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Star Office 6.0 Source Code GPL!
jjr writes "An article over at TechWeb states the date for the release of the source code Star Office 6.0 is on Oct. 13 and it will be released at openoffice.org."
We've been hearing rumors of this for some time now, but I'm still looking for confirmation of the license, but the rumor is that it will be Open Source compliant, and hopefully GPL (especially considering the (well deserved) heat they took over their previous license). Rumors about the license in German. I've also heard that the among the major goals is a GTK port of the suite. Update: 07/19 01:31 PM by CT : It's apparently official: Finally a story in English proclaiming that it will be released under the GPL!
So, can I claim credit for being the first to use linux as a verb?
linux - v - act of opensource product rapidly gaining marketshare over commercial competitors, forcing competing commercial products to offer more featues or reduce price, and ultimately the opensource product becoming the de-facto standard. EX: (1)OpenSSH linuxed ssh.com's sales of ssh 2.X. (2) PGP was linuxed by GnuPrivacy guard. (3) The market for photoshop has been seriously linuxed by The Gimp. (4) The RIAA fears that napster may linux their embryonic plans for an online music distribution system. (5) Sun's GPL'ing of StarOffice helps offset fears that it will be linuxed by gnumeric and abiword.
Staroffice to take away 40% of Microsoft's current revenue stream?
"Over the next three years, we'll have a similar impact on the office-suite market as Linux did to the operating-system market." -- Marco Boerries
now as to replacing the toolkit with GTK, I bet that will take quite a while longer.
All in all, this is a good move for Sun and will do a lot to help enhance and improve SO over the long run
FYI:
www.openoffice.org is running Apache/1.3.13-dev (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 AuthMySQL/2.20 on Linux
I can easily see them doing it for reasons of favorable publicity.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The author of GPL'd code almost always retains ownership of the copyright. It's not a big deal- once released under GPL, it's safe. Probably the only reason that they mention it in the press release is that normally the FSF recommends assigning ownership of copyright to them so that they are better positioned to protect the GPL on your program in a court of law, and Sun is ignoring that (I'd assume that this is the case since they have their own resources for this that far outstrip those of the FSF.)
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I have no problem with MS Office being Windows only product. To tell the truth, Windows is the best general desktop platform available ( Mac comes close here too ) However, I do have problem with the document standard MS Office is using. Having relatively simple, well documented, open format would allow anybody to implement any kind of processing software be it interactive or not.
Gaining that much karma in such a short time is due to :
1) using multiple accounts to moderate up your own posts.
2) getting your friends and thier multiple accounts to moderate up your posts.
whats the point of gaining karma? increasing your default posting score doesn't really help, anyone who knows what the fuck is going on browses at -1,nested anyway.
Lars -
Whoa ... how many predictions turn out to be true ? I will stick to my PC, thank you very much.
Don't be too sure there won't be a GTK port of StarOffice - Sun's developers seem to be planning to work with Helix code:
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
For a moment, let's put the window manager MDI issue aside. It'd take no more than a few hours for someone to simply shut off the 'taskbar' and let StarOffice run in a more conventional MDI model, like ClarisWorks and Opera do. I want to talk about something else.
The real advantage of StarOffice is its tight integration with Java. Despite the fact that it's not written in Java, it can utilize Java in clever ways. And it uses whatever VM you have on your system rather than carrying its own around, which is of course another advantage.
Recently, I was faced with the task of building a small database for a boring corporate type task. While this could have been done in MS Access or whatever, I wanted to go cross-platform, client/server, and 100 percent Microsoft-free. So here's what I ended up doing: MySQL on the back end, and StarOffice Database on the front end. But there's no MySQL support in StarOffice? True, but there is JDBC support. I located a JDBC driver for MySQL, plugged it in, and everything started working. This may not impress anyone until you come to the realization that no platform-dependent code was written!
And therein, I believe, lies the real power of an office suite that is tightly integrated with Java. Java becomes the 'glue' that pulls various pieces of architecture together. Java becomes the scripting language. Java becomes the language to write StarOffice plugins. This is all good stuff, because all third-party StarOffice stuff is automatically platform-independent.
A couple of side notes: I think that two things would benefit StarOffice in the short term: first, the built-in web browser should be an embedded Mozilla 1.0 (when it's eventually released); and second, Sun should get super aggressive about bundling free copies of StarOffice with new PC's -- not just Linux machines, but Windows machines as well. With a free 'good enough' office suite in their hands, many users wouldn't bother spending the 500 bucks on another suite.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
GPLing the suite will correct this, NOT because I automatically think that the coding is broken and that some programming geniuses that are not available to Sun will save it from itself, but because it will no longer have to be monolithic.
The ONLY real reason it takes a while to load (not THAT bad) and uses a lot of mem is because when you start it, you are not simply starting a wordprocessor or spreadsheet or presentation app or drawing app, you are starting every one of these things at once. With the code GPL'd, coders will be able to break it up into parts (as mentioned, using bonobo makes this so for the GTK interface at any rate). You will be able to start Starwriter and ONLY Starwriter. Same for each other component, yet they will retain their integration/interoperability.
Actually, not. The point is that I haven't been moderating up my own posts or causing friends to do the same... I know how to work the system. This is a proof of concept and my fourth +1 bonus account.
Unfortunately, to be truly usefull, any office suite needs to read MS formats well, otherwise it is nothing but excersize in frustration.
after it has gone GPL, and delaying the release until after the
changes are made prevents fatigue from code readers who learn the code
one way then have to figure out how it works another way.
I guess you could argue by not making the source available now, they
are missing feedback from the community on how the redesign should
go. But I don't think they are going to get much intelleigent
feedback from the community in just a few months.
Reports of the PC's death have been greatly exagerated.
Get your facts straight.
SunOS 4.1.4u was the last release of what people generally refer to as SunOS (bsd-based)
but... with the introduction of Solaris 2.X, Sun retroactively named SunOS 4.X as Solaris 1.X, and internally Solaris 2.X was knows as SunOS 5.X
Confused yet?
Okay, now Sun decides they need "version inflation" to keep up with the likes of MS who jumps from 3.1 to 95 to 2000, so they rename Solaris 2.7 to Solaris 7 -- FOR PURELY MARKETING REASONS. Dumb.
So here's a translation table
SunOS 4.1.4 - (nobody ever calls it solaris 1.X)
Solaris 2.4 = SunOS 5.4
Solaris 2.5.1 = SunOS 5.5.1
Solaris 2.6 = SunOS 5.6
Solaris 7 = Solaris 2.7 = SunOS 5.7
Solaris 8 = Solaris 2.8 = SunOS 5.8
One thing I have heard about Bonobo is that, well, it is not known for being lightweight ( to put it nicely.) Combining that with existing bloat of SO what can we expect from this kind of "marriage" ?
Well, for starters it is scaring the hell out of Microsoft (remember the Halloween documents?), and it is slowly but steadily taking away Windows NT market share. But that is a different story (and completely off topic here) More info here /pyder.....
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"Over the next three years, we'll have a similar impact on the office-suite market as Linux did to the operating-system market."
What impact is that?
Sure a lot of people use linux but SunOS is still *probably* (dont flame me) a better platform for high end servers and windows is certainly still the most common platform for desktops.
