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ChrisRijk writes "The Register is reporting that according to the German mag c't, next month Sun will buy StarDivision, whose major product is StarOffice. With Sun's financial and development resources behind it, StarOffice could rapidly become a worthy competitor to MS Office, especially in multiple-platform environments. The idea of having a major office productivity suite that looks and feels the same no matter which OS is beneath it is simply too good to be denied. But this is just a rumor report (albeit a well-sourced one), so don't get too excited yet.

Toast writes "According to CNET, Linux (and some other alternative OSes) are the #1 trend for 1998. They cite the Gimp and StarOffice as two reasons why alternative OSes are gaining popularity. According to CNET, 'Alternative OS-makers no longer need rely on their "Microsoft sucks, and we're not Microsoft" appeal. This year, the sentiment is "Our OSes stand on their own merits." And this year, they can back it up.' " Ya know, a year ago nobody in the media mentioned Linux. Sure, Slashdot was easier to run because there were fewer articles to pick from, but now, Linux is recognized everywhere. Very cool.

scoop writes " StarOffice 5.0 Personal Edition for Linux is available for free for non-commercial use. The offer addresses to all individuals, private persons and students and is exclusively restricted to individual, non-commercial use. StarOffice 5.0 is a fully-integrated and Microsoft Office-compatible suite of productivity applications. It provides powerful Web enabled word processing, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, email, news, charting and graphics applications. StarOffice runs native on the Linux Operating Environment on Intel platforms and is also available for other operating systems. "

Sun will be making Solaris 7 available for $10 for non-commercial use. Star Division will also make its office suite available at no charge on Solaris 7. This link was found on Linux Preview.

Microsoft is not going to wait for the outcome of its trial with the DOJ before attacking Linux. The battle scene is France, where Microsoft's new (expendable?) regional director Marc Chardon has just issued an open letter to his clients. Click below to read the translation of the Linux-section (it's in French) and some commentary. The new director of Microsoft France (MF) has just issued an open letter to his clients. Most of the letter says essentially "We're right. Critics aren't. Millions of people use our products." and other fascinating insights. However it does contain two interesting revelations: Microsoft's OS is an integral part of your PC, and Linux is of very limited interest to anyone but fringe groups (students and researchers).

As previously reported, it is illegal in the EU to tie the sale of a product with another in the EU. However Microsoft France (MF) argues that because a computer can be argued non-functional without an operating system (or a hard-drive), what is being sold is a single product, not two. A little later, MF's director contradicts himself by stating that "assemblers" (basically small computing shops that will assemble a computer from standard components according to your desires) will sell you a computer without an OS -- is that a broken computer? Indeed, since the same letter claims there are more OS's for PCs than any other computer, we must be dealing with a product tied to another precisely because no other OS is sold (according to the letter) with a computer.

Further down, you'll see a whole section devoted to Linux. While today Microsoft's lawyers declared Linux to be developed by a single person, MF's director claims it to be a movement. I've translated the rest of what he had to say about Linux since it's interesting...

"It would seem that Linux does not satisfy the requirements of most companies, let alone the general public.

Linux presents limits that will slow down its widespread distribution, particularly in companies and the general public

In terms of the system's stability, Linux has problems of general coordination, and one feels strongly the lack of a project leader. Linus Torvald ( S: Microsoft can't spell!) left university last year to join a Californian company. The development of Linux has since considerably slowed down. Similarly, the maintenance of Linux' functionality depends on the mobilization of its teams. Thus, certain of its functions have not been updated in the last two years.

The installation of Linux is delicate. For optimal system performance, each version must be tuned on each computer at each installation, by a competent computer-technician. Setting it up and its administration are therefore not within the reach of a computer-technician used to more friendly operating systems, let alone basic users. Using Linux is complex, its programs generally take text commands.

Finally most Linux application software has limited functionality. Word processors rarely have functionality common on today's PC or Macintosh: dynamic spelling correction, graphic input of tables, integration of imported graphics. Most Linux word processors bear more resemblance to Microsoft Write written in 1985.

Linux' advantages of zero-cost and open source are not relevant criteria for most users.

The zero-cost of Linux is a non decisive advantage: the cost of an OS is minor in comparison to the other costs of a company. The price of the OS is only one of the elements of computers in companies. Putting a traditional OS into place costs many times the price of the OS itself, and the same goes for the creation of an application program and its maintenance. So, by installing Linux, one saves the cost of the OS, but one increases the cost of installation, and one takes risks for the maintenance of the applications and the system itself.

If certain people consider the permanent availability of source code to be an absolute guaranty of independence from software editors, we fail to see the benefit for a company or a person to have access to the source of his OS.

However, the distribution of the OS source code is very useful for students and researchers, to understand the inner-workings of the OS and eventually to change it. Linux will therefore probably stay for a long time a good subject of study for computer-scientist, rather than an OS destined for widespread distribution. "

I must apologize for any mistakes in my translation. Use babelfish to get an alternative translation. I'm open to any corrections. update! Linux Weekly News has just published a de-babelfished translation of the whole letter.

