Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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 $679.95 so soldiers can make powerpoint presentations and type office memo's. And what not-being-able-to-print problem?
I'm sure you like to recommend Gucci designer fatigues for the troops as well, Nike boots, gold plated M16's and diamond studded medals.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
StarOffice does NOT reliably open MSOffice documents. If a doc has been fast-saved, the version you will get is non-deterministic. We discovered this the hard way at TiVo.
_Deirdre
I think that a headline proclaiming that the "Dept. of Defense Adopts StarOffice" is a little much. I'm working for the DoD, and we're using MS Office, as is most everyone else within the DoD. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is a major coup for Sun, but by no means have they taken the whole DoD.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...don't buy the hype...
stories like this one?
My biggest beef against Microsoft (and yes, I see this as a blow against Microsoft), is their forced upgrade cycle that is made a hurricane by the careful manipulation of the network effects. This reign them in a bit. A corporation that wants to work with the USDOD MUST use DOD forms and formats. Just ask ANYONE who has EVER dealt with DOD contract compliance how picky the inspectors can be and how easy it is to lose a contract over something silly like incompatible font sizes and you will get more than your ears can hold.
If Microsoft tries to force upgrades with incompatible document formats, they will either put in special features for the DOD, or the DOD will throw them out. Then all the corporations will be submitting docs in StarOffice format. And when the CIOs see the cost savings without the need to retrain or track liscences they'll skip the next forced upgrade. Look for M$ stock to start tanking.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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?
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.
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....
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
Oh, fast save. Yah, non-deterministic is about right.
Fast save works by just saving a snapshot of the data structures inside Word. Pieces of text might be in any sort of order, and Word needs to walk the "piece table" to sort it all out. The normal save takes the extra moment to sort everything out and write it in sensible order.
This feature may have saved enough time to be worth something back when people were running Word on a 16 MHz 386, but even then I doubt it. (When you scroll around in the document, Word has to walk the piece table to show you the text, on the fly... so it's definitely fast enough for a save operation!) Back when I ran Word on a 486 I didn't notice any difference in speed between normal save and fast save. Alas, the default is for fast save, and people don't realize this.
At a place I used to work, they were indexing their documents, and the indexer did a pretty good job, but it couldn't correctly grok fast-saved documents. You could search for a string and sometimes not find it, depending on where the pieces were broken up! Turning off Fast Save made things work correctly.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
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
* 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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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
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.
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.