Comparatively few people actually use StarOffice.
Sun has always said, "the network IS the computer"... meaning that they think everybody should be connected to the Internet.
Scott McNealy purportedly said that we don't have privacy anyway, so get over it.
Sun makes a lot of money supplying to government agencies and government contractors (there are a bunch of Suns at the NSA...).
Reputable companies have been known to put privacy-violating components in their software (look at RealPlayer, or any number of other software products...).
Even "source-available" (not Open-Source) software can have undetected bugs for long periods of time (PGP bug, anybody?)-- if not enough people are looking at it.
StarOffice has the potential to become one of the biggest desktop apps for ANY OS, especially now that it's been GPL'd.
The program will be released on October 13th: 10-13. Any X-Files fan should know what THAT means...
As far as I can see, onbody claims anything to be ``Open Source Compliant''. The author just says `... the rumor is that it will be Open Source compliant ...' without making his own statements. I can see no problem with that.
Perhaps the old license was too restrictive in other ways, in order to ensure that only paying members got source? Or did it demand that Sun be assigend copyright on mods? Or was there some other valid complaint? Or was it simply griping that Sun dared release non-free software?
Free software is cool stuff. I write it, and GPL it. But I do not demand that everyone else GPL their stuff. Although I do think that software copyrights should be like patents: short term (say, two to five years); can be renewed once for an additional term; the source is on file; the source becomes available at the expiration of the copyright. This way people can make money for a few years on their work, but we still get the source in the not-so-long-run.
Now, if Sun...
- realize that they are about to lose more cash with SO than they expected to make
- still wants to gain market shares
- and still wants to piss off Kro$oft
Then, as this is not their baby, they will easily get rid of it.BTW, could we expect some GPL'ed Swing-like toolkit for Guavac/Kaffe, one of these days ?
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
btw, the GPLd version will be v6, which is a complete re-write according so some things I've heard. Apparantly, since the takeover, Sun have quadrupled the number of developers! btw, Sun reps have also clearly stated recently, that even with StarPortal, they expect people to be using the normal StarOffice product for many years.
Also, Sun actually have about 4 'source available' license in use - SCSL, MPL (mozila public license), the "Open Source (tm)" certified one they're using for 'technical' things like the NFS 4 release, and also the license for Solaris. This makes 5. Quite a wide range.
Some intriguing replies, including one where somebody appears to feel that the score 5 insightfull which he rightfully stated that particular post would not get (I admit, I was not exactly delving into the dark recesses of genius there, I was merely stating an opinion) was more likely to go to his (less than brilliant) flame.
Now that is Moronic.
Sorry I did not reply sooner, my time is not my own.
Here it is then my answers to most of what was asked:
I did not compare KDE to StarOffice, I compared my KDE configuration (which is hand customized in the source not to have a menu) with the cascading menu system in the Xerox..eh..MacOs..eg..Windows..Eh..Star Office interfaces.
Even long time Linux users often can't use my box simply because they can't find out how to launch commands without menu's or bars. I do everything by hitting ALT-F2, and then typing the commands, where this is insufficient I start a terminal.
But I like that, and I have no intention of changing it for the rare few times somebody else works on my machine.
To the person who mentioned that a GPL'd SO would be nice because it would not be stuck in an interface and even be theme-able, I think your right, in which case my opinion might change, I'll wait and see, I am open-minded enough not to keep prejudices. At least I like to believe that.
Overall I am surprized so many people agreed on the basic concept, I really thought I was the last guy left who didn't like start button thingies. If my writing style was less well recieved, I appologize, but from that appology I exclude the first Anonymous replyer. If you can't make a point without resorting to childish namecalling, I have little respect for your opinion.
"Semper in excretum set alta variant"
I have it from a pretty decent source that they have a large team of people working on the GTK port (read: multiple dozens of coders), and that they have had that team working on it for some time. So it's not as far fetched as it would seem. Also, for the most part everything will be available as a bonobo component, so you won't have to load the entire thing as one monolithic binary anymore.
If you are using GTK's canvas and pass it to X as a picture, there's no problem with X. Like GIMP does it.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
If it is indeed GPL this will allow people to create an Office Suite appliance were that is the only thing that computer does. What would also be another interesting thing if some creates a GUI that write to the linux frame buffer then you won't even need an X server.
Female Prison Rape in NY
As much as I dislike the sluggish bloat of StarOffice, this is great news. If the MSOFiice filters are also GPL'ed, then KOffice (and other GPL'ed office suites) should get a boost. Thanks, Sun!
Not necessarily - they still own the copyright, so they can revoke the GPL-granted rights at will. The problem with free-as-in-beer is, you sometimes get what you pay for.
What?...
"Bonoboized"?...
Never mind.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Gorkman
Verbification of the noun verb can be renouned by nounification.
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
According to dpa /stern.de, the license will indeed be the GPL. Way to go, Sun!
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I'm generally not a conspiracist, but this seems all too likely to me.
At least with open source, workarounds will be released more quickly if this does occur.
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It seems the article on Heise states as much, I mean, they're going on with the GPL. My German is a little bit rostig and limited, so I didn't bother reading in full. I'm curious though, why would the Autistic License be more likely for a mega corp to accept? For reasons of pride, to top it? Because prophet Larry said so?
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
If Star Office is GPL'd then surely the guys working on Koffice, Applixware etc... can only benefit.
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
"Even a split MS may not port MSOffice to unix (try to make the business case for a linux MSOffice port...) "
Challenge accepted...
With a split MS, The apps division no longer needs tie itself to MS Windows operating systems. Thus they can feel free to improve API compatibility tool kits - for instance Wine. Once that is done, they have a fully operational MS Office that is available to any/all of the unixes with minimal effort. The cost of improving wine to where it would fully operate with most/all of the MS Apps, might well be fairly insignificant (with proper knowledge of the Apps and MS OS internals, something that the Apps division will have plenty of.) Thus they suddenly gain massive market opportunity for minimal investment capital.
LetterRip
Not to sound like a troll but I wonder if this wouldn't help bring KDE to the table (not that I believe at all they would need to be brought) with Gnome to discuss common component access.
Of course if SO is OpenSourced then the KOffice developers might just take the pieces they think they need and leave it at that. (They've done a truly remarkable job BTW to anyone who hasn't checked it out).
Either way (or should I say 'Anyway' to include 'Nothing happens' as a choice), everyone wins.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
First off, Gnumeric has been using Bonobo for a long while, as it is the testbed application.
Other applications that make use of it include Evolution, Gnome Ghostview, Gnome Xpdf, Gill, and Nautilus.
It may not be finished, but it is being finalized for inclusion in Gnome 2.0, due out this fall.
