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One Year Of OpenOffice

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-a-burpy-baby-you-have dept.

no parity writes "Last year on October 13, much of the source to Sun's StarOffice was released as the OpenOffice project. They have set up a birthday page to celebrate what they have achieved in that one year - yes, it prints, spellchecks and has online help. Keep up the good work, guys!" Yep - and my installation still spits up, too. *grin*

17 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Getting there by CmdrTroll · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My roommate was an intern at Sun last summer, and he was assisting the OpenOffice team with resolving compatibility issues with MS Orifice 2000. He said that was the biggest stumbling block for the project, aside from memory management and speed issues. He also said that the DoJ was privately talking to a few of his co-workers and they were interested in widening the probe into monopolistic file format practices. I doubt that the current administration will give it a green light, but if they do, that would help knock down the last barriers to seeing OpenOffice on every Windows desktop in the near future.

    Wishful thinking...

    -CT

    1. Re:Getting there by All+Dead+Homiez · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I believe the story on the widened probe is here or here.

  2. Re:5.2 sucks, let's hope 6 doesn't by davecb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm using 6 beta, and it's better than
    5.x and less buggy: the only things I
    can break are broken in 5.2 as well.

    --
    davecb@spamcop.net
  3. CUPS by redcliffe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It doesn't print with CUPS. I've tried for ages but it can't see my printer even though all my KDE apps do. Anyone know if there are any moves in this direction?

    David

  4. Congrats - What will it take? by pgrote · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Congrats to all involved!

    What will it take for the stranglehold on Microsoft Office to be overcome?

    Many people have suggested that the "new" offices have to have complete file compatibility with Office, but I don't think that's it.

    Others have said that it is necessary for businesses to adopt the suites.

    What do other think?

    I am really interested in this because for three years or so there were four office products you could choose from: Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works.

    Then boom ... it was over. Microsoft ruled.

    1. Re:Congrats - What will it take? by gimmie_prozac · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What will it take for the stranglehold on Microsoft Office to be overcome? One big stumbling block is finding employees who know how to use the new software. I work for an employment service, and people with MS Office skills are thinner on the ground than you would think. So given the high costs of finding, hiring, and training workers, if it's hard enough for an employer to find new employees who know MS Office, they will be unlikely to want to switch to a different product, where skilled individuals are even rarer. I would think that breaking MSFT's stranglehold would require, along with file compatibility, making the UI of competing office suites as similar to MS Office as possible, so that it will be easy for people who only know MS Office to switch over. I don't know how feasible this is, especially re: "plagarism" concerns.

    2. Re:Congrats - What will it take? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, _most_ businesses wouldn't bother unless it _can_ read and write with MS Office apps. I think that's what the DOJ should really do - force MS to open their file specs.

      I think it'd be great for Lotus to open the source to SmartSuite - since IBM owns them, one wonders what the chances are. Then again, they've not opened the code to the OS/2 WPS. *shrug* I've heard from people inside IBM that there's too much licensed code inside those products for them to be able to do that - they simply don't outright own the code those products are made from. That's a shame.

    3. Re:Congrats - What will it take? by foonf · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I think it'd be great for Lotus to open the source to SmartSuite


      This would be kind of silly and wouldn't benefit the Linux community at all. SmartSuite is all Win32, and even the OS/2 port was partly done using a windows-compatibility library (this forms the basis for Project Odin, actually). Mind you, I used Ami Pro in the early 90s, and if quality really mattered, I believe strongly that it would be the dominant word processor right now. But this wouldn't accomplish anything. It would be far better for IBM to support the existing *nix office software efforts.
      --

      "(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
    4. Re:Congrats - What will it take? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Lotus was put into maintenance mode last year.

  5. A real good start! by albat0r · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've look at the features list, and tried it too, and I must say that it's a really good start! And I hope that it will continue like it.