S: This letter obviously contains many "inaccuracies":

If I buy a car, is the fuel a separate product or not? What about electricity? Computers are non-functional without it. I hope the EU lawyers will notice this wriggling.

His attacks on Linus stating that Linux development has slowed down are not credible with the inflow of new developers and the number of ports now in the standard kernel. The letter very much ignores the fact that Transmeta lets Linus hack on Linux during office hours and has other employees that contribute, underplays Red Hat employing kernel developers, and completely ignores the current tidal surge of major corporations towards Linux: Intel, Compaq, Oracle, Sun, to name but a few.

Anyone who has had to install Windows from scratch, as I do every 3-6 months when it has corrupted its hard-drive beyond repair at work, knows that installing Windows is a royal pain. It takes over an hour, requires minding (yes... I'm just here to click OK)... Linux takes me 20 minutes on an 100 Mhz system. The only argument here is: when Windows is pre-installed (i.e. when you buy your machine) it's easier than it is to install Linux. Duh!

I, and many others don't view GUI's as necessarily friendly. Until they are a substitute for true understanding, I prefer to have control over my system and to be able to repair it. The usual answer for Windows to reinstall everything, and then try eliminating various components until you've found the "culprit". The same applies for source code. Funny that the latest C'T has devoted 19 pages to "Hacks & Bugs & Workarounds: Large Projects with Word, and how one survives them". To me, and many others, this is an unacceptable hit on my productivity.

Indeed, the whole notion that Linux is too hard for the average user is nonsense to me. I gave my mother a Linux box -- I'm living 8 timezones away so I cannot help her fix an unreliable OS. She cannot rely on computer-savvy neighbours either, since she's in a very rural area. But, with Linux as her first computer, she is happy using it laying ridicule on Microsoft's claims about the difficulties that the average layman will experience.

Complaints about Word processors are unfair since most Windows word-processors are also not very advanced. Percentage-wise (if you count all the free, shareware, and old ones), I expect Windows/DOS have a worse ratio. Only a few products provide the features Marc discusses. Similarly, on Linux, we have WordPerfect 7 (hey Corel, port WordPerfect 8!), Applixware, and StarOffice (which I sometimes use), Angoss, Dtop, and Axene's Xclamation, On the free front we have Emacs which is also used by a very large number of people under NT and which will soon have a WYSIWYG interface, Thot, EZ, Papyrus, Cicero, Doc, Maxwell, and new promising upstarts such as Glue. And let's not forget TeX: I and my fellow PhD students wrote their theses in it because it copes well with 700 page documents. Most academic papers must be written, and many books are written in it. It also accepts any graphics as encapsulated postscript. TeX is still the only format which is guaranteed to come out looking the same on any computer, and still looks better to me and many others than the output of any other product. As to dynamic spell-checking, I turn it off: I think, I write, I reread, I spell-check. Dynamic spell-checking just breaks the flow of my thoughts.

The attack on zero-cost software is a pretty obvious diversion, and tries to draw the reader's attention away from the fact people use Linux because of its stability and features rather than its cost.

Finally, Microsoft's attempt to make academics and students irrelevant is interesting, since they are the ones pushing Linux, but also very dangerous. France values intelligence and high education more than most other societies, as Marc Chardon's own CV shows.

So what do you think of all this?

I'd like to thank A Dark Elf, Jacky Liu, and Linux Weekly News Daily for some of the material I used here.

John Cavanaugh writes "Well after numerous delays it looks like the StarOffice website is finally up. link They have quite a bit of information available on StarOffice 5, which by the way looks very cool. It appears that desktop applications are really beginning to catch some momentum." Mmmmm. Apps good.

To read news about Amoeba (a newly freed OS), Sun's new free software website, IBM's new UNSUPPORTED ADSM client, Staroffice 5.0, and a possible port of QuickMotion to Linux, hit the link below. Jesper Juhl informs us that the Amoeba Distributed Operating System is now available for free download with a pretty liberal license. Amoeba is a powerful microkernel-based system that turns a collection of workstations or single-board computers into a transparent distributed system. It has been in use in academia, industry, and government forabout 5 years. It runs on the SPARC (Sun4c and Sun4m), the 386/486, 68030, and Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/60.

Robert Herrmann writes "Sun is getting serious about helping people use free software on Solaris."

On the commercial side, an anonymous reader informed us that IBM released an UNSUPPORTED Linux port of the ADSM Version 3 client., so please don't discourage them by bugging them for support.

Telcontar writes "StarOffice 5.0 for Linux will be available by August 18. The English website has not been updated yet (will be updated today), but the German website says that more than 400,000 users are already registered for the latest version (4.0 with service pack 3). The final version will be released on September 30 and will have all features of the versions for other platforms. It is free for private/educationaluse. 5.0 will be available in 8 languages (soon to be 24), and StarDivision has just opened an office in the USA"

Finally, David Nedrow writes that Practice Corp makes QuickMotion/2 for OS/2: a Quicktime viewer which provides standalone viewing, plugin support and QuickTimeVR and is better in many cases than XAnim. Tom Harding at Practice has indicated that they have been looking at Linux as a target platform. So if you'd like to see a port send a pleasantly worded message to the developers.

(I've edited the comments for brevity)