Msft reports better than expected earnings, public brand name recognition that rivals Coca-cola - it's starting to look like the bazaar dwellers are storming the Cathedral with sticks and stones, while the guards look over the ramparts, chuckle at the rabble's feeble attemtps at penetration, then turn back to their latte's. Revolution? Certainly, but it'll probably take half a generation to manifest itself, like the hippy youth rebellion of the 60's had to wait 'till the 90's before they came to any real power to change things. The 'middle aged managers' and power brokers of today grew up with WinTel, that's what they know and can't conceive of anything else replacing it, but they'll grow old and retire and the young Linux enthusiasts/advocates will take their place. It's a slow train a'coming.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
...stating that StarOffice gpld will do to Ms Office what Linux has done to (fill in the Unix/Windows of your choice here)... Hope this 6.0 (which it's going to be based on) is in a better state than the "Netscape 5.0" was when the source came out. (I mean: the first mozilla source was so stripped down it was barely usable, maybe it would be better to release the 5.2 source (but then again, what are they allowed to ship (or: what parts of the code do they have to remove))) p.s. sorry for all the brackets :-) /pyder.....
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\_\ sig under construction
You must mean tomorrow. They release on July 20th.
You could do what I did....although I can't format the hard drive and install Linux because of networking needs (I can't find a Linux client for Exchange and Outlook's shared calenders), I did install WordPerfect Office 2000. Personally, at home I use WordPerfect 8 (the free one) and Gnumeric for productivity on Linux. However, this is the next best thing. Now the only Microsoft Office application I need is Outlook. WordPerfect and QuattroPro can both import and export MS Word and Excel files.
./configure
make comment
make post
The german Heise Newsticker writes that it is GPLd and the official announcement will follow today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. It also mentions that Sun has hired Tim O'Reilly, Miguel de Icaza, Brian Behlendorf and Andy Hertzfeld as coordinators for openoffice.org and they will also define "open" XML-based data formats at openoffice.
A well written program should not be a "memory monster, but inevitably it may have to turn that if its goals are monstruous. Star Office is a graphically rich program that allows you to do WYSIWYG formatting of documents, advanced spreadsheet functions, presentantion graphics, email, web browsing and publishing, the works, to sum it up. You cannot compress all that in a binary as slender as /bin/ed.
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
openofffice.org domain is owned by Caldera.
So soon we can expect another rumour that Sun is buying Caldera?
This is exactly the step which was needed to make SO a realistic alternative to that other package.
God, I hope this works out!
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Can't have everything. Speed, Cost, Robustness, Size, Time to Market, etc. You HAVE to ineract with big business if you want that market (duh!) and you (Linux) get to deal with it. Linux doesn't have a focus and this is one of the results of the lack of focus.
btw: Isn't this (Sun, drivers, etc) exactly the proposed strategy that Linux evangelists wanted in order to 'infiltrate' the consumer/business market?
Yes! One of the biggest hassles that the koffice team works on, is the import filters. These are extremely important to have in order to recruit users of certain other suites, but they take a lot of work to develop. It doesn't help that Corel, which has sworn it's support to KDE, won't donate their excellent filter code to koffice. Hopefully they should be able to use the ones in staroffice though!
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Ok, am I the only one in the world who doesn't like star-office ?
Ok, it is pretty functionall, but nonetheless, I am pretty irritated by that windows like interface, I actually hate the windows GUI, I do not agree that it's good, it suxors majorly, KDE (with the 'K' button hidden and a good theme loaded) is about 6000 times nicer to work in.
I am not berating the software, just the interface, I wish we could get an open-source office suite with this power, and none of that crappy cascading menu crap.
"Semper in excretum set alta variant"
From a functional perspective, Star Office is pretty cool.
But have you ever wondered why it takes SOOOooooooo long to load? Ever run top or gtop to see just what an incredible hog it is? Try it and you'll be pretty surprised!
IMHO, Star Office isn't even close to snuff -- a well-written program should not be a memory monster. A lot of work will be required, if it is even possible, to put Star Office on a diet!
If it's GPL'd, or otherwise Open Source, then a port can't be far away (just switch from X to Tracker / Appserver, and voila, instant BeOS office suite.)
If violence isn't solving your problems, you're not using enough of it. - MAJ Misato Katsuragi
Or perhaps "A similar effect to that which Mozilla had on the browser market".
In the spirit of open source, I also cleared up this man's sub-literate grammar.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Aww, relax. Have you ever used Star Office?
If you do something like turn the computer off every night, there's nothing to worry about. The program is so slow that I couldn't use it til after lunch. Assuming I remembered to start it before the morning coffee break.
At the point where it does actually become useable, you can look forward to a creative rendering of MS-Word documents. I can't help but wonder if someone didn't get a preview of Word 97's HTML formatting and copied it.
On Sun's side, remember Sun announcing free copies of Solaris 8 source (minus media and shipping cost) ? Anyone have their Solaris 8 source CD?
When do we see GTK Java?
... with Staroffice as I see it is that it's one huge application. And I mean, HUGE. If I want to work on a spreadsheet, I don't need my Word Processor sitting in memory too. Unfortunately because of the tight integration in StarOffice this is exactly what happens. It kills my 64MB P-II. Gnumeric and AbiWord, although nowhere near as advanced, are at least usable.
ESR said, "Sun gets it".
Find funky gifts
According to the FAQ, a dual license will be used (GPL+SISSL for most stuff, LGPL+SISSL for libraries).
SISSL as far as I understand allows non-free derived works as long as all changes to the file formats are disclosed with open source (The idea here apparently is to ensure that there won't be any closed office file formats in the future by giving other companies the incentive of being able to use OpenOffice.org source code).
Also, all copyright is meant to be assigned to SUN so that "the copyright is unified" and they can prosecute license violations more easily.
I personally think these arrangements make sense but I'm sure a lot of people will be disappointed anyway.
Anyone happen to notice that October 13th is a Friday? I wonder if they picked this date to appear as "Bad Luck" to Microsoft...
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Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I don't think they are biased. Excel spreadsheets are often wildly mangled when opened then saved in SO. For example, lines/borders get screwed up, and printing headers/footers get added/changed.
Then there are the many spreadsheets it can't open at all (especially ones with macros). Until it can read spreadsheets such as the one from http://www.epa.gov/ada/ftp/models/bio scrn.exe (this is a self extracting zip file), then I will have to continue to dual boot.
Here is SISSL.
I really can't grok it. Does source have to accompany an executable? Does StarOffice have to be distributed under both licenses? It appears as if a lawyer with too much time on his hands wrote it. Why can't they make law easy to understand?!?!?!?
Hmmm...maybe I didn't make myself 100% clear. Not *all* of my complaints were about MS compatibility although I didn't clearly separate those out from my other complaints. And I should have added. I really wanted to use a non-MS product to present a paper (at SIGGRAPH actually) but the StarOffice fonts are dismal. I don't think it's just the lack of anti-aliasing in X - they look blockier than the usual X stuff. I really couldn't use SO for a presentation that might actually have people in the audience.
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-- SIGFPE
>Wouldn't it have been smarter to release the source code before a complete rewrite,
It was. Here is the source code from the new version before a complete rewrite:
:)
In case you missed it, here it is again:
hawk
It would seem that a number of people missed some highly interesting pieces in the press release. Therefore, relevant snippets from the English press release, with emphasis added, is included below--
StarOffice 6, the next version currently in development, will serve as the source code base for OpenOffice.org. With the upcoming StarOffice 6 technology, the next generation architecture of separate applications and componentized services will be introduced.
Major Linux companies, including Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux, Easy Linux, Mandrakesoft, Stormix, Conectivia, Definite Software PLC, and Macmillan, have signed agreements to redistribute StarOffice(TM) 5.2 software, making it the number one office productivity suite for Linux and most have pledged support for OpenOffice.org.
