), then the source must be made available as well. Non-software corporations tend to be allergic to releasing their source code, in my experience, because their lawyers tend to be very conservative. Some manager somewhere will likely have to bet his career by accepting legal liability for the corporation. Will the risk to his career if Something Bad Happens justify the benefit he perceives?

The issue of support will also likely be raised. What if the customized version breaks - who will "support" it? Yes, yes, we all know the internal team of developers will - assuming they weren't laid off in the last "shareholder value" improvement exercise (a constant risk in corporate America). But IT directors tend to go the other direction, from what I've seen - they want to outsource support (and legal indemnification) for open source software, so it can be treated as if it were proprietary. Proprietary means comfort; a target at which the finger can point if Something Bad Happens. This tendency is likely the foundation of IBM's business case for Symphony, by the way.

Finally, if a support team were to be established in a corporation to produce a custom version of OOo, they would need to have some type of development environment. As much fun as bashing Microsoft may be, Visual Studio and .NET are not technically inferior products. So a corporation is unlikely to consider that an inferior option to, say, Eclipse technology. Sure, it costs a lot more - but it's a small number of licenses. They probably wouldn't hesitate.

But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform? The third is where Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" bias may hurt them with this decision to abandon VBA. (Gee, now I'm sure glad we chose to use Python as the scripting language in our internal applications! :-)

Wouldn't it be possible, at the corporate level, to do quite a bit of customization, more than possible for mere humans on MS Office.

I'm not all corporations, but I've been around a few decades. Here's my 2 cents worth.

All of the OOo code is licensed under the LGPL, and can be freely downloaded, built and customized. So yes, it's possible. The sky's the limit; it's just software. :-) Several factors make it less likely that a corporation would take this approach, however.

One is that such a customization would very likely be deemed a "derivative work" by Legal, in which case if it were distributed (e.g., to suppliers for a given project, or even arguably to contractors working for the corporation), then the source must be made available as well. Non-software corporations tend to be allergic to releasing their source code, in my experience, because their lawyers tend to be very conservative. Some manager somewhere will likely have to bet his career by accepting legal liability for the corporation. Will the risk to his career if Something Bad Happens justify the benefit he perceives?

The issue of support will also likely be raised. What if the customized version breaks - who will "support" it? Yes, yes, we all know the internal team of developers will - assuming they weren't laid off in the last "shareholder value" improvement exercise (a constant risk in corporate America). But IT directors tend to go the other direction, from what I've seen - they want to outsource support (and legal indemnification) for open source software, so it can be treated as if it were proprietary. Proprietary means comfort; a target at which the finger can point if Something Bad Happens. This tendency is likely the foundation of IBM's business case for Symphony, by the way.

Finally, if a support team were to be established in a corporation to produce a custom version of OOo, they would need to have some type of development environment. As much fun as bashing Microsoft may be, Visual Studio and .NET are not technically inferior products. So a corporation is unlikely to consider that an inferior option to, say, Eclipse technology. Sure, it costs a lot more - but it's a small number of licenses. They probably wouldn't hesitate.

But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform? The third is where Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" bias may hurt them with this decision to abandon VBA. (Gee, now I'm sure glad we chose to use Python as the scripting language in our internal applications! :-)

I do most of my doc work on a 1.1Ghz Celeron with 512Mb of ram, and 1.1.5 is really zippy, especially after going into the memory options and tweaking them a little. That is why I always install 1.1.5 on older machines instead of the newest release. When most of the time all the user is doing is light office work and a little web surfing an older machine with 1.1.5 works fine, and saves plenty of machines from ending up in the dump.

So give it a try and if it works let us know, as it would be nice to know if I run into any customers with really old .doc files.

"There is no macro language specified in ODF. Users and developers differ on whether inclusion of a standard scripting language would be desirable." So, I'm afraid not.

However, OOo defines a Universal Developer's Kit that allows development of scripts in any supported language. The one's we have written are in Basic, though our current choice would be Java or Python (we us a lot of both).

My current version of OOo (2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy) lists Basic, Python, Javascript, and Beanshell as available by default. I'd have to check to verify that these same options are available on 2.3 on Windows and Unix.

"There is no macro language specified in ODF. Users and developers differ on whether inclusion of a standard scripting language would be desirable." So, I'm afraid not.

However, OOo defines a Universal Developer's Kit that allows development of scripts in any supported language. The one's we have written are in Basic, though our current choice would be Java or Python (we us a lot of both).

My current version of OOo (2.3 in Ubuntu Gutsy) lists Basic, Python, Javascript, and Beanshell as available by default. I'd have to check to verify that these same options are available on 2.3 on Windows and Unix.

Python Power baby !!

As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon

Unless... what if there were only some alternative, open-source project that already supports it on Mac and a similar ongoing Windows/Linux project...

Oh well, I can dream.

