One Year Of OpenOffice

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*

Comments

Getting there

[CmdrTroll]

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

OpenOffice needs MacOS X programmers!

[sakusha]

Since StarOffice dropped official support for MacOS X, OpenOffice needs more MacOS X programmers. Microsoft is going to make a huge marketing push for Office X, but if we had working OpenOffice versions, their monopolistic push could be thwarted. But it's too late for now. We need help!

Re:OpenOffice needs MacOS X programmers!

[Phroggy]

Agreed. It looks like some of the work has been done, but large chunks have not been ported yet. More information here.

Just out of curiosity...

[Reality Master 101]

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?"

Re:Just out of curiosity...

[purplemonkeydan]

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.

Re:Congrats - What will it take?

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Tends towards MS Office - A good thing!

[aliebrah]

With each release of Star/OpenOffice we're seeing something that more and more resembles MS Windows/Office. Most people here keep on saying that its a bad thing. I think otherwise.

You'll Microsoft and Apple are slowly tending towards very similar UIs, case in point being Aqua and Luna - they're really similar now. This is because both companies are spending millions of R&D dollars to find out what the best user interface is for their users, and, surprise-surprise, this doesn't differ across platforms.

That's why I see this trend in SO/OO as a good thing. It's tending towards a much more usable state now. Though, it still has to play catch-up with MS Office. In Office, even if I don't know how to do something, I can easily find out by clicking as few buttons or even some guesswork based on looking at icons/tooltips. SO/OO still has quite a ways to go before it reaches this kinda ease-of-use.

I just hope that people understand why these office apps are all tending towards a similar UI. It's not Microsoft's UI, or anyone elses for that matter, its just the one that works, and that's what's important.

One year of OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, presumably they're talking about the wait-time for the damned thing to load. Has anyone actually gotten around to using it yet?

Mac support dropped? Why?

[A_Non_Moose]

What was the reason for dropping mac support, does anyone know?

I, for one was looking forward to Star/Open Office 6 for the mac. (drooling for it more like it).

It just seems a trifle silly, really, if you think about it.
Everyone that wants an alternative to Microsoft's Office products, but still need the compatability with it.
I'll concede that the Mac has a smaller market share, but, you gotta admit that it has a more "vocal minority" (kind of reminds me of /. in a way).

Add to the above thought, that, it is NO secret that Sun's CEO released S.O. free to tweak Microsoft's CEO's nose. (figurativly, of course).

So, If you see where I am coming from it does not make sense.

heck, I platform hop enough not only to keep up with the tech, but sometimes the politics of distros, tools and apps.

Look at the screenshots and tell me that this would not look good under aqua, and run under osX.1 really nice.

I suppose I understood a little in the 10.0.X days becuse a lot of developers and programmers were griping (rightfully so) about the APIs not being coherent and up to spec/snuff.

But now, seems silly.

Help me understand.

Moose.

Open Office has a marketing project.

[Futurepower(tm)]

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.


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