In addition to the GPL, Sun intends that all code contributions to the OpenOffice.org project, including Sun's contribution of the StarOffice source code, will be made available under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). This dual-licensing approach is designed to allow all organizations and individuals to use the source code freely and openly as they choose. An important requirement of the SISSL license is that it requires compatibility with the GPL reference implementation of the OpenOffice.org source code, including APIs and file formats. Copies of both the GPL and the SISSL licenses are available at http://www.openoffice.org/licensing/.
Sun will retain copyright to the source code and Sun's ongoing engineering work on StarOffice software will be done as part of OpenOffice.org. Beginning with StarOffice 6.0, a branded version of the OpenOffice.org reference implementation will be made available under the StarOffice software brand.
The fact that you actually equate karma with some vague notion of self worth illustrates more clearly than anything I can say that you, especially you, should not be advising anyone how to moderate. Moderation is not a dick-measuring contest, as you seem to think it is. So next time, before you try to preach to me, go read the fucking Bible.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
If I actually had to pay for MS Office, I might use StarOffice. Then again, wordpad works pretty good. Copy con isn't too bad either, but I forget how to send things to a printer on the command line.
And WTF is that comment about the Bible doing in there?
I find it interesting that Miguel is throwing his full support behind this, and says a few things about using it's Bonobo components. I wonder what will become of the GNOME Office suite as a result of this. Gnumeric is one of the best spreadsheets I have ever used, and I sincerly hope that the effort behind it is not undermined by this.
./configure
make comment
make post
Seriously, if I were product manager for Microsoft I would have Linux port of M$ Office around. Just in case you need it someday.
This might be the case now so, let's wait and see what M$ will release on October 13th...
Miguel did not say that Star Office 6.0 is based on the Bonobo component model. What he said is that he is pleased that Sun has chosen to use Bonobo as a component model. Part of the openoffice.org roadmap includes porting to GKT+ and using Bonobo and other Gnome technologies. But it remains to be seen how much of this work has actually done.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
The point of my concern is: Can this negatively affect the OS in a tangible way? (other than being "less cool"?)
Maybe. My ultimate goal is to free as much software as possible, so seeing StarOffice GPL'd is a positive thing. But I'm worried that as all this software floods in, Linux may no longer enjoy the stability and efficiency that it's famous for. And then why would the IT folks use it? It's a vicious cycle: the OS becomes popular (simultaneously popularizing Free Software) because it's stable and efficient, but then popularity reverses it (and away goes Free Software again). (The reply about "underground" bands makes a good point. No doubt some distributions have faced pressure to change aspects of their distributions for commercial reasons as well....)
Linux has less and less become an "underground" (even "subculture" is losing applicability), and sometimes I think this has a negative impact on the OS. I see many of my friends who take that aspect seriously switching to less popular operating systems like OpenBSD or Be.
So what this tells me is that your friends weren't using linux because they thought it was a superior OS, but to have some sense of elitism in using an OS that most people didn't. This is just silly. However, the same attitude exists everywhere. In music for example. Your favorite underground band finds some wide success and lots of people hear about them. Suddenly this band and sold out and become trendy. You dont like them anymore even though they're more or less putting out the same quality of music that they've also put out.
I don't think commercial adoption of Linux had much if anything to do with any loss of stability in the OS. The fact of the matter is that Linux has grown more and more complex with each release. Obviously the more complexity you introduce into a system the more problems there are going to be with it. Add to that the fact that this code gets ported to run on numerous different architectures introducing even more complexity. No matter how good of a programmer you are, you can't avoid bugs. Still, given the complexity issues I've state above, I think the kernel developers have done a hell of a job.
Now, quality of applications. That's a different story, but it has nothing to do with the OS itself. No matter what OS you are using there are going to be great applications and there are going to be total crap applications. You just need to weed out the good from the bad which, admittedly, is getting harder and harder as the number of applications available for Linux grows. But look on the bright side, more applications means more of a chance of finding something that works well and you'll rarely be stuck using one terrible application simply because there's nothing else around that'll do the job you need done.
I'm not authoratative enough on GTK for Windows to answer your question, but the GIMP runs very well on Windows. It doesn't crash (much) and the GIMP itself is a development version. I think Tor Lillqvist has done a wonderful job of porting GTK to Windows. Keep in mind, other stuff like Dia and FreeCiv have been ported too. This leads me to believe that GTK for Win32 is a good platform.
SO mostly reads most MS office files, so you can read stuff other people have done (which is something).
:-)
If you change anything and post it back to them though, they'll be very cross
SO 5.2 has much better import filters, you might want to try that.
Yeah, yeah! I want it. Current interface is *way* too ugly. Also, using GTK probably will bring in all goodies like theming, antialiased fonts, etc. And if they port to bonobo too - we get all office framework compatible with GNOME. Dreams come true :)
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
One thing that would be helped greatly by a GPL release of StarOffice is i18n. For example, currently, there is exactly one applicatione suite suitable for use in Japanese (Applixware), and quite frankly, it sucks. It doesn't suck in any major way; it just has amny small to medium niggles that make using it about as pleasant as picking your nose with a corkscrew - it'll get the job done, but it's not what I'd call fun.
In particular, I'd like to see the GTK port mentioned above. GStarOffice make a great addition to Gnome.
Listen folks... it's going to take more than a bunch of starry-eyed kids touting the virtue of openness to wrestle with the market forces of the PC world. Not much has changed in terms of market share during the 90s except that NT is now ruler of the realm rather than NetWare for PC LANs. Unix is still used as an alternative for big iron. Windows is still on the desktop. Linux is widely popular in the press but is not yet ready for the role that the current Unix & NT servers are doing. This is due to lack of a proper support structure and also lack of enough scalability/uptime. On the desktop front, Linux doesn't stand a chance in it's current form. It hasn't the mutlimedia features or the apps to make for a desktop. So let's see... not big and bad enough for the glass house... not sexy enough for the desktop ... sounds like there's still plenty of work to be done. Let's hope that StarOffice has a better success rate.
This article from Reuters has a Sun spokesman named Marco Boerries stating that the "open source" release of StarOffice will be based on StarOffice 6.0, and will occur on October 13th.
Apple just introduced dual 450 and 500mhz G4's - available today! Sweeet!
Umm....welll....uhhh.....because I manually copy the make executable to the current directory before every build? Uhhh....yeah, that's it..... Good point. .sig fixed.
./configure
make comment
make post
As for StarOffice, it doesn't matter what their reasons were. It can only benefit the community to have it GPL'd. In essence, they've actually GIVEN StarOffice to the open developer community, rather than leased it as in the SCSL.
Don't worry so much. As long as the community and not one corporation or entity has control of the code, we can always ensure that these software products are enhanced (not grown!) to their fullest potential without restrictions.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
Wow, that's COOL. I have a few ideas for the further development of StarOffice
They don't release the source for the working
version, they release source for a non-working
experimental new implementation.
Same as with Netscape/Mozilla. No fixing of
the quite fine 3.x, just major new stuff few
people want or even can work on.
It's amazing how exactly they reproduce Netscape's
steps/mistakes. No problems for Sun, "OpenSource"
will get the blame anyway.
