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Dept. of Defense Adopts StarOffice
Polar Pope writes "The Department of Defense has adopted
Sun's Open Source productivity suite
StarOffice (up to 25,000 units)." Honestly I don't see this as being that huge of a deal, but it sure is getting submitted a lot. Then again, 25k Linux boxes inside the DoD is cool.
> Rather, people are crowing that the era of one-vendor lock-in for desktop OS's has ended at the DoD
Yes, but those people are uninformed and cheering for something that doesn't exist. StarOffice is replacing a UNIX office suite they were using and not MSOffice. So now they (and they isn't the DoD, it's an independent subdivision) will be using MSOffice and StarOffice instead of MSOffice and Applix.
Man...what the heck would you call GOOD software. You guys act like NOTHING Microsoft writes is any good. I really wish people would keep their concerns about MS where they are really concerns - such things as licensing, and tech-world domination. But the software itself is quality stuff. There is simply no better browser than IE, there simply is no better office suite than Office. Windows, well, thats strictly opinion - but for what it does, it works pretty well too (try writing a multitasking windows-based operating system including all the COM stuff, server software, media, drivers, and more - then you'll understand why Windows has bugs - just ask the folks at KDE and Gnome if their software contains bugs and they arent even an operating system!). Point is, Microsoft does in fact write GOOD software. They just happen to want to cram it down your throat, and make you pay out the a**.
Driving people away? Hardly. In the DoD, they're used to paying a lot more to UNIX vendors than to MS and dealing with a lot more license issues. At one job I had in the USAF, I spent more time dealing with UNIX licenses and support contracts than getting real work done. MS has been getting a lot worse lately, but the price & convenience level of MS licensing schemes is still better than the major UNIX vendors.
Of course, Linux is much better still, but many organizations need to stay with the big vendors because of legacy software.
Honestly I don't see this as being that huge of a deal ...
Of course you don't, because you don't start sporting a chubby until there is a little penguin involved in some way. For the rest of, who would like to be able to easily exchange office-type documents with other normal (read: "What's Linux?") people without having to pay the M$ tax, any news of widespread acceptance of a freely-available and well-supported product is welcome news.
The biggest reason that MicroSoft Office took over the market, back when it had competitors, was because they got the government to use it. This meant that all the businesses who wanted to do business with the govt switched to MS Office, so they could be sure that their proposals and quotes would be properly displayable within the government. Why would anybody choose WordPerfect if it might cost them their next contract?
To use Microsoft's words, the office suite is a cancer. If the DoD switches to another office suite, then many others end up having to switch as well. Then the people who do business with those businesses need to switch.... then the people who do busine... etc, et al, ad infinitum.
--
StarOffice runs on Windows too, so it doesn't necessarily mean they have 25K Linux machines. Also, StarOffice isn't quite open source. There's an OpenOffice subset that is, but Sun doesn't have the necessary licenses to release source to all of StarOffice.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Nice to see another branch of government taking Open Source seriously. I'm wondering what drove the directon to Star Office, and if it will also drive some of the 25K machines to be Linux (Yes, Virginia, there is a Windows Version of Star Office). Wonder if other branches of the US Government will follow. At least most of them disseminate their forms in .pdf format. Gotta give them credit for that. :)
...or you could just use the old Ultra as an Xterminal and run SO itself on a "real" machine.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Frequently, those who use StarOffice receive embarrasing statements from those with whom they try to share Word-formatted files.
.doc files.
In my experience, RTF files share better between SO and Word and back again than do
--
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
They basically consider that Microsoft's continued screwing of their customers (mostly contracts, but they forgot to mention prices) is driving people away. Also that many large (government) groups around the world are considering similar stuff.
btw, the DoD are basically paying $0 for this - they already have a support contract with Sun to cover support. Good for US tax-payers eh.
Yes, that is true. StarOffice most certainly did come first. That wasn't at all clear from my post.
What I should have said was that StarOffice 6.0 will be the re-branded OpenOffice.
And Open Office really is getting better. For one thing it no longer relies on the goofy Xprint extensions to print (it can generate Postscript). I actually have been playing with the recent builds and they are getting to be pretty darn good (although soffice still takes forever to start).
I also agree with you about AbiWord and Gnumeric. The Gnome Office suite is getting to be pretty good. Either way it is nice to see an organization standardize on something besides MS Office. The fact that they are saving us taxpayers some money is also good news.
I suppose they would do it for the same reason that Netscape rebrands Mozilla as Netscape. Marketing folks think that changing the name on the free product lends the non-free (yes, both Netscape and StarOffice will be released under commercial closed source licenses) product some dignity.
Personally I think that this particular trick has failed miserably. Mozilla is good enough to actually use as a browser, Netscape, on the other hand sucks. Right now StarOffice is certainly more stable and useable than OpenOffice, but once that is no longer the case I imagine that people will simply use OpenOffice (although your Sparcs will probably come with a copy of StarOffice).
Yes, if you want to fork the code base you can. If you want your source code to end up in their CVS repository, on the other hand, you will assign your copyrights to Sun.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. The Free Software Foundation requires the same thing if you plan on submitting code to their projects. They do this to make sure that they can prosecute copyright infringers (only the copyright holder can prosecute), and to make sure that all of the source is legal to distribute.
In Sun's case it also means that they can re-license your code under non-free licenses. Not that this matters to you. You still have your copy of the source, and you can do what you want with it (including creating a fork). You can't sell closed source versions of the software, however, because Sun owns a large part of the copyrighted material.
In essence this sort of deal gives the originator of the code a slight advantage. Sun could, if they wanted, sell commercial versions of StarOffice with proprietary add-ons not found in OpenOffice. However, if they spent to much time on the proprietary add-ons then their userbase would probably fork their codebase, and Sun would lose the help of the Free Software community (and probably the bulk of their users).
Believe it or not their are business reasons for using the GPL.
OpenOffice is the GPLed version, StarOffice is Sun's rebranded version of the same thing. Part of the fun with OpenOffice is that all hackers assign their copyrights to Sun. This allows them to relicense StarOffice as they please.
It's sort of like the difference between Netscape and Mozilla.
Just for the record, I personally think that this sort of licensing is good for all involved. Sun remains in control of their project, unless they are evil. In which case OpenOffice becomes the de-facto standard and StarOffice disappears. If Sun plays nice, everyone wins.
Granted, it's been a while since I was a sp00k for Uncle Sam, but when I worked with the DISA systems, they all ran Solaris on Sparc hardware. The next giant leap for DoD will be to standardize on Linux for their other desktop systems and implement StarOffice or OpenOffice for compatibility across the board. When I worked on the non-secret squirrel projects, they couldn't decide on a standard office software package. Some shops used AmiPro, some used Wordperfect, etc. It varied across the board.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Sharing files problem is due to Microsoft not giving out the specs for its Office format (unlike, say, RTF or PS).
Font ugliness and anti-aliasing are the responsibility of X, and do not show up in the Windows version.
(granted StarOffice does not use the X fonts properly, and when I add TrueType fonts to X, SO52 doesn't grab them)
Lightweight is something I doubt a complete office suite will ever be, just like wanting a complete browser like Mozilla or IE to be lightweight.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Man, you make me want to come over there and whack you with a "computers are deterministic" clue stick.
I work on the {Star|Open}Office msword import and export stuff. And in the latest versions we do reliably handle fastsaved documents. Get a shiny development interim milestone from openoffice.org and give it a whirl for importing word documents, it laughs in the face of fastsave documents. Anything that doesn't work is a bug and you can submit it as such through openoffice.org's bugzilla thingy, we can always do with troublesome documents.