    But, even if I know that a lot of you doesn't like Microsoft (and I understand it!), an office suite for Linux can only be complete if it can read/write in .doc format. I'm not saying that this format is better than anything else (an empty .doc file is far from 0k in size, and I've never understand what it can have in it to take that much space on my hard drive...!), but in my case, I have contacts with many people that use Microsoft Office, and I need to share files with them, and read there works and show them mine. Without the support for .doc, this thing become more hard to do; some people don't want to use other things than .doc format. So by now, I use Star Office and KOffice, but I've have trouble with both of them with .doc sometimes. So, if Open Office support this format one day, and handle them good, I'll be very happy to use it!

    So, everybody that work on Open Office, continue your good work!

  6. Just out of curiosity... by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does Sun use StarOffice exclusively within Sun? Maybe I just haven't seen all the press releases of them touting how much money they save and the huge success it has been, but isn't a little funny that they don't make a huge deal of Sun being "100% pure StarOffice -- Microsoft free?"

    --
    Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    1. Re:Just out of curiosity... by purplemonkeydan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They are supposed to use StarOffice and Solaris exclusively, but they don't.

      Some Sun sales guys came to my former company and gave us the salespitch for the Spaghetti .. sorry .. Serengeti line of servers.

      They were using Office 2000 on Windows 2000 on a Toshiba laptop. The sales guys mentioned that they were supposed to be using StarOffice, but they said it sucked.

      I guess being in Australia they weren't under as much scrutiny as the US operation, and could get away with stuff like that.

  7. Re:A good start by funky+womble · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Works fine on Windows on my laptop (pentium MMX, 96mb). It normally pre-loads from the startup group (like MSOffice does) - once this is done the time to open a new document is about the same in each. .doc and .xls support seems good, and can be set as default (makes it easier to work with MSOffice users on a network).

  8. You should be ashamed... by Patoski · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if everyone would be yucking it up and joking so much if this letter was sent to the FSF? I dislike MS as much as the next geek but making wise cracks about this is pretty low and tasteless. I wonder if you would mind telling that joke in front of the affected people's familes? If the thought of that makes you uncomfortable then you know you shouldn't say it in the first place. If it doesn't bother you then any words would be air better used elsewhere than talking to you...

    -Pato

    --
    G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
  9. ApplixWare is a good alternative, too by PoiBoy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Although it's not free, I use ApplixWare 5.0 as my main office suite. My experience with StarOffice is that it tries to be too much like M$ Office. I just want a simple, intuitive app. to do word processing, spreadsheeting, drawing, etc. Unfortunately I still haven't seen anything with perfect M$ Office compatibility, so once in a while I've still got to use a Windoze machine.

    --
    Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
  10. Open Office has a marketing project. by Futurepower(tm) · · Score: 4, Interesting


    Wow! Open Office has a Marketing project too!

    Even though open source projects don't try to make money, there is still a marketing function. Marketing is creating communication between the project and prospective users. Most projects ignore this requirement; some die as a result of not communicating.


    Secrecy corrupts democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?

    --
    Bush's education improvements were
  11. Re:Mac support dropped? Why? by sabi · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Because Sun cares zip for the Mac. When Sun did anything decent for the Mac, such as their Tcl implementation, their horrendous JDK 1.0 implementation, or their abortive efforts at re-porting StarOffice, it was either because it was historical, or because it was a checklist-item soon to ba abandoned.

    Considering how they're working to oppose Microsoft in platform (Java) and office suite (StarOffice/OpenOffice) dominance, it's just crazy that they don't support the only other currently viable desktop platform. They can't expect everyone to use Solaris, after having put next to no work into improving its usability (CDE? GNOME? uh, no, certainly not in their current state.).

    Sun just fired Lee Ann Rucker, who worked for Sun at Apple on the OS X Java implementation, in particular the Aqua Look & Feel for Swing, and was doing an incredible job. Check out recent messages on Apple's java-dev mailing list for more. I'm still stunned - I hope Apple is able to hire Lee Ann directly.