Martin
I'm currently at the oreilly open source conference 2000 in monterey, ca. I am having a great time even though I live here. I saw the anouncement of the GPLing of staroffice and openoffice.org this morning. hey, if anyone else reading this is here, my name is greg mcclendon, I'm about 6ft tall and I have a evil geniuses in nutshell t-shirt on, come find me. -greg
For sure. You can't have Emacs in your corner and not win that battle :).
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
There is a real case of wanting to have your cake and eat it here. You want Linux to remain stable and retain "underground" credibility but you want to see it adopted wider. We all do, of course.
Is there any way to get around the problems commercial pressures cause, with the inevitable bugs cropping up aplenty? Perhaps.
Because the GPL allows us to mess around with the code and release it again, it is not difficult to see people who need stability using one of a range of distributions that strives for the Linux you know and love, whereas the people who want features, features, features get their Windows-like distribution.
This is already happening. As long as the support is directed where it is needed there is plenty of reason to expect success.
That is absurd. Microsoft formats, while prolific, are not ideal. The XML formats of open source applications such as gnumeric and AbiWord, are much, much easier to process, grep, hack on, etc. Reading Microsoft's formats is not the only reason people have an office suite. Some of us actually use it for productivity and don't need to read Microsoft file formats at all. LaTex, for example is extraordinarily useful...
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
you don't have to buy it, but here is a bit of their reasoning behind why they GPL'd StarOffice and not Solaris or Java.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Woohoo OLE! If there's one feature I want added to my windowing environment, it's OLE. That oughta make it stable. And useful, too!
Truthfully this sounds more and more like Windows the more I read on. Not trying to be an OS bigot here, but with all those added features, things are gonna get less and less stable. I've been introduced to a new phenomenon recently, and that is of my window manager crashing. I hadn't ever really seen that under Linux prior to switching to a mature version of Gnome. The crashes are rare, but I'm worried it's a sign of things to come.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Quarter earnings reports are coming out today. I'd say any measure of stock fluctuation coming in reaction to their decision to open StarOffice is pretty much irrelevant for the next week or so.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
thats not very extraordinary... have you used wxwindows? now, thats a toolkit...
http://www.wxwindows.org/
soup, the dragon.
dna.h:include "std_disclaimer.h"
Well, lets be honest - MS Office is better than most other products, in terms of value and performance at any rate. Just my 0.02$ worth, Ron.
Microsoft - not all bad.
I tried to work on a simple letter created in Word recently using SO. A simple letter with about 3 paragraphs and nothing fancy. It was unusable - the cursor kept being 3 or 4 characters out from where the text was actually getting inserted. I tried creating a presentation in SO,a really simple one, but things kept changing every time I saved and reloaded it. And in both cases the fonts looked so yucky it hurt my eyes. I tried reading in a presentation from PowerPoint into SO. It was 90Mb long (lots of pictures). On a 64Mb Windows machine it plays fine. It completely locked up a 128Mb Linux box because it went into heavy duty swap. Let's hope GPLing gets some things fixed but right now I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider using SO for anything but the most trivial tasks. (I'm using SO5.1a BTW FWIW) And please can people break this monolith into bite sized chunks. I don't want to load up every sinlge other application as well as a Windows-look-alike desktop thingy every time I edit a document. And please, can it not look *exactly* like a Microsoft application - it makes me feel a bit dirty to use it. Can't a program have its own look and feel?
--
-- SIGFPE
The Press Release says: "Sun's open-sourcing of StarOffice Suite is the single largest open-source software contribution in GPL history"
So what was the largest Free Software contribution? The GNU project itself?
any release on that particular day has to be bad luck!
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Sun aren't shipping OpenWindows *shudder* with it. :)
Bets they ship the helixcode desktop environment with it, to go with their GTK enabled Staroffice 6.
Incredible - Yahoo actually beated /. in the competition "Who makes the article with most broken links*".
:-)
* Broken links include links which requires username and password.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
Well, if they didn't think so, they wouldn't have done it.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Miguel de Icaza says that SO 6.0 is based on Gnome's Bonobo component model. AFAIK, Bonobo is neither released yet, nor are there any Gnome applications making use of pre-release Bonobo versions. So I guess the GPL'ed StarOffice will not build (yet) and take a long time before it's ready for use, probably as long as Mozilla.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
You will soon (?) see a KDE/Qt Java! :)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Just thinking. If this thing is actually going to be modular so you don't have to start all parts of it at once, might those parts of StarOffice that make up the web browser and the email client pose some competition for projects like Mozilla and other email client projects? (Not saying it's a bad thing.) I would actually consider using StarOffice as my browser and email client if it didn't take 5 years to start!
I wonder if there is any significance that SUN chose to release the code on Friday the 13th?
---- perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
Dude,
I've been using linux for 4 years and unix for far longer. Xemacs, latex and octave are among my most used tools. And they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
Yet, I WANT to see more, many more, commercial applications for linux.
This does not mean that I will abandon good free applications for commercial ones at the drop of a hat. However, if a good free application is not available for linux, I will gladly pay for the ability to use a commercial app.
And this will help linux. It will become easier for new people to use it, because linux will become a "full service" store wherein people can easily accomplish ALL their tasks.
As an example of how lack of commercial applications and support is hurting linux, let me share a story. The company I work for is building up a software development group of about 35 people. We are a small company doing embedded programming and are somewhat budget conscious. The software director (who is a sincere and open-minded guy) performed a comprehensive study of the pros/cons of standardizing on linux/KDE on the desktop for the developers. (As opposed to NT). Ultimately, linux lost. Why? Because none of the vendors of the toolchains that we plan to use support linux, or have any plans to support linux. (By toolchain, I don't mean gcc+kdevelop, we need sophisticated embedded development tools).
The guy was prepared to standardize on staroffice, though the absense of a visio-equivalent hurt. He was prepared to go through the extra overhead of setting up the enviroment and providing training to people unfamiliar with unix. But even this unbiased, openminded and willing-to-learn guy ultimately ended up going to NT. And, I, despite being a hardcore linux fan who would have loved to see it deployed here on a large scale, cannot fault his logic.
That is a total of 35 desktops lost to NT. This story is repeating all over the world right now.
Hari.
X used to never crash!, window managers have been falling over for years. Its the source and the freeness to hack the crap out of that said source, stability and so forth is purely icing. XFree86 has had bugs just like everything else, heres the thing though, if you wanted you could fix it, hell if you hadn't the skills you could try to identify when it would happen and help the developers track it down, if you were really into it you could pay a developer to sort it out for you. Even if the original writers had no interest, you could get anyone skilled to do it.
The increased popularity of Linux is great, the naysayers can just bugger off. A strong profile for linux is a strong profile for releasing source, without linux you wouldn't have just gotten 5.3 million lines of source of StarOffice into your laps, what does a little spin to make this announcement accessable to journalists and ordinary investors matter, its the source. And its bloody well GPLed, do you know you awesomely unlikely that is. Its great.
Granted I think that binary only modules for the kernel and so forth are nowhere as good as the real thing, but its a stepping stone along the road for companies to try the waters
This is why Im in this game. Eight years, Ive loved this linux GNU thing. Heres a thought though, how many of you have actually contributed something. Sent in a patch or wrote some code, thats the community, not the gripers about how popular it has become, what kind of mad talk is that.