W

OLE2 filez:
OOO - http://www.openoffice.org/ - OSS Office
POI - http://poi.apache.org/ - Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files

MS Access:
Jackcess - http://jackcess.sourceforge.net/changes-report.html#a1.1.11- Jackcess is a pure Java library for reading from and writing to MS Access databases.
http://www.kexi-project.org/

You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:

• Flash player and PDF reader are available direct from Adobe. Additionaly, there are several open source flassh players, and PDF renderers are everywhere. Open source Action Script compiler here. Blender can directly generate Flash movies as good as anything produced anywhere, while lots of other Linux programs can produce some Flash output;
• Open Office; KOffice;
• granted, there's no equivalent to iTunes which will talk to the iTunes store;
• Freewheeling, SooperLooper, Audacity, Rosegarden...;
• Starry nights? Hell! you know the professionals use Linux, don't you? Start here and stop somewhere beyond the horsehead nebula...
• As for GPS software, the list is so long I don't know where to start. Anything you want to do with more or less any GPS - from professional navigation for shipping (although that's proprietary and expensive) to mapping your walks in the woods - is available. What is it you want to do?

Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact?

WTF?

Maybe you've heard of VMWare?

Or, perhaps, Wine?

Or maybe you've noticed that software like Open Office and FireFox is cross platform, running on Win/Mac/Linux ? Toolkits such as GTK Java, Flash and QT allow for easy, straightforward cross-platform development?

Or, perhaps, that there's a whole operating system being put together utilizing all these parts?

Get your head out from under that rock! (or is it... Mom's basement?)

>> http://www.openoffice.org/security/cves/CVE-2006-2199.html

>> A security vulnerability related to OpenOffice.org documents may allow certain Java applets to break through the "sandbox" and therefore have full access to system resources with current user privileges. The offending Applets may be constructed to destroy/replace files, read or send private data, and/or cause additional security issues.

Cool... Sure this bug is from 2006. BUT, look at the workaround. Disable the software, and in the future?

>> With the updated versions for OpenOffice.org, support for Java applets in OpenOffice.org will be disabled.

I am not saying the OpenOffice is worse than Microsoft Office. What I am saying is that the problems Microsoft has, OpenOffice has as well. The big difference is that people shut their eyes to the problems outside the Microsoft world.

Open Office opens back to Word 6, in fact it opens WinWord 5 doc files and StarWriter and more. I guess you don't know what you're talking about.

Try Open Office 1.1.5. I haven't tried it to see if it is true of the latest and greatest(I do most of my Document work on a 1.1Ghz Celeron and prefer the non-bloat of 1.1.5) but I just opened a word 6 doc in Open Office 1.1.5 and it rendered perfectly. It is also nice to have 1.1.5 lying around on a cd for those times when you have to work on an older machine, as I've found it runs better on pre 2.0Ghz machines than the newer Office. And lets face it, for most Office work(documents, email, maybe a little spreadsheet work) anything over 1Ghz does the job just fine given adequate RAM.

This is my favourite software to pirate.
You can steal a lot of stuff here, too.

You can try the Aqua version of OO2.3, which works quite well already.

Myself, I'd go to the OpenOffice site, click here, find the nearest local source for the disk, and contact them for directions....

"Because it's so difficult to type http://www.openoffice.org/ into your browser."

No, the point is that the ISP previously offered OpenOffice on their servers which would not count towards users' monthly download limits. Now, they've removed it from the "free area" and users will have to take a 120+mb hit to their monthly bandwidth limit to download the software.

Frankly the whole concept of "unmetered free download areas" reeks of AOL and CompuServe, to me, but I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit.

Then they need this one: http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/index.html#cdrom

I can't think up a good reason as to why this company should subsidize a competing product.

They are an ISP, if they blocked their customers from reaching http://www.openoffice.org/ that would be news.

Because it's so difficult to type http://www.openoffice.org/ into your browser. Slow new day?

Maybe I'm missing something, but couldn't you get equivalent results by using OpenOffice locally and having some sort of syncing online? Or maybe figuring out a way to mount a remote volume and open/save documents directly to it?

That's what really gets me: the technology to do this was old news in 1998. URL wrappers has been working well for eons. It would be *NOTHING* to include native support for webDAV style functionality into OpenOffice, (EG: you don't have to "mount" the DAV directory locally) and it seems that some effort to do this has already been undertaken - why hasn't this been brought up before???

Really, everything old is new again, and everything fresh is really very stale. (EG: Linux is a re-implementation of a 35+ year old Operating System, and the browser is a glorified dummy terminal, while Javascript is a return to Client-Server computing, of a sorts)

LyX is a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor.

Thanks! Now to Google...

I think OOo also can use LaTeX source.

Looks like there's at least one utility to go the other way (OOo -> LaTeX), but otherwise the best I can find in a brief search of the OOo site is this macro extension, but given that it's macros, I'm not too sure how robust it is. There's mention of a latex2oo filter, but I can't seem to find it. (Don't need it, just went looking out of curiosity.)