I sometimes write stuff
FWIW, the next version after 5.2 will have an xml file format which is of course documented (pdf) at xml.openoffice.org.
So anyone can create an import filter to import the new formats. Equally the xml format doubles as an api so creating import filters for OpenOffice is trivial enough
C. (I work for them, so I'm completely biased, but don't speak for them, etc etc.)
I sometimes write stuff
I think it's neat.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
It could be with all the reports of security holes in MS Office and back doors etc that one part of the DoD has decided they'd like to run something where they can view and check all the source code themselves to make sure it's secure.
Also, I'm sure the DoD has a lot more than 25k PCs, so this must be just for a small part or division where security is more important than features or compatibility.
pithy comment
> Hell, defence contracting is the only reason Ada exist today.
How is Ada "outdated, dilapidated, and otherwise useless"? It's a object-orientated language with many of the features of C++ and Java. Ada programmers can write code based on the latest standard, which isn't true for C or C++ - heck, the GNU toolchain still doesn't use many features from the 10 year old C89 standard, for fear of incompatibility. It's in a number of non-DOD places where 100% reliability and formal provability is needed, so it's obviously not useless.
Just because you don't like the language, doesn't make it stupid or pointless to use. There are many odd languages out there that keep their place because they do what they do better than their competitors.
> I have a copy of the annotated draft standard at home [...]
Comparing apples to apples, the Ada95 standard is 800 pages, and IIRC the C++ standard is well over a thousand.
> Ada was the right answer in 1979 -- C hadn't yet achieved its current prominence,
Actually, C was taken out of the running by AT&T who pointed out that it was unsuitable for what the government needed.
> design of Ada is not enough like its closest ancestor Pascal to be really familiar to anybody
I don't understand why this is an issue. It's not far enough from any other imperative language to be difficult to learn. C has no well known close ancestors (unless you count B). Neither does Perl (a lot of ancestors, but you can't say that it's closer to any of them than Ada is to Pascal.)
> it became rather antiquated [...] simply because it didn't catch on outside the defense industry.
(Antiquated: so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period - Wordnet.) I don't see how it not catching on outside the defense industry could make it antiqutated.
> a niche product akin to Fortran
Which sticks around in part because it combines the utmost in efficency with easy and powerful array and numeric handling in a way that no other language does.
> As for calling it object-oriented, that's a stretch [...]
No. It has proper objects with dynamically dispatched methods, so it's object-orientated by definition. It's not object-dominated like Java or Smalltalk, but then neither is C++.
> OO was a bag on the side added to the system in the 1995 standard.
Sort of like OO was added to C to make C++? It's no less elegant IMO.
> Ada simply is no longer necessary
True. OTOH, you can say the same about most languages out there - only one of Perl, Python, Ruby and the other scripting languages are necessary, but they all still exist and have their little subnitches.
> it won't ever take the place that its supporters want for it.
That's undoubtedly true. The question is, how much of the reason is technical, and how much is socipolitical?
> Ada83 was not OO in the sense we normally associate with the term -- no inheritance, for example.
... end record; has been in the language since the first. What it did not have was dynamic dispatching.
Ada83 wasn't OO, but Ada95 is. In any case, Ada83 did have inheritance - type foo is new bar with record
Hehe, there are the DoD complaining that linux doesn't have CDE and Sun are looking to drop it in favour of Gnome, or so the rumours go...
--
Performance is one thing Star Office is desperately needing. I don't have a problem with it on my home PC, but then, it has 384MB of RAM and a 600MHz Athlon; on a Ultra 1 with a 167MHz UltraSPARC it wasn't particularly hot, even with 256MB of RAM. On anything slower it was painful...
--
Linux isn't "Orange Book" Secure. Not really even all that close. SGI was making promises to work on that, using code taken from their secure-compliant version of Irix they sell the DoD, but aside from XFS, they haven't really made all that many releases of things to show any progress in this direction. Thus, Linux is not even permitted to be on the vast majority of DoD networks (private or internet-based).
--
You know, you gotta get up real early if you want to get outta bed... (Groucho Marx)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
MS Office has the mind-share in so many people and so many companies of being the only thing to do. I would say 'the only reasonable alternative' except that implies the acknowledgement of other possibilities.
.ps and .pdf)
I for one will be quite glad to see non-MS utilities being used more. I don't have, and don't care to pay for or pirate any MS products. It quite annoys me when people email me a Word or Excel file assuming I can read it.
It happens when my ISP emails me a form in an MS format. It happens when the freshly hired new professor only distrubutes study material in Word. (The older professors know better and even if their slides were made in powerpoint they'll distribute in
Fight the Hegemony, don't buy in to MS Office.
Start Running Better Polls
Um, here on Planet Reality, Office 2000 has been rightly labelled as something to avoid. It's got lots of features, but it's just too buggy for professional use. I now have to go over my Word docs page by page in hardcopy to make sure that none of the cross-reference links have spontaneously failed on me (they do that now). Automatic numbering is broken. Version control is unusable (it causes bugs in automatic numbering of figures). Oh, and the Section Break bug from Word for Windows 2 is alive and well!
In my opinion, Word's usefulness peaked with Word 95, which had lots of useful features and was fairly stable, but has been going steadily downhill ever since. It makes my professional life miserable (I'm a tech writer).
Man o man I wish I could get a job at a Linux company so I could GET AWAY from Microsoft Office! Someday....
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
StarOffice is one of the poster children of the open source revolution and as such I'm very curious about its origins: Did StarOffice start as an open source project or was it a commercial project that went open source because it didn't have a chance against the existing products otherwise (sort of like how Corel priced their supposed competitor to office down to about nothing as it was included with many machines for free, only to be promply deleted)? How many contributors to StarOffice are there are there?
I saw one particular posting where the person mentioned that the dod could modify it for their custom needs right after mentioning that this was a great cost savings for the DOD (ignoring that said modifications generally end up taking years and millions of dollars of development. As if the DOD is going to let Jimmy the Haxer make his custom StarOffice install that they'll put on 25,000 DOD machines [espionage anyone?]). I'm curious if anyone out there is running a copy of StarOffice that you have modified in any manner? i.e. I'm not asking if it's great that you have the ability to, but rather I'm asking if you actually have?
whipping out MicroWarehouse - let's see:
Msft Office 2000 Premium: $679.95
StarOffice 5.2 Delux : $39.95
Geez, the only thing that 'pales' in the general's
face when he get's the bill for 25K X $679.95 so soldiers can make powerpoint presentations and type office memo's. And what not-being-able-to-print problem?
I'm sure you like to recommend Gucci designer fatigues for the troops as well, Nike boots, gold plated M16's and diamond studded medals.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
StarOffice does NOT reliably open MSOffice documents. If a doc has been fast-saved, the version you will get is non-deterministic. We discovered this the hard way at TiVo.
_Deirdre
And, just for the record, no you do not _have- to assign copyright to Sun. Read it further please.
r ig ht.html
They _ask_ that you do if you submit more than ten lines of code, but, since it is Licensed under the LGPL, they cannot require you to.
And, to clarify, the code sun released is under a dual-licnese, you choose which you want to use, not them.
http://www.openoffice.org/copyright/assign_copy
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I think that a headline proclaiming that the "Dept. of Defense Adopts StarOffice" is a little much. I'm working for the DoD, and we're using MS Office, as is most everyone else within the DoD. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is a major coup for Sun, but by no means have they taken the whole DoD.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...don't buy the hype...