No matter how it all works out, with linux ventures dissappearing into the sea, or companies bailing out of free software the deeds are done, and the code is there for all or us to play with to our hearts content, and thats what its all about. Hmm, port SO to OpenBSD, go ahead, excellent hack, but its the popularity of linux which you so fear which has created that opportunity. Popularity is a tool, take advantage of it
C.
disclosure: I work for SO
I sometimes write stuff
What if Sun is "dumping" StarOffice, a product that pours name brand into the home PC, into the GPL so that others will do development work for them? They maintain their brand association, YOU do the work.
Eviler reply:
So what. Linux wins, computing is free, Sun is a hero. Freedom. Beer.
Either way, cheers to Sun!
From Sun's own page about this. I guess they don't love Solaris...
So what this tells me is that your friends weren't using linux because they thought it was a superior OS, but to have some sense of elitism in using an OS that most people didn't. This is just silly. However, the same attitude exists everywhere. In music for example. Your favorite underground band finds some wide success and lots of people hear about them. Suddenly this band and sold out and become trendy. You dont like them anymore even though they're more or less putting out the same quality of music that they've also put out.
I agree that this is silly, but this paragraph has some flaws of it's own. Quite often, when an underground band finds success it is because the record company has said to them "If you change in tthese ways, we'll pump you on the radio stations until every kid in the world is humming your tunes." I've seen some really quality bands turn down contracts because of this, others have broken up because of it, and others have gone along with it. Some of these requests actually change the band in absolutly fundamental ways. There was a band from Maine years ago that had a contract in front of them that stated that they would have to take on a frontman (the rhythm guitarist was one of the best singers around, but they didn't want a singer who was held down with a guitar apparently), and they would have to stop promoting themselves as a band from Portland - they would now be a band from Boston. They turned it down feeling that the new singer would be bad for the band. Other bands would have seen the contract and signed it regardless of the impact it would have on the music.
Other bands (Metallica) drastically change the style of their music even after they have the contract because they figure they can squeeze a
bit more money out of consumers with a different style (listen to pre-Black album stuff and then the recent stuff and tell me you don't think they changed over the course of 1 album).
At the same time, eliteism can get out of hand. Personally, I don't care if other's use Linux or not... I also don't care if lots of commercial apps get opensourced or not... It might be nice, but unless a project gets lots of attention it won't draw developers.
Addlepated - punk & metal
Does anyone know if this includes the OS/2 version? That last OS/2 version of StarOffice was 5.1, but all the press releases talk about is 5.2 and 6.0.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I note that in all of the euphoria that follows this announcement no one seems to have noticed the following piece of the press release:
> Sun will retain copyright to the source code and > Sun's ongoing engineering work on StarOffice > software will be done as part of OpenOffice.org
What is the relationship of this assertion of copyright ownership of code (my reading), and the free use and modification of code allowed/promoted under the GPL? Does this allow Sun to claim copyright control over contributed code once the office.org site is up?
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
SO GPL and even better it will be Gnome oriented!
My favorite desktop envoirment(although blackbox is also very good on low spec machines).
Way to go SUN!
Sun, contrary to some peoples belief, is a hardware company at heart. They make most of their money selling Ultras, SunRays (a new product that replaces the dumb term, uses smart card authentication, and is cheaper than the cheapest PC out there), and services.
Sun could have decided to sell Solaris 8 instead of making it free, the media pack costs $75 but that is a drop in the bucket considering what you get. They could have decided to start charging for SO when they bought them, but they didn't.
Sun has several things on their mind and it isn't about trying to restrict access to their software. By GPLing SO they taking a jab at MS in several ways. The first is that it stays free, which, compared to the several hunderd dollers per license for MS Office, is very enticing, even to big companies because it is being supported by Sun. By causing even a couple businesses to switch over, I know one big one that is getting ready to, they stick it to MS. The second reason is that by GPLing it even the most picky of distros like Debian (I use Debian and love it) will be able to include it. Solaris is not a home user OS, but Sun believes that Linux is, and by doing this they are hoping that Linux will grow in the home user market and stick it to MS.
Sun doesn't plan on making any money SO, and there isn't any proprietary code that they feel is so important that they cannot release it so they are.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
English ( as the name suggests ) was not invented in America.
English (like any other natural language) was not invented at all, it evolved; modern-day American English as well as modern-day British English are both descended from a common 'ancestor' and are thus 'cousins' (this is a vast oversimplification). British English is no closer to the 'original' English (A mixture of the Anglo, Saxen, and Jute dialects of old Western-Germanic) than American English -- just as a cousin descended from your grandparents through women is not any less related to the grandparents because he/she has a different family name.
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Given the talk that the PC is predicted to soon be dead (see Intel Preparing for post-PC world ), I have to wonder, is Gnome/Star Office/Linux on the PC simply panhandling now for gold flakes after Microsoft has hauled off most of the gold during the height of the PC era?
---------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
moderate parent +5, Good News
I'd love a GTK version and especially to get rid of the "start" button.
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What's with the Login with a password at openoffice.org? I think this may come dwn after the 10/13/2000 release date? I hope so. What would be the point of GPLing the Star Office if only a select fiew can get to it?! Wonder what MS thought when they heard that?
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
English ( as the name suggests ) was not invented in America.
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
I can easily see them doing it for reasons of favorable publicity.
This will not help them very much. Who does this really impress? I can see it bringing smiles to fans of the GPL--there ought to be a club. I doubt stockholders will be impressed: SUNW is now down 1 3/4 as I write this. No. I cannot confirm if it is related to this news. Will this really help Sun? Another question: did Sun need help?
Not only is this good for projects like Abiword, Koffice etc. as they can use Sun's code, it also means that Sun can use code from other GPL projects. From what I've seen, the page layout/frames aspect of koffice looks very powerful, as well as other interesting features, and now Sun could quite easily put this in SO.
Open source - it's a win-win situation!
Imagine... a KDE Open Source desktop with a KDE Open Source standards-compliant browser on a QT Open Source toolkit with a KDE Open Source Office Suite... and a native port of Java! Whoa...
I don't know, I still don't understand why people are so obsessive about licenses used. IMHO if the source is available and you are legally allowed to fuck with it without too many restrictions it is free.
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
I hope that as we see all of this commercial attention towards linux, it doesn't lose some of the qualities that have made it so good.
We'll still always have the source to the OS thanks to the GPL. This is great.
Some applications will be free(d), and if they're good enough to be worth it, dedicated hackers will be able to fix bugs in them.
Yet, something tells me that Sun didn't GPL StarOffice out of a sense of community, they did it for buzzword compliance. Press releases riddled with marketspeak phrases like "move forward" and "continued innovation" make me cringe, fearing the worst...
Linux may turn into Windows.
With fancy new GUI "Windows" managers, X has started to crash for me occasionally. X used to never crash! The latest redhat shipped with no fewer than two remote root exploits. It's getting to be a major chore to understand all of the things your system does on boot (3 years ago with slackware, this was easy!)
We're starting to see proprietary drivers available for linux. When we have as many proprietary drivers as Windows does, will we see the same loss of stability?
