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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.
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.
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?
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....
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
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.