What is interesting is what isn't said. To whit, 25,000 licenses bought. 10,000 are replacing existing Solaris Applix installations. Where are the other 15,000 licenses going? Quite likely, numerous installations on Windows or other boxes, replacing MS Office in those locations. Why? Because of price, performance, but most importantly, because of guaranteed compatability between Windows SO, GNU/Linux SO, and Solaris SO, and the ability for IT soldiers and/or civil servants to get at the source and fix a problem if a show stopper should arise.
This does open the possibility of replacing Windoze boxes with GNU/Linux or FreeBSD boxes down the road, and the DoD almost certainly took this into account when making their decision. Bottom line, they will no longer be held hostage by a single, powerful vendor. Standard military doctorine requires a decision like this be made, whenever such a possibility arises. The alternative is a single point of failure and an unacceptable exposure to coercion (possibly, but not necessarilly, by Microsoft, either). Star Office is Free Software, which means that the DoD also retains the freedom to dump Sun if and when they choose, without losing access to their data and documents because of a proprietary storage format.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A lot of us come out of DoD with our initial training and skillset in the IT field. The DoD is the umbrella organization for all the services (much as the MoD is for our cousins) :) So, not only will the DoD boxes per se be affected, but the deployed platforms within each service will be too. That means that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines will have thousands of officers and enlisted men and women exposed to doing "mission critical" work on something not made in Redmond. As DoD sets the IT policy for the various branches, they will follow suit as Star Office establishes that it is up to the tasks. Despite a solid Novell/ccMail capmus network with less down time and lower hardware and software investments, we were being told by DoD to migrate to NT and Exchange. Every year thousands of people will enter American society with experience in something other than Office. MS can be expected to either protest the awarding of the contract on legal grounds or question the validity of entrusting our national security to Open Source software. Expect to hear more in the next year on this subject.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
Geez... and we make fun of MS for manufacturing bloat!
At least windows (any version) doesn't require that much horse power in order to run it's GUI plus a web browser and word processor at a tolerable pace...
I dunno about you, but I'd rather spend my money on kick-ass hardware to run my bloated GNU/Linux apps on than working on a prehistoric PC because I ran out of cash for the next decade after buying Photoshop and Visual Studio (and WindowsXP and OfficeXP and SQL Server - you get the idea).
You do have a point there... Though i only wish that free alternatives for Photoshop (with CMYK, Pantone, Photoshop Plug-In support), Illustrator, QuarkXPress and Dreamweaver existed... But since i make my living with those, i have no qualms about spending what works out to being around $2500 a year on software in order to generate much more than that...
except that SO is available for linux?
if one was to read the last sentence, solaris is the platform they use now, and will use then...
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
That would be a disaster in a mission critical environment when Bill suddenly thinks he has not been payed...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
stories like this one?
So they don't all go down in flames when one kicks the bucket.
25,000 units of StarOffice != 25,000 Linux installs.
This is important, because it is a implementation of Linux inside of the DoD itself. Having recently built a system for one of the armed forces, and being forced to deploy it on NT, because Linux was "not yet accepted".... This is a huge wonderfull foot in the door.
Does it matter? Most of the 25k users will have an OS simply to run Star Office on. In time these will become Linux (or other Free system capable of running SO). Either way you know Redmond is upset.
Actually, its more like 25000 copies of StarOffice running on Windows. You did know that StarOffice runs on Windows right?
I think CmdrTaco forgot that there is another OS besides Linux out there...
Take care,
Brian
d vantages.shtml
Find out why AssortedInternet.com offers the BEST Linux Web Hosting Services Available:
http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/faq/our-a
You're confusing the DoD with the DoN. The US Navy recently setup a contract for all Navy and Marine Corp computing needs, with very few exceptions. The prime contract winner was EDS, and it is called the Navy Marine Corp Intranet (NMCI).
You can check this out at http://www.eds.com/nmci
This is primarily for Intel platform computers running MS Windows with MS Office. Primary PC hardware supplier is Dell.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Since DoD sites tend to use Powerpoint a lot, maybe StarOffice .ppt file reading will get
better ... it can handle the simple bullet
slides fine now, but the animated slides get
pretty messed up in my experience.
25,000. Sun only. Pardon my enthusiasm, but that's even better.
It might be free, but in that world, it sure isn't cheap.
What is Endnote? What is your experience that makes you conclude that Endnote is a killer app for universities (outside of your own)? From my experience, this would be an app specific to your university, but if the DoD adopted it, you bet your bloody tax dollars that every Fortune 500 company would quickly learn about it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
My biggest beef against Microsoft (and yes, I see this as a blow against Microsoft), is their forced upgrade cycle that is made a hurricane by the careful manipulation of the network effects. This reign them in a bit. A corporation that wants to work with the USDOD MUST use DOD forms and formats. Just ask ANYONE who has EVER dealt with DOD contract compliance how picky the inspectors can be and how easy it is to lose a contract over something silly like incompatible font sizes and you will get more than your ears can hold.
If Microsoft tries to force upgrades with incompatible document formats, they will either put in special features for the DOD, or the DOD will throw them out. Then all the corporations will be submitting docs in StarOffice format. And when the CIOs see the cost savings without the need to retrain or track liscences they'll skip the next forced upgrade. Look for M$ stock to start tanking.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
What are you talking about? The article I read stated they would not pay ANYTHING as their existing contracts with Sun covered install fees and that the software cost was $0.
Where did you read that price?
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If Windows is working out just fine for the non-high security systems
Why should it work any better here than in any other situation.
why would they switch to an OS that'll be unfamiliar to most of their users and cost a lot of time to install and retrain and offer few benefits
What is this nonsense about being "familiar with the OS" these are users we are talking about, not programmers, administrators and engineers.
As for the benefits these would be ease of installation and maintanance. As well as being able to make it impossible for anything to be saved on the local HDD, so if a workstation goes bang you can simply replace it with another. (Or use something like LTSP where setting up a machine is as simple as plugging it in and switching it on!)
the average secretary doesn't care about reading the kernel's source code
like they care about what the registry is, what registers the CPU has, what a stack frame is, defragmenting a hard disk, what clusters are. All the stuff they really shouldn't have to know, but end up needing to know
In the unix world users use the machine. Unlike in the Windows world where they are also expected to perform system administration tasks.
Being Engineers they felt the need to play with their Windows boxes and effectively destroy them on a regular basis.
:)
But anyone sat in front of a Windows box can do this. They don't need to be an engineer. As plenty of people can tell you
The higher-ups in the military are in love with Powerpoint - seriously in love with it. If you take it away from them, who knows what might happen - there might be a revolution, maybe even a coup :)
Unless StartOffice does things that Powerpoint can only dream about, I wouldn't hold my breath over MS' demise.
slashdrone:
U X,BeOS,MacOS,\*BSD\* } ; do echo "Linux is superior to $each" ; done
for each in {Windows,Solaris,SunOS,Multics,Unicos,HPUX,God,HP
:)
AnalogBoy | http://www.sunhowto.org/
I would be very surprised if many of the 25,000 don't get shuffled to Sun machines. They are extremely common in the DoD, and I think that Sun does make a StarOffice for Suns...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I am an FSA(Functional Systems Administrator) on an Air Force Base, and the Communications Squadron expressly forbids us to use Linux on the network.
"I wish I didn't care,
but I do."
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
...it's replacing applix. So this is one office product running on linux for another. It's not that big of a deal, IMHO.