Linux has less and less become an "underground" (even "subculture" is losing applicability), and sometimes I think this has a negative impact on the OS. I see many of my friends who take that aspect seriously switching to less popular operating systems like OpenBSD or Be.
What do you think? Does this much marketing force and this much code eventually turn a great system mediocre? Will we just end up with another (mostly open source) Windows?
I hope not, but I'm still worried...
It will be re-architechted to use smaller programs, and components
It will be integrated with GNOME via Bonobo component architecture(note that this does not necessarily mean using GTK). What it does mean is that GNOME applications will be able to embed SO docs, ala OLE. So a GNOME Email Client(don't know what they are, I use KDE) could allow in-place editing of SO attachments, etc.
In my opinion, both of those are excellent news.
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pilchie
I'm glad that Staroffice is becoming GPL'd. Now I can fix all the user interface mistakes sun made. When I'm done with that thing, it's gonna make look difficult
I will be helping with the BeOS and AtheOS ports, though - a GPL'ed suite like this, even though it's not the best - is a good foot in the door for a startup operating system!
I'm looking forward to the StarView technology itself - a cross platform porting toolkit for OS/2, Windows and X is a good thing!
I sometimes write stuff
Hopefully all the filters are included. Then the development of filters for [K|Gnome]Office will benefit a lot from this release.
Actually, I think Sun presented it as "SunOS 5.x is the OS portion of Solaris 2.x", with "Solaris" containing, in addition to SunOS, the window system and desktop code - but the key point, as you note, is that there's still SunOS in there, even if the code base for SunOS changed.
You are correct - that's exactly what uname -sr reports on Solaris 7.
(uname -sr gets you the OS name and release number, without all the other stuff you get from uname -a; it's what I use if I just care what version of what OS a box is running, although, for those OSes constructed by assembling a large number of independent pieces, it tends to give only the version number of the kernel - uname -sr on a Linux box won't tell you it's running Red Hat 6.2 or Debian 2.1 or SuSE 6.3 or Mandrake 7.0 or..., it'll tell you it's running Linux 2.0.36 or Linux 2.2.14 or.... There are times where that's a feature, but there are times where it's not, given that the behavior of a system, both from the user and programmer point of view, is controlled by more than just what's in the kernel.
Of course, the next question one might sometimes ask of a system is "which patches does it have installed", and uname -sr doesn't necessarily answer that; Solaris has, I think, a way of finding that out, but I don't know which other OSes do.)
The code is going to be massive. And it's going to look messy because almost everyone will be new to it.
Except for a challenge nobody will want to go through this!
I said like the AL. I meant I thought it was unlikely that they'd go with the "compulsory sharing" (yes, I know that's an unfair descripton) philosophy of the FSF. Seems I was wrong. Heigh, ho.
I don't thing the GNU project would qualify in this little verbiage contest as its multiply authored as well and not really a single entity as its distinctly lot of programs.
Anyhow I reckon theres a real drop off to number 2.
C.
I sometimes write stuff
No.
Sun Microsystems is NOT just a hardware company. First of all, they sell hardware/software solutions. Part of the cost of that sparc you bought is the license for solaris.
Second of all, they have other software which makes them money (See: Java). So I think it's safe to say they're not purely a hardware company.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are a veritable plethora of reasons why Sun might release Star Office under the GPL, but one reason might be simply to extend the power and interoperability of Star Office by switching to the GTK+ toolkit and possibly even using other Gnome technologies such as gnome-print and bonobo. One of the biggest complaints against Star Office is that it tries to be it's own OS (Hmm...sound like another text processing program?) with it's start button, it's own "desktop", file manager, toolkit, etc. With the adoption of Gnome technologies by converting Star Office to GPL, they would suddenly gain interoperability with Gnome applications and have the use of a component architechture to share resources. In addition the potential for KDE getting in on the fun is endless.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
By largest, does he mean largest number of lines of code, or does he mean most significant? And why didn't he say which? This is just marketing bullshit. The only things of value said here (besides the meat of the announcement itself) are the various people who actually know what they're talking about who were quoted. Frankly, I haven't listened to anything anyone at Sun has said in years, but Tim O'Reilly is a pimp, and the fact that there are affirmative quotes from four heads of linux vendors is a nice touch. I wonder how much they paid them for their taglines.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OK, so it would seem that the new SO is going to be built on GTK (see Miguel's comments about Bonobo and such.) I'm really curious: does this mean the end of multi-platform Star Office? I know that there is a GTK port to Windows, and I even found the home page, but it really doesn't say how stable, usable, or up to date it is. Not that I really care too much about the windows port, but it would be really nice to be able to give Windows users SO 6.0 for Windows and say: "This is what GPL software can be, if you give it a chance." So... anyone know enough about GTK for Windows to give an educated guess about the chances of the Windows port surviving?
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Guess that would be too much to ask.
Do you run it on Z80, or what?
--
Well, one has to keep in mind that Sun is primarily a hardware vendor.
It might well be possible that they see StarOffice/StarPortal mainly as a way to sell their big hardware.
And what do you think will be necessary to run StarPortal for several hundred users??
-- never underestimate someone who overestimates himself
I hope the open-sourcing of SO will help making
it smaller (both package size and memory footprint) and faster. Then it would be usable for my setup (K6/233 Mhz, 48 MB ram) and I could finally delete Windows, which I still need to run MS Office (the _only_ use for them).
(e)
I'm as monolingual as the next American, and maybe it's not fair to quibble about stuff that's getting posted in a hurry, but this makes it look like the fact that the story is in English is what makes it official.
Which confirms the usual European prejudices about Americans.
P.S. I did read the story.
Microsoft completely avoided that problem. They designed office applications (especially access) so that they load up quickly (under a half hour) but god forbid you should try to shut them down. I've spent many late nights waiting for parts of MS office to shut down, and for clippy to get his ugly ass off my screen.
Office 2000 seems to have perfected this. After a few minutes of hanging up the computer the program will GPF and die... a very innovative solution, if you ask me.
If there were MSOffice for linux and solaris, I'd probably have purchased licenses and have been running it for a long time.
But there's not, and even if MS were to start porting it now, they've lost a whole lot of ground to Opensource office suites, and would have to practically give it away.
So, let's be Honest - Even a split MS may not port MSOffice to unix (try to make the business case for a linux MSOffice port...)
In a cross-platform world, that leaves MS Office out of the running as an option. I don't see any value or performance benefit if it doesn't run on all your platforms.
seems MSFT stock is taking a downturn today. Just my 0.02$ worth.
This deliberate, or in error? And can anyone with a username/password shed light as to what is contained therein?
This is fantastic news of course, those of us who have been trumpeting SO as a realistic alternative to MSO while lamenting it's closed nature can amp up our trumpets and really give it some. Speech and beer, well, it don't get much better than this.
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
In addition to the GPL ...will be made available under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). ...An important requirement of the SISSL license is that it requires compatibility with the GPL reference implementation of the OpenOffice.org source code, including APIs and file formats.
I couldn't find any information on the SISSL, but it sounds a little fishy to me. If the source code is GPL'ed, then I can create a derivative work, which would be as incompatible as I want. (Not that I'm advocating intentional incompatibility). Is the SISSL intended to be a closed-source complement to the GPL? Otherwise, I can't see how it would be useful, since under the GPL you can do what you want with the code in terms of modifications.
