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OpenOffice Coder On StarOffice 6.0's Beta Release
"Release 6 also gets rid of the old Star Office desktop of version 5 which was generally disliked for its annoying tendency to cover up all of the other windows you were working with and make it difficult to interact with your X Window Manager.
The application suite has programable APIs for each of the applications, exposed through a custom object request broker named UNO. In an impressive demonstration, Max showed live update of a spreadsheet with real-time stock data, all under the control of a small Java application. Changed data were reflected throughout the spreadsheet table with each update as the sheet recalculated each cell based on the new input.
Max freely admits that there are still weaknesses in the code. He pointed to the ten year lifespan of the mostly C++ code base, and hopes to see the code improved with the use of more modern C++ features. In browsing through the source tree I don't find that the code is in nearly as bad shape as Max portrayed it. Admittedly I've only seen a tiny fraction of the code (at 3.7 million lines, OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the world), but my random sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed. Even with these measures in place however, the full system takes upwards of 15 hours and 1.5GB of disk to build on currently available hardware.
System load time for the office suite has been significantly reduced (about 20s on Max's 500MHz laptop with 128MB memory) by removing several libraries from the link process and instead loading them on demand. Over the next year or more Max hopes to see more modularization of the code base with the eventual goal of seperating the monolithic program into seperate applications linked together through an object request broker.
Q&A went on until we got kicked out of our room, so there is a lot more that is new about OpenOffice than I've described here. If you are interested you can pick up a copy at OpenOffice.org, or at one of its mirrors around the world."
All right! Look out M$ Office!
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Not to criticize the OpenOffice project, which is only trying to provide a reasonably-priced replacement for MS Office, but what the hell is so compicated about text documents and spreadsheets that it takes such a whomping code base to handle it?
It strikes me as sick that so much human effort is going into a piece of software that will be used primarily to create email attachments that can't be read by non-Office users, all of which will be essentially plain text but inflated in size by several times by the inefficient document format.
OK, I'm done ranting now. There's nothing to see here. More along.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
No it's not...
Is there a freedom software distro for Microsoft Windows. Such a thing would be a great boon. They should be everywhere like AOL cd's.There's not, because there's no money in open source...AOL can do it because they make money...lot's of it.
OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, Apache(not enabled by default), Perl And so on... I mean really how many people would buy office XP if they had a shiny "new" cd sitting around with a free compatible equivilent....How dare you say that OpenOffice is the equivilent to MSOffice? It's simply not so! Mozilla the equivilent of IE? Ha!! Gimp to Photoshop!? Don't make me smack you! Apache/Perl to IIS/ASP? Well, you may have something there, but not by much and only in the area of security/speed. (There's a lot to be said for ease of use in the corporate world!).
And no most people don't write vbs scripts in word they have enough trouble with fonts and margins.But what if you did want to? (Obviously *somebody* does otherwise they wouldn't have put it there ;)
Do you really think that your plan would work? Why haven't you brought this to IBM? They're big Open Source proponents...ya think they might have thought of that and said to themselves "Nah, we're just gonna sit back and let M$ make all the money!"?? No, IBM and other OpenSource backers (Sun, Apple) *know* that M$ products are currently far more superior than anything available for *nix. Why do you think Apple makes a big deal about MSOffice for the Mac being released?