--
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
The title would make it seem like they're replacing M$ Office with StarOffice, which is not the case. StarOffice is being used to replace Applix on UNIX workstations (there is not a single mention of Linux in the article), which I guess is interesting, but not very notable. It's also not open source, as the article says. I'm still looking forward to the release of StarOffice 6.0, regardless.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Hehe. I used to think the same way until not long ago. Then I got my AMD Thunderbird/1GHz + 512 MB DDR RAM, and presto! Everything in the Linux world suddenly became a whole lot faster. Even StarOffice.
I wouldn't know why WindowsXP runs slow, because I don't run Windows and I'd rather keep my mouth shut than express an uninformed opinion. I can however tell you that *GNU/Linux* runs slow because it's bloated (at least the distro I'm using is), and that's precisely the reason why I upgraded. What exactly is wrong with that?
Of course upgrading is the only option if you choose a bloated distro for your desktop machine, and that's perfectly OK with me, because I want to be able to do all sorts of fancy stuff with my desktop PC. On the other hand, the GNU/Linux flavors I run on my laptop and PDA are very slim and run pretty fast on little CPU/memory. I don't know about windows, but GNU/Linux is whatver you want it to be.
...in order to run it's GUI plus a web browser and word processor
...and a web server and a JRE and a software DVD player (thank you SigmaDesign for not releasing the specs on em8300) and a MySQL server and Gimp - at least that's what I'm running on a regular basis
I dunno about you, but I'd rather spend my money on kick-ass hardware to run my bloated GNU/Linux apps on than working on a prehistoric PC because I ran out of cash for the next decade after buying Photoshop and Visual Studio (and WindowsXP and OfficeXP and SQL Server - you get the idea).
When the port to Mac OS X is done, it should be able to take advantage of Aqua and its superior font handling capabilities. Anti-aliasing is a system service so I can't imagine that it won't use that as well. There, problem solved but only if you have an OS that cares about presentation and looks...
Despite the fact that StarOffice is OpenSource and free versions are available, the Defense Department will pay 12.9 billion dollars for the software.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I know this is a 'me too' post, but it suprised me (some, not much) that anyone would suppose just b/c a person/company/whatever starts running a program that is available under multiple platforms that it's assumed to be your platform, when you KNOW they have used a completely different platform for years.
/. - it's losing O2 to it's vital organs.
I mean, come on, don't TOTALLY disengage your brain.
Poor
WHONEEDSSLEEPWHENWEHAVECAFFINE?!
Good point, but I think it misses mine. The original post seemed to state that Taco believed there were 25k systems either being switched to Linux, or already running Linux. Either way it was wrong.
Might have just been a bad way of stating his point, but that's kind of what I was pointing out.
WHONEEDSSLEEPWHENWEHAVECAFFINE?!
LOL!!
WHONEEDSSLEEPWHENWEHAVECAFFINE?!
Since it was WFW 3.11 and then Windows 95, it was especially easy. You can make such systems stable, but it requires picking the hardware and software you use carefully, and working around the bugs in that software. At least with Windows NT the system is pretty stable unless you have buggy drivers. Everyone had to have MS Office to be compatible, so we were limited to Windows and Macs. They were strongly discouraging the use of Macs, so that left Windows.
Regardless, this is still pretty good news for StarOffice fans. I don't know much about DISA, but I did do computer support on an Air Force base once apon a time. There were departments which used a wide variety of computer systems with different OSs. They could definately benefit from having a productivity software suite that ran on many of those different systems. Specifically, there were a lot of Unix gurus who only knew enough about Windows to be dangerous. Being Engineers they felt the need to play with their Windows boxes and effectively destroy them on a regular basis. This created a tremendous amount of work for us "stupid tech support weenies", and never made anyone happy. I like the solution of giving them Star office for their Unix box, and letting them play with it. For the most part they were capable of supporting those systems on their own, or were at least too embarassed to call me and complain about the system being screwed up without thinking through what they may have done to screw it up. The ability to let them use the software they know best would have been nice in several cases. I can remember a couple times where I'd get someone's computer working, and I'd get an angry call the next day saying it was broken again and that I screwed it up. This would happen repeatibly with the same people. In a couple cases I was forced to prove that they were changing the configuration of the machine/applications while my manager and the engineer's manager watched. This was a very bad situation for everyone, and benefitted no one. The engineers were bright people whe were just out of their elements on a Windows machine, but otherwise were valuable employees. Once it was shown that the computer problems were because of things the user was "inadvertantly" doing the issue was dropped. If you're a contractor you don't point fingers and say it's all your fault. That will get you fired eventually even if you are right. The best solution would have been to give the engineer the tools he needed on the system he knew how to use, and had to use for a significant portion of his duties anyway.
Just as a note, if you can't deal with people blaming you for things that aren't your fault, and you have no control over, stay our of computer support. Having people blame you for things they screwed up is part of the job, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. If you can't deal with it, then it's time for a career change. I guess it never bothered me too much, because computer support was just a job I was doing while working on my masters degree.
Does this mean that they'll also remove their own "start" button? When I booted up my own copy, I got freaked out seeing a start button on my linux desktop.... uggh
- passion
One of the huge issues with alternative non-Windows OSes is "does it run Office?"
This is a small step in the major strength of Open Source products like StarOffice: cross platform dominance *because* of portability. It ran on the right platforms so it got chosen.
This bodes well for projects like KDE and Gnome that feel the need to become a common desktop for *ix. This may also do interesting things for MS if they want to keep control of the entire supply chain. Porting apps to *ix (eg: IE) is not new to MS but this may hasten it and it's further involvement with *ix and open source code.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Many usability professsionals have sharply criticized microsoft for the adaptive menus feature and Clippy found in Office 2000. Let me add that in Word 2000, there is no "one-stop shopping area" for all the user's configuration needs. Configuration choices are spread throughout the entire program, being found both in "Options" and "Customization" menu selections. One particularly stupid thing I remember was that many spelling options were found under "Options", but the option for the feature that corrects text as you type was found in "Configuration". Finally, those toolbar buttons in O2K are damn near useless. A toolbar button can serve two purposes: it can give a user a graphical representation of what a command does (if the icon is descriptive enough), and it provides a faster way to performing a command than navigating menus (if the toolbar button is large enough). If a toolbar button is very small, it is not fast to access, in accordance with Fitts' Law , which states that the time to access a target is the function of its distance and its size. If a toolbar button has a tiny and undescriptive icon, it really doesn't give a good graphical representation of the command. Microsoft programs (barring IE) generally have both these problems. If Microsoft had added labels to the toolbar buttons like they were supposed to do, the toolbar buttons would be far more descriptive and be faster to access. But that would make O2K more usable and microsoft is anti-usability, despite everything they say. One of the few things GNOME does really well is toolbar buttons: their toolbar icons are big and are labelled. There is a far, far greater chance that a user will use a GNOME toolbar button to execute a command than those tiny, useless things that clutter microsoft programs.
Not that I disagree with the rest of the post. StarOffice is very inadequate in many ways, just like O2K. If you have the choice of inferior or damn inferior, the obvious choice is the first one. But there is advantage in StarOffice: you have the source code to make it not suck. If you can read all those code comments in German. ;)
Note that the article mentions StarOffice 5.2, which does not use the Xprint extension (I assume this is what you are referring to?). As for the rationale of using Xprint... Admittedly not the best solution, but... Plus Xprint was in Solaris longer than it has been in XFree (>=4.x), I believe?
CmdrTaco indicated that they were 25k linux machines. The article clearly shows that there is a smattering of various OS's, and talks more about "open source" than about linux.