---
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
They are pretty far along with it, and hope to release it later this summer, I think. I know that evolution (the Gnome Outlook-ish thing) uses bonobo pretty heavily, and I believe that Gnumeric has also been bonobo-ized. So, while it's not 1.0-like yet, it is pretty far along.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
-J
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Actually, Open Source (tm) is a registered trademark of the Open Source Initiative. You are not allowed to call your product Open Source unless it is licensed after one of these licenses.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
In his keynote at the Ottawa Linux Symposium today, Miguel de Icaza mentioned that StarOffice will be ported to GTK and will use the GNOME Bonobo component model.
SUN is obviously significantly involved. Does this mean that we may see GNOME on the Solaris desktop in the near future?
Can anyone provide more insight into this?
Now I can fix some problems in Star Office! HOORAY!
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
Closely tied into the Star Office Suite is their Star Portal program which is just the network computer model. How much you do you want to bet that making Star Office free, then Open is actually setting up people to buy into their Star Portal program when it comes to fruitation (which I can't possibly see being free)?
/
sun's Star Portal webiste http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/starportal
A pessimist thinks that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. A cynic thinks that the world is going to hell in
My computer at work doesn't have a port of StarOffice. Now it will, and I'll have no excuse for ignoring all those Word-formatted emails from PHBs and their secretaries. Fuck you, Sun!
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> What companies have been successful with a GPL model?
Sun is a hardware company idiot.
From http://openoffice.org/project/www/faq.html - about half way down:
A: If I contribute code to OpenOffice.org, what am I going to be asked to do as far as licenses are concerned?
A: All contributions to the source code will require that the code is automatically available under both the GPL and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). We ask that developer assign the copyright to Sun so that the copyright is unified. Further, the assignation of copyright ensures that we can defend license violations if necessary. We are absolutely committed to the dual license mechanism of GPL/LGPL + SISSL and will remain so committed.
1) Can they force contributions to be under both the GPL and SISSL (ie does this contradict or nullify the GPL?) - is it legal?
2) Are their reasons (listed above) valid or is there some other motivation we should be looking for?
3) Does this "dual license" prevent someone from making their own distribution of StarOffice which wouldn't require developers to go under the SISSL?
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
So, I was at the Ottawa Linux Symposium this
morning, and who was doing the opening keynote,
but Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame. He mentioned the GPL-ing
of StarOffice, and the project underway since
*April* to port it GTK and Bonobo (the Gnome component
system), which Helix Code was assisting in. He
changed the subject quickly after that, mentioning an NDA
but.. very interesting nonetheless. Oh yes, the new name is OpenOffice. Check it out at http://www.openoffice.org
1) Sun bought Staroffice for 30milj$.
2) Sun added 4 times the developers to the project
3) After releasing the product for free for noncommercial usage, it's now totally free by releasing the sourcecode (however, how will they release the NDA-ed protected parts of the application???)
Adding this up... where's the catch? Sun is a commercial company only in the business for the money. Releasing the sourcecode is to me equal as throwing away the 30milj$. Pretty much if you ask me.
so.. where's the catch? why will this bring Sun extra $$ instead of costing only $$$ (as it does now, with truckloads!)
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Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
since the word "verb" is actually a noun, it's been 'verbed' too!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I don't think the PC will die as much as the fact that the majority of the consumer devices will be far simpler, disposable, and not require the level of maintenance that current PCs require.
There will always be software developers, large corporations, designers, etc. who need and use workstations and servers (as opposed to "PCs").
What OS and what tools do you think they'll be running?
... and don't discount the potential for using parts of GNOME/SO/LINUX for the foundation of simpler consumer appliances.
(still waiting for linux-based AOL cds to start coming in the mail every month...)
you know that TiVO is linux-based, right?
It's called Gobe Productive. It's been around for years. It's better then anything around on Linux. It's a great suite. And it's BeOS native.
;)
http://www.gobe.com
Sure, it's commercial, but its worth the money.
We (BeOS users) don't NEED StarOffice. Sure, a port would be nice, and I'd support it. However, StarOffice is not as important for BeOS as it is for Linux. (Apart from the inter-platform compatibility that StarOffice provides.)
/me waits for the eventual troll/flame from the recommendation of a NON-FREE app!!!
They have a stable code base, but the will need a macOS version to really take off. Otherwise word (and .doc) will remain the standard. If everyone has staroffice, then it will become a de facto standard....
kde who?
I just hope that there's a BeOS port in the works. The OS is great - it just needs some serious software.
"I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." -Former Vice President Dan Quayle
I can't see a big corp going for the GPL with a major product like this, if only for reasons of pride. I would think something more like the Artistic licence would be likely, probably their home-grown variant. Maybe they'll just fix the problems with the SCSL.
>One thing I have heard about Bonobo is that,
>well, it is not known for being lightweight ( to
>put it nicely.) Combining that with existing
>bloat of SO what can we expect from this kind of
>"marriage" ?
The idea that bonobo is a huge bloated monstrosity is an assertion oft repeated by KDE proponents, but rarely backed up. A large part of this may be due to KDE dropping use of CORBA as a part of their component model in favour of a pure shared library solution.
However Gnome is not KDE; and more importantly ORBit is not Mico.
A large problem with KDE implementation of CORBA is that it was built around Mico (which had already been attempted by the Gnome team and scrapped for performance reasons.) A simple test where a dummy function was executed 10,000 times was completed in a mere 2.93 seconds by ORBit, as opposed to 22.48 seconds by Mico.
A large portion of the performance benefit of ORBit is that, although it provides the ability for components to communicated through internet or unix domain sockets, it provides the ability to short circuit this method and load as a shared library if envoked on the same host as the calling application.
The benefit of this is that you have a single unified API allowing for both network transparent operation and high perfomance local operation.
Theory aside, I am currently running a Bonobo application on my desktop (Evolution) and see precious little evidence of any bloat. Yanking the memory usage statistics from top, the application itself is taking up 5640k, which might seem high if it weren't for the fact that 4432k of that represents shared libraries, including glib, gtk, gnome, X itself, and a variety of image libraries. The mailer component is also fairly lean, utilizing 7676k, with 5376k shared.
I've been trying to find the best way to learn GTK and despite playing with it a little and buying a book, programming is easiest with experience. Perhaps this is an opportunity to learn two toolkits at once... hopefully there's ample documentation. Perhaps what's needed is a porting library, like one that uses StarView's function calls but translates them to GTK+? It wouldn't be perfect, but would save a lot of time. I'm out of school, I should work on that...
I'd also like to see StarOffice get recompiled for Linux/SPARC, and I'm sure many others would like to see that too.
One more thing on my wish list: split up the apps like StarOffice did in the old days, and stop reimplementing everything like the desktop, WM, etc. and then it would be hard to call bloated. Otherwise I really enjoyed using 5.1 until my affair with AbiWord, then WordPerfect Office 2000 came out.
# debian/rules
Of course, the Open Source Initiative is at http://www.opensource.org, not .com ;)
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Why Sun should GPL StarOffice.
Zach Frey