Cheers,

Does that means that Openoffice.org is a KDE project?

http://kde.openoffice.org/

There are only 2 projects in gnome-office it seems:

http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/

Abiword and gnumeric and neither of them are supporting ODF

While I realize this is supposed to be an amusing turn of phrase, there are actually quite a few tools out there. A few that I like are:

PDFBox - OSS Library for modifying PDFs on the fly.
FOP - Use XSL-FO to design printable page layouts in XML, then use FOP to transform them to PDF documents.
Foxit Tools - Alternative to the overpriced Adobe products.
OpenOffice - The built-in support for PDFs is absolutely wonderful. I rarely give out DOC files anymore.
FPDF - PHP PDF generation tools.
iText - A great library for your own custom PDF generation.

Those are just a few. The PDF format itself is actually not too bad. (When Adobe isn't breaking it with needless revisions, that is.) It's biggest strength is that the psuedo-text nature of the format allows one to diagnose the internals of a file pretty easily. Its greatest weakness is that things like text fields are needlessly convoluted. At the end of the day, though, it's a pretty good format.

You've obviously never heard of Vuze (which features commercial distribution), Linux, or OpenOffice torrents

Here, let me enlighten you.
It's called Open Office and it is free. Not $300.
I'll let you in on a little secret - what they (Microsoft) "sell" is worth nothing at all. Software is not equivalent to (for example) a bike. To make a bike, I need someone to mine the metals, form them into the correct shape, harvest the rubber, make it into tyres, and then I need someone to bolt it all together. The materials (rubber, metal, glass) all "cost" money. They don't just magically appear. They have to be grown or wrought from the ground. Sure, under our current system of economics, there is a cost for labor, marketing, and distribution as well. So your bike is not free. You can pay the $300 you saved from not buying MS Office, and you have a new bike.
But to create my office suite, all I really need is my brain. Where once there was nothing, now behold! there is an office suite. Sure, it cost some material as well (electricity for my computer, some food for me, maybe a coffee or two) but really these are things that I need anyway - I have to eat no matter what job I do, and if I own a computer I need electricity. So the cost for my office suite only inclues labor, marketing, and distribution. Oh and a couple of bucks for a CD and a cover.
Here is the difference. One item, a bike, created from a heap of hard-won materials. The other, an office suite, essentially created from nothing.
And another thing - If I steal your bike, you no longer can ride it. You are "out" 300 bucks. If I *copy* your Office suite, what harm have I done to you? (Assuming I only copy the programs and not your data!).
The whole "let's charge 300 bucks for Office 2007" (or whatever crap M$ is pushing nowadays) has to be doomed. I mean, I have burnt heaps of CDs with Open Office for friends, co-workers, family etc. Who wants to pay hundreds of bucks to be able to write a few letters and do a term paper or two and have their weekly budget on a spreadsheet?

I appreciate the compliment, but I think a stronger dose of reality is in order.

The geek is absolutely hopeless when it comes time to understand and communicate with end users.

Case in point:

OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office Online

Office Online rarely puts you more than one click away from an attractively presented tutorial or a genuinely useful download. Tens of thousands of downloads. "You can do anything in OpenOffice." Microsoft makes it easy.

OpenOffice.org is the marquee open source project. But its public face is Amateur Night and that is inexcusable.

Do you think MS will go down without a fight? Do you think that a company with almost limitless cash is going to be threatened by anything less than all-out war from the FOSS community?

I defy anyone to disprove any of my facts.

- No one is going to do anything about MS's monopoly.

- The monopoly will get worse.

- The only people who have a chance to break it are the geeks.

- Even then it would take a united effort from all of us.

Many of the major free GPL licensed programs are now available in both Windows and Linux versions. In the past they were only available for Linux/Unix users. If a small business wanted to they could replace Microsoft Office and most of their other commercial applications with free GPL licensed alternatives and still keep Windows. Here are a few examples:

• OpenOffice
• KOffice will soon be cross platform
• Thunderbird
• Firefox
• GIMP for Windows
• AbiWord

OOo has equivalents. They aren't pretty, but work.

We already have a great alternative. http://www.openoffice.org/

Make OpenOffice accept these fonts first. OOo does not like .otf fonts, at least not on Linux.
And it does not export them to .pdf, see e.g.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=43029
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=78858

Make OpenOffice accept these fonts first. OOo does not like .otf fonts, at least not on Linux.
And it does not export them to .pdf, see e.g.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=43029
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=78858

OpenOffice.org is licensed under the LGPL. They can not license it under the LGPL unless they allow all associated patents to be used in any LGPL code including LGPL'd code to support competing document formats.

A person engaged in prohibited uses continuously for one hour could typically use 100 to 200 MB...

Source code != documentation.

Go ahead, go check out a recent snapshot of the OpenOffice.org codebase, and use it to try and work out how to write a plugin for it.

Then go read the Developer's Guide [PDF warning!] and see how much easier it is.

Anyone who thinks the code alone is sufficient documentation has never contributed to a large project.

Source code != documentation.

Go ahead, go check out a recent snapshot of the OpenOffice.org codebase, and use it to try and work out how to write a plugin for it.

Then go read the Developer's Guide [PDF warning!] and see how much easier it is.

Anyone who thinks the code alone is sufficient documentation has never contributed to a large project.