While I agree with your basic message, I am a bit surprised at the $6 billion figure as well as how this stacks up in relation to the rest of MS's revenue. Have you got any links that can confirm that?
Taco's just having a bad day. Of course, he's not the only one. I'm sure that out there somewhere are overzealous geek evangelists shouting from the rooftops about how the entire US government now uses kernel 2.5
That IBM ,that is so oriented now to open source products and projects, have no plans to release their Lotus Office Suite to the open source movement?.
I bet that if that occurs "Macrohard" would be in financial problems in the future.
Hi!
Uh...did anybody actually read the article? In particular, did anybody read the second paragraph? And, perhaps, think about exactly what it says? Here is it again, just to save you the hassle of linking back to ZDNet:
The phrase that everybody seems to have missed here is "...would replace Applix on more than 10,000 of DISA's Unix workstations at 600 client organizations worldwide...."
Well, gosh. So what does this mean? It is kind of a stretch to say that this is a win for Sun vs. Microsoft--Microsoft doesn't sell Office for Unix workstations. You could even view this as a win for Microsoft--now 10-25,000 DISA Unix workstations can read/write Office file formats. Which would seem to more permanently entrench Microsoft at the Dept. of Defense.
My point isn't to be a Microsoft apologist, or to denegrate Sun. My point is that it seems we're all busy cheering about this wonderful event--and practically nobody has read this critically to see what this article really amounts to. Here's my take on it:
When you see an article like this, you really, really have to view it critically. A single-source article (in this case, two obviously related sources) is almost always based on a press release--and lots of the "news" you read consists of PR plants. (Generally a lot more sophisticated than this one--but PR plants nonetheless.) Sun did not magnanimously offer to remove 10,000 copies of Applix in order to promote the GPL among the Defense Department. What Sun wanted to do (and there is significant bucks behind this) is to continue an existing Defense Department contract for software support. Sun isn't working on StarOffice for free--it keeps Sun in the position as the incumbent supplier of Unix software, and helps Sun sell Sun hardware too. And that's Sun's bottom line: they're a hardware vendor, and they're out to sell hardware.
A few years back I was fuming about the horrendous inefficiency of IBM's DB2 product running on the AS/400. A colleague reminded me of an important truth: IBM is in the hardware business--so they have no incentive at all to write a faster, more efficient database solution. Sun (or Compaq, or Intel, or Transmeta) is in the same position--at the end of the day, they want to sell you hardware. You can say the same thing about Microsoft: they're in the OS business. They'll prate about their wonderful vision for this, and their glorious plans for that--but at the end of the day they want to sell you tools that--what a surprise!--require their OS. If you saw a single-source article on ZDNet, quoting a Microsoft sales exec gloating about providing 10,000 "free" copies of MSN Instant Messaging to the DISA, you shouldn't think of this as a "win" for Microsoft, or a "loss" for Sun or the GPL. You should think instead, that what really happened was that Microsoft "gave" the DISA 10,000 pieces of software that require a Microsoft OS to be installed on the box.
At the end of the day, Sun is out to sell hardware, just as Microsoft is out to sell an OS, Intel is out to sell Pentium or Itanium chips, and Frito-Lay is out to sell potato chips. And every time they do a deal with big numbers--like this one--it gives them a chance to issue a press release that they can spin as a "success", a win for the little guy, a bonus for the beleaguered taxpayer, etc. In truth, its just another software upgrade, an extension of a contract, and nothing more.
When you see Dubya wearing a FreeBSD t-shirt, OTOH....
Interesting. I wonder why Sun wants to re-brand OpenOffice back to StarOffice. Just building the corporate brand?
Thanks for the info.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Um, no. StarOffice came first.
Sun bought the company that created StarOffice, and then decided that they didn't care about the revenue stream from StarOffice. As long as they didn't care about it, they went ahead and made StarOffice free. I think the management of Sun considered it a poke in the eye for Microsoft, and they probably enjoyed doing it.
Anyway, Sun agreed to open up the source. But there are parts of StarOffice that are under license from other people/companies, so they could only open the source on the parts they own. When they first released OpenOffice it didn't even build. These days it builds, but it isn't stable at all yet.
When OpenOffice is stable, and any missing features have been added back in, and they have split it up into separate apps (I hate the StarOffice desktop!), then I will look at OpenOffice.
And then they can try to re-brand OpenOffice if they want to, but I can't imagine why they would bother. They are giving away StarOffice now; why would they care about re-branding OpenOffice when OpenOffice works?
P.S. The most interesting part of the article, to me, was the part about StarOffice 6 coming out, split up into separate apps. I might be very interested in that. But right now I am mainly interested in AbiWord and Gnumeric.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Office IS overtly offensive. It never prints the same document the same way on two machines! Propriatory formats and fonts that constantly change and break things are a huge waste of manpower and money. These problems have been around since Win3.1 days and may never be resolved due to the greedy liscencing methods and business model MS encourages. Super greed => intentional waste. Waste is offensive.
I might not see stuff "standardized" to Win2K after all. Yes!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I could never understand what they were saying either. =/
Microsoft's newest monopoly is not the operating system. They know the operating system could go away very quickly with new mobile and wireless devices (palm, cell phones, etc), and most people who have used Windows in any serious way would love to see it go away. However, Microsoft will not die because of their office suite. There is so much momentum behind Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, that Microsoft continues to sell their operating system(s) (see recent news of Ipaq vs. Palm). If somebody could come out with an Office suite that makes MS start to lose some of that market, then MS might start porting their Office suite to other OS's, and we would all benefit. We could run a decent office suite on a decent operating system. That would be a joy!
Personal opinion.
You forgot to put it in context with recent news that DoD is preparing 6 billion contract with Microsoft. This is about as much as one year revenue of Microsoft and the government is traditionally M$'s best customer. If we are going to win ANYTHING in the government, chances are that it will spread inside very fast. They like the policy of one vendor and also like to save some money time from time. This might be one of the most important news for a long time...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
1) They're switching from Applix, not MS Office. 2) re: easier to deal with, has fewer bugs, is cheaper, and sucks less in general. Except for the cheaper part, you are describing StarOffice and Applix, not MS Office.
You're assuming the poster is out of college (high school?) and has a clue about the real world.
Not sure if I know what you mean here, but Sun is definitely maintaining the 5.2 code. There are some good sources of free support for SO, including a usenet newsgroup. Once you get past the 'convert MS Office files' stage, the life of most SO users is pretty good.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Hey, never said I could spell :)
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
They do make SO for Windows. I know DoD is progressive and all, but I'm sure that at least 1 or 2 of the 25K is for windows.
-c-
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
Marines taking an NT administration class? What, they have NT admin coloring books now? ;^)
I'm guessing that Open Office would work better in the long run, but because it's not offered by a big name company such as SUN it's not yet ready for DoD...
They don't specify the OS, merely that they're replacing Applix on UNIX machines.
These could be going on Solaris terminals, or even Windows machines.
Either way, though, it'll help StarOffice development.
Interesting this article should appear.
A friend and I checked out Star Office 5.2 today where I worked (on a linux box) and were <honestly surprised> pleased </honestly surprised> with how it handled things. Most impressive to us was how it saved documents in M$ Office 2K formats and was basically the same document on Office 2k. In fact I have went from different versions of M$ Office products and have experienced much worse in terms of layout corruption etc. (Ex: Word 6.0 to version >=6.0 spring to mind, Access 2.0 to 95)
I believe Sun should be given kudos for making it available to the community. Best of all they left out the notorious clippit and other marketing drivel. :)
If a good all around editor/spreadsheet without useless frills is what you need, look no further.
They aren't all linux boxes - some ar "UNIX" some are windows...
Also in the article is mention of StarOffice 6 - to be released later this year - that will be launched with each of its applications as seperate components in order to help performance.
BlackNova Traders
To write an RTF parser, all you have to do is RTFM; to write a .DOC parser, you have to do some serious reverse engineering. SO's .DOC support is better than nothing, but it still munges all but the most trivial documents. Word and SO both munge RTF too, but not as badly.
Try this experiment: create a document in MS word that uses has some fancy formatting (EG complex tables). Save it. Load it into SO. Save without changing anything. Load the SO'ed .DOC and see how badly it's munged.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
There really doesn't seem to be much impact to MS here. Sounds like a shift from one non-MS solution to another, and probably only on workstations that are already running a non-MS OS. Now, if they start using StarOffice on all their Windows machines, that would be news!
BTW, I've used StarOffice on a Windows platform - its not bad.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Well, given some of the networks these machines might be on, it's not like they can download it off the Internet. I also think there are security guidelines that ask for a little more assurance that the software's the authentic article. Meaning, you take delivery directly from the vendor rather than assuming your download is safe. Besides, 1.2 mil helps the vendor keep supplying the software you rely on.
"Italian taxpayers recently sent a petition to the government demanding it scale back spending on proprietary operating systems and desktop productivity suites when viable alternatives exist in the open source arena. The Chinese government is also very active in this space," Grabau said.
This whole story casts the MS attack on US govt support of GPL software in an interesting light. Leaving aside the fact that our US govt is throwing more of its weight behind open source (OSS if not FS),this shows the OSS/FS movements as international -which makes you start to think that MS' apparent aim in getting the US govt to disallow backing open source == "Dear Uncle Sam, won't you please bite shoot off your own foot? And don't forget to bite off your nose. Thank you."
Higher clock speeds do not necessarily equate to better computing power .. and for 64-bit computing - Itanium stability in linux (or elsewhere) may be a long time in coming.
the_crowbar
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines
Does the term "deadpan" mean anything to anybody here?
The fact is that the DoD is using an Open Source product. The Linux comment was jumping to conclusions and should not have been made, but it's a good move. (And it's free to them as well, to those who didn't read that part -- it's already covered under their current support contracts.)
Now if they'd just do it on some of their Windows hardware.
/Brian
This might mean that Star Office has a prayer of succeeding. You see, I spent a month or so trying to help out with Open Office, which is the slated to be the "next generation" (my words) of Star Office. The "stable" builds wouldn't even build, and after weeks of posting to the mailing lists and waiting for the people in charge to tell me, oh yeah, you need to do this, this, this
Perhaps the DoD and other Government Agencies will get involved with their own fork of Star Office that actually will change things so that MS-Office is no longer the obvious choice for desktop productivity solutions.
Note: I realize that a major part of the reason MS-Office is the obvious choice (right now) is that people have chosen it in the past and there is now an installed base providing almost devastating inertia. I don't have to like the reason *why* it's the obvious choice, I merely have to acknowledge that truism.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
the more people who use open source, the less people will be screwed by .NET and the MS ownership of all your data, as well as licence renewal BS.
This is a big deal, if you ask me. The first step is always the hardest.
* There are a lot of Sun workstations floating around various organizations. That is probably the main thing they want to use StarOffice for. I saw little in the way of Linux use in the DoD, but there was a decent amount of *BSD use in certain niches.
* There are at least a couple major organizations that have moved from alternatives to Windows NT for standard desktops. I would bet that the adoption of StarOffice is partly because there is more cross-OS compatibility with the hordes of NT boxes.
Darn right he'd been all over it, and rightly so. Personally I'd find the idea of naked DoD employees running around in Invisible Trenchcoats quite disturbing.
1. Global Command and Control System (GCCS) is the system used by the US military when it goes to war. It is a "system of sytems" that is used for the planning and execution of combat forces. GCCS is the single most important program in the DoD.
2. DISA has a very big say in the direction of IT in the DoD. It's in charge of planning IT needs on an Department-wide basis. Theoretically, DISA lays down the map, the Army, Air Force and Navy follow. Although this only impacts Sun systems, it will only be a matter of time before they apply the same thinking to the rest of the systems out there.
3. Given the importance of GCCS, should there be an incompatibility with it and another system, that system will have to be adapted to GCCS, and not the other way around. Applying this to the StarOffice vs MS Office debate, the easiest way to avoid Office proprietary issues interfering with GCCS funtionality will be to replace Office with Star Office
4. If the DoD saves $500 on software, that's $500 more it can spend on bullets/stealth aircraft/submarines. Most warfighters don't care who made it as long as it works. All it will take is one General to ask the obvious question.
Hmm, $25,000 toilet seats like they have before?
It sounds to me like it's 10-25,000 licenses that MS can't collect on. This is always a good thing.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
This article is surely generating the greatest number of redundant posts ("Staroffice runs on Windows Too!") in the history of /.
Please read the other posts before posting!
Thanks!
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Aside from the linux thing, this is still great. While not a US taxpayer, I think all of you that are should rejoice. The DoD just saved $15M!!! (~$600 * 25K).
I just downloaded SO for the first time yesterday and started playing it. I work for the Feds here in Canada. In our department, we've got somewhere between 25K-35K machines. We're also in a budget crunch, trying to save every dollar we can. Not too mention that we're also in the middle of a big audit on our MS-Office Licenses. After looking at SO for only a bit, I really think its a feasible alternative. I'm considering writing up a proposal and sending it off to both the heads of the IT department as well as the Treasury Board (who does funding for all Federal departments).
The only added cost would be training, but even sending a dozen or so of our folks to wherever to get an instructor led course would be far cheaper than spending the $$$ on licensing Office! As a taxpayer, I'd be extatic.
Anyone have any good links on writing up such a proposal - or even a draft they'd be willing to let me fit to our situation? Any help is appreciated.
The Defense Information Systems Agency isn't going to be ripping out Wintel machines and replacing them with Linux boxen. Yes, 25k penguins in the US DoD would be nice, but that's not happening here.
From the article:
Basically, they're ripping out an older, proprietary, closd-source system which hardly anyone ever uses anymore, and replacing it with StarOffice. The machines are already *NIXie-boxes (probably a flavor of SunOS/Solaris.) I wish we could claim this as a victory against Microsoft's monolithia, but this is a setup which never had MS in it's shop at all.
What is is a victory against is Microsoft's FUD about open source being 'cancerous' and the like. This could be construed as a slap in the face of Microsoft by the DoD, arguably the second-most number-crunching group of peopl ein the US Government. (The first being, of course, the Internal Revenue Service, the tax collectors. Come on, the US Government has SOME sense of priorities! ;)
I use StarOffice for myself, and I'm very pleased with it overall. It has a relatively small footprint, the features I need, and it's nice and flexible. I find it's a little buggy, but with a situation like this Sun will likely very much want to work out all the bugs.
---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I don't think this is as important for open source or SO as people claim in the past 50 posts. It sounds like the military got wind of Microsoft's hidden security "features" and decided they didn't like the idea of confidential documents phoning home on their own. Why should the military trust the security of a corporation?
StarOffice gives the DoD a starting point of some reasonably full-featured software, and they can nitpick through the source for all types of security issues.
Open Source sounds like a good way for the military to still use 'modern' software without having to compromise security.
Maybe this will be a boon for Sun and all goverment computers will run their own, modified open source OS and applications.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
How exactly will they install MSWord on UNIX Workstations? They went with StarOffice, and why not? It does what they want it to do and it's free. The only winner in this transaction is the DOD. Hell 50$ for 25000 installs, damn good.
so, if i submit an MLM proposal a ton of times, they'll post it because of sheer volume?
i can't see this as being anything but good for both SUN and the DoD! glad to see some department is finally getting some senses (although the deal is mostly replacing applix and not 25k copies of MS Office)
It is very likely that DoD PCs are tied to a very tight firewall against the outside world and that the online registration with M$ Office 2000 did not sit with them very well.
I used to work on classified contracts and any communication with the outside world was closely monitored and periodic security briefings were a regular occurance. We had our own secured servers for data and for email, with little or no connection to the outside world. You can bet that the DoD is VERY concerned with what information is flowing out that internet port under their noses.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Geez, the only thing that 'pales' in the general's face when he get's the bill for 25K X $679.95 so soldiers can make powerpoint presentations and type office memo's
What I think is really cool about this is that the DOD does put their office applications to quite a bit of work. Having spent a few years working for a DOD contractor I know first hand how much officers like long word documents, slide shows, spreadsheets, and well... anything else a piece of office software can provide. I think this is a step in the right direction as a way to support users on multiple platforms, as well as to save money.
Quite a move by the DOD. Now if the DOD requires compatible formats, this can virally implicate the rest of the Gov.
As others have priviously stated in this thread, the star office format will be blessed. Congrats to Star Office, but lets hope not only Star Office will be blessed. Lets hope it opens up for compatible formats everywhere. Which should be easier now. Then life as a user sure will cause a heck of lot less worries. And the more the star office team aids other office application teams agree/adapt to a common standard, also Star Office and us users will be helped.
We use Star Office at our company, and communicating with our partners may become easier. I hope for a lot more of such stories.
hehe, with DOD having the sleigtest prob with Microsoft incompatible formats they are very much welcome in aiding the DOJ in the antitrust case, having in-depth experience with how the closed formats aid the microsoft monopolly, and why its so difficult to change. TOCAFF - the open components and formats foundation
now just give me the news that microsoft and sun and dod has closed a deal where dod obtains for $$$$ a special license to a format compatibility module/component for their star office installation, and all my blessing is unjustified.
Insted of talking linux or open source just note the fact they decided to go with a product that suits the enviroment. Rather than changing the enviroment to suit the product.
M$Word may be a good product but who needs to change thousands of computers to write a memo.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
Sun is going to deliver a software package for free and it happens to be SO. Now Sun is going to make a lot of money delivering the hardware and the service. Maybe some training. People want to learn about the insides on how to successfully not crash a document over a certain size. It is just a business deal. A business deal in Suns favour. And it happens to be an open source product. But thats about it ...
Didn't Sun buy Star as a going for-profit concern?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
I was just replying to the suggestion that "Sun started making SO for suns and later on it got free and ported to other platforms." by pointing out that Sun didn't start making SO at all -- they bought a company that had been actively selling the product for some time.
What they did do, of course, was release it as freeware, and then open much of the source.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
It's not like we should expect the whole gubmnt to start using StarOffice in one stroke. ANY step towards using it is great. I know some people say that StarOffice does not fit their bill, but for the majority, it is all they need. I (an engineer) have been able to take my work stuff home and fire up StarOffice and get it to function practically perfectly. Once the people in the DOD start using and the product and working exclusively in StarOffice documents, they will find it to be perfectly acceptable. The DOD might also start to push the StarOffice document format as the "official" format for submitting proposals, ROMS, etc., which will start pushing StarOffice down to the defense contractor level too. This is GREAT!
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
Linux is mentioned in paragraph's 2, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14 an 16.
--
I used to think this too, when I was using a Pentium 133 with 32MB RAM.
Now I have a Pentium II 300 with 128MB RAM and everything seems fine (except divx movies). If you're using less than 128MB, you really should upgrade now while the prices are so low. Memory seems to make a lot more difference with Linux than processor speed.
Read the article, it says "25,000" units of star office on "10,000 UNIX stations" and implies that the othe 15k copies will be for Other OSs primarily windows. I would be willing to bet that the lion's share of DOD unix is Solaris since they have "extensive support contacts with Sun". You need to remember that Unix does not automatically equal Linux, S.
"Laws are like sausages, it is best not to see them being made" Otto Von Bismarck
I think the DOD is using this as a bargaining tool to get a bigger discount on their MS volume purchases. It easier to negotiate when you have a second source. Good thinking DOD! It may save the taxpayers $$$!
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
--brian
And as others have pointed out, this does not represent a shift away from Microsoft Windows or Office, just an upgrade to existing Unix boxes (of which the DoD has plenty).
Also, as others have pointed out, DISA is far from being the entire DoD. The component services often do not follow DISA's lead except on systems under DISA's control.
I'm scared of world leaders who think locally and act globally.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
The reasons for this are more than obvious: Didn't the Chinese adopt Linux as their OS of choice? Well, if you want to be able to read all the secret docs NSA grabs from the Chinese, you better run the same system ;-)
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers"
- Princess Laia to evil Commander Guy from first Star wars
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The article says the DoD is going to use StarOffice 5.2, and that Sun has plans to release Star Office 6.o later this year. I thought that StarOffice was going away, and that Open Office was the replacement. Anyone know about the future of StarOffice and Openoffice?
IMHO, openoffice.org is much faster and cleaner than Staroffice 5.2. Out are the integrated desktop and mail/news integration. The releases are becoming more and more similar to M$ office, except for the licensing and price!
The DoD also dumped alot of money into looking at implementing vmware at about the same time the announcement came out that the NSA was working on a security hardened/audited source Linux kernel. BigBrother Hat, running Linux kernel 2.4.5-nsa1 running StarOffice, and for the slow computer users, running vmware+windows and staroffice.
2. Do you really believe this?
3. The only way you can make this claim is via a one-dimensional view of the issue.
4. Just which US military has these Generals?
Conclusion: you work for DISA or SUN, or are into recreational trolling.
As a son of a son of a sailor, and having just rolled off of ten years of active duty, I can tell you that GCCS (pronounced 'Geeks') is a niche product (albeit a critical one) used by gnomes buried in an unspecified location. The bulk of the computers in the military (excluding real-time, ordnance handling stuff) are running 'Doze and Orifice97.
The military, God bless it, is a strange, warped reality, speaking a language into which 'business model' is un-translatable. An electromagnetic pulse of sufficient magnitude to smoke every existing Intel chip in the military inventory MIGHT open the door for your general to ask the obvious question, but don't get overconfident.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Once again Taco is adding bulshit to plain usefull news...
Who says the 25k boxes running staroffice will be under Linux ?
OK,
- B
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I would like to see how this works out. Frequently, those who use StarOffice receive embarrasing statements from those with whom they try to share Word-formatted files. The environment is bloated, and dealing with fonts is a nightmare (not to mention that they're ugly to begin with).
Hopefully, as StarOffice gains momentum, we will see a greater demand for a more lightweight solution that has better interoperability, better font handling, and anti-aliasing.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
About 2 1/2 years ago, I suggested to my local Congressperson that the Federal Gov't adopt StarOffice free software - the savings would be enormous. She said she would pass it along to the GSA, which oversees such purchasing. I hoped for a suggestion award, considering how much this would save the gov't. Haven't received any money yet. This also undercuts the sales of MonSter software so may have more effect than the anti-trust lawsuit. Office Suite software has too many bells and whistles on it anyway. So getting a basic application is just fine with this retired bureaucrat who still pays taxes.
From what I hear, the DoD has already been using StarOffice for a great many years.. under OS/2.
All your base are belong to XO
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"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
What makes you think there are 25K linux boxes in there? StarOffice runs on Solaris, and I know they have lots of Sun boxes floating around. And more than a few Windows machines.
sun != linux.
By the way, does anyone know if they are using StarOffice (the proprietary product from Sun available under the non-free SCSL) or OpenOffice.org (the free version that Sun made available under the GPL)? The ZDNet article seemed to indicate the former, but I'm not sure they could tell the difference anyway. The difference to the Free Software community would be significant, though.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
2)If some DOD offices are using Star Office, corporations dealing with those offices will feel it's a good idea to install Star Office also. That 25K seats in DOD will probably multiply to over 100K seats in large and small corporations. I'm hoping that some of those corps will discover that Star Office is about as good as MS Office, and adopt it on a wider scale. Whether or not that happens, that many gov't and corporate seats will ensure the Star Office developers will hear what is needed to make it _better_ than MS Office. I think the chances just improved that my employer will let me move to Linux/Star Office in a couple of years instead of buying the lastest MS upgrades -- and from what I've heard, MS's present product line is really a downgrade from Win98 + Office97 which I use now, so I expect the 2003 version will be even lamer...
Are you kidding? The DoD already has a measly budget, I'm sure they're not stupid enough to pay for free software. Besides, since it's open source, they can tweak it to track every government worker's productivity to make sure no one is skipping their daily regimen of coffee and smoke breaks. :) Besides, everyone knows the government is inefficient at best due to the sheer size of it all, so they don't need the best software out there like M$ Office Suite. This sounds like someone actually did some thinking high up in the political realm of the DoD for once.
I worked for USSTRATCOM ( http://www.stratcom.mil ) until November 2000. Their standard for office automation on their top-secret level Solaris-based intranet is Applix 4.x. We lovingly referred to it as Crapplix because that is what is was. A tremendous resource hog whose administration was a nightmare and reliabilty was just south of atrocious. But it was the DoD standard so we used it. I tried to get Star Office accepted but because it was not the standard, the head-shed would not even consider it.
Because Applix was so bad, the 1,000+ users of the network banded together and force the IT managers order the purchase 100 Intel-based workstations (with plans for up to 300 more) with NT4.0 for no other reason than to use MS Office. Your tax dollars at work, folks. USSTRATCOM has a contract with Sun for the servers and workstations that includes upgrades and now they shell out over $1K per Wintel box just so everyone can use an office suite that works.
The coming of Star Office on DoD *nix platforms is a blessing. It's going to save money, give the users an office suite that actually works and extend the life of *nix in the DoD realm. And maybe, it will show folks there is another office suite out there.
Nice, and complete. Although these I find StarOffice slow... In Linux world everything is slow: KDE 2, StarOffice, but I suppose this will improve
I'm glad to see the military is friendly to open source, I'm just not sure I want StarOffice to be the ambassador of the movement.
Miko O'Sullivan
Miko O'Sullivan
Reagan's not dead. Good grief, you call yourself a conservative and you don't even know that?
Miko O'Sullivan
Miko O'Sullivan
This is good because it may lead quickly to a situation where software is easier to deal with, has fewer bugs, is cheaper, and sucks less in general.
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
"It's the LICENSE, stupid."
Office 2K could be ten times better than its free equivalents. It still has that ass-disgusting, soul-sucking, self-respecting-intelligent-life-form-insulting LICENSE.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
So I suppose that they fixed the whole not-being-able-to-print problem?? I suppose this will get modded as a troll, and I'm no MS lover, but StarOffice(OpenOffice, whatever) pales in comparision to Office 2000. That and IE IMHO are the only decent pieces of software that Microsoft has ever produced. Not excellent, just decent, usable and not overtly offensive.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
> The DoD already has a measly budget
0 0_ bt045-00.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2000/b020720
> Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen today
> released details of President Clinton's Fiscal
> Year (FY) 2001 defense budget. The budget
> requests $291.1 billion in budget authority and
> $277.5 billion in outlays for the Department of
> Defense (DoD).
Measly...lousy even.
You forgot to mention that the upgrade from StarOffice 5.2 to 6.0 will be free (or a small fee for the deluxe version) and the upgrade from M$ Office 2000 to M$ Office XP will cost a significant amount of money.
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)
Of more interest is the statement:
... However, this was possible down the line, as the National Security Agency was engaged on this issue and was using Linux at the research and development level.
But the biggest obstacle was that it [Open Source technology] had not been security tested
The GPL needs a slight modification:
"You may view, copy or distribute the source code to NSALinux, provided you agree to be killed afterword."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
without saying too much, i've had the pleasure of associating with someone who works four miles away at the big p. they told me some basic non-classified information about their systems, their office and backend servers, but not a whole lot on their actual intelligence stuff. but from what i understand, linux and some bsd form the majority segments of their backbone, for the plain simple fact that they can SEE what it DOES. that's a huge advantage with the coming wave of cyberwarfare. the person i know also told me a bit about that, that there are committees working on the issue, and that opensource is also their utility of attack because of the extensibility of many distributions. star office is just the next logical step. as was said, not a hugely surprising one, but still an important and suggestive event. this, along with other news such as the german government or some segment of it at least passing bills to eliminate all closed-source code from their systems. now microsoft is arrogant (no this is not a flame, it is a simple fact) and wants to impose very restrictive controls on the usage of computers world-wide. any central authority that controls a sufficiently massive control of communications is in effect the dictator of the individual. hussein controls all of the media - and look where he's at - mocking the united states and getting away with it. so as far as the dod etc are concerned, opensource is the only way for them to guarantee that they keep control of their own machines. very intrusive technologies are being implemented in standard software.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
Yeah, they are going to useing Star Office, but what of Micro$oft's agile software, for business? (Please do not reply asking for an explication as to what the agile software is, because the commercial did not tell me, all I know is that it is agile, and for business, and if Taco was to order Anime, and Kung Fu films frequently the agility of the software would be put to use, when he orders a DVD of a singing purple dinosaur, the software is fucking agile I tell you.) Whoa, what a run-on sentance that was.
It's flexible, operating across many OS's. And no licensing fees means it was less expensive. It's refreshing to see our government striving to operate on a more cost-efficient basis.
phrases people put on things. What they are really saying is that we will put in anywhere from 1-25K copies of StarOffice. Laugh :)
See the subject.
As if the Liberal Media would tell us he's dead. The Liberals want Reagan alive, to pacify the God-fearing Americans who would otherwise be spurred to action by a desire to carry on his legacy. They feed us images of his stand-in, safely de-politicized by his alleged "Alzheimer's disease."
This switch to such an openly Communist product by the Department of Defense is just another example of the rapid decline of the United States. What's next, Open Source Stealth Bombers? Ronald Reagan must be turning in his grave.
Have we as a nation learned nothing from the Chinese infiltration of our national laboratories? Even the Liberal Media sees Red China's hand in this:
Consider that admission very closely. The space we are talking about is our nation's defense. Write to your representatives in Washington - before it's too late! The Liberals are banking on your apathy.
Seriously, this dovetails nicely with the "Star Wars" missle defence project. It's not like the Military can use an Email client called "Out"look. Don't Ax, Don't tell...
Carl G. Jung
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Carl G. Jung
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"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia