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OpenOffice 641d Released, Next Stop: 1.0
Damek writes "In the spirit of the proliferating news about Office alternatives and 1.0 versions this week, OpenOffice.org has released a new version of OpenOffice, 641d, the last planned release before 1.0. They're calling for help in pinning down and eradicating final bugs before they hit the big milestone: "...we would like you to download it, test it, and finally vote on the feature set.""
seems like apple could throw some of its AppleWorks developers at this and get it done in 6 months or so.
This would be a universal value to all of its customers, That being said i understand now that SUN is charging for the next version StarOffice why a buisness wouldnt jump headlong into helping another buisness out.
Unless they are planning a linux only type release then openoffice is nowhere near version 1, I'm all for software for linux but really it isn't hard to make the code portable enough that it will compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OsX etc. Right now it compiles nicely in NetBSD ports n thats it, the others are all broken. If I was enough of a C hacker I would try and do my bit but my gripe is the portability issue should have been thought of from the start, if it had been then we could be close to a true open source office solution that everyone (nearly) can use.
-mutter- something something something...
It doesn't matter how well it works. The main thing that matters to most people in an MS Office replacement is how well it reads and writes MS Office files. And that's, unfortunately, a moving target.
Miguel de Icaza [ximian.com] too has said that time is better spent on improving OpenOffice rather than working on say Gnumeric (which he wrote part of too).
Lots of people seem to think that redundant programming such as this is bad. The truth is that competition is good as long as the products are compatible. So as long a Gnumeric and OpenOffice can open a common file format the fact that we have development time *wasted* on two products doesn't matter both communities compete against each other. This leads to better products because each group tries to do something new to make it better. The problem is when the groups start to hate each other and don't work together when it makes sense to work together.
Gnome and KDE are a great example of this as they are both use the same *basic* idea but have different implementations. Gnome adds something then KDE adds it and the other way vice versa. Most users don't care as long as they interact in the common areas. That is as long as you can copy and paste from X windows to Gnome to KDE to Java most people don't care what you implement it in.
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive!
yep, you're paranoid!
the source code for both these products you mention are OPEN SOURCE. if you can show some of these time loops in the free version, we'd love to see it. i'm sure the developers of the software would love to see it as well.
If it ain't broke then don't fix it. If it runs on 6.2 then it should run on newer versions.
I still fail to understand why people upgrade office machines as often as they do. My IT person at work tells me she has to upgrade the hardware in order to run the latest software and that often requires an OS upgrade.
Why? Because her users have to be "compatible" with other users in the world. She cited several examples of people receiving files from vendors that were in OfficeXP so we had to have OfficeXP to be compatable.
That was the reason that, when she discovered my 486 box with RedHat 6.2 on it while I was on vacation, she replaced it with a brand new 1.2 GHz machine running Microsoft products of the XP line. She claims this to be an upgrade and is shocked at my lack of thankfulness.
She is, and I'm sure you will be, shocked that I am not happy about this. But damnit my computer was doing just what I wanted it to do, and quite reliably. It now takes longer to write a simple memo, to create a simple spreadsheet, even to check my email or find information on the WWW. But I've got a "compatable" configuration.
Not everyone needs or wants the latest and greatest. Because of this I'm glad that they are testing on a version of Linux that has been out there a while, is fairly common, and has proven itself. The results of those tests should indicate that their product will work fine on newer OS. If not, well that's an OS issue.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Simple - it's largely because they're cross platform. This means that they cannot take for granted ANY system services at all. With Mozilla for instance they reimplemented COM (into XPCOM) because only Windows has such a component model. They created XUL (as far as I'm concerned the coolness value makes that worth the effort alone) because at the time there were no robust enough XP GUI toolkits under the right type of license. Qt would have been ideal, but I think there were problems with the legalese.
So they used their kick-ass rendering engine to do the GUIs. But this makes it larger, as all the widget logic has to be contained within the software. I'm amazed Moz is as small as it is.
OpenOffice is the same - they created their own component model, not sure about the widget set, but because they could assume nothing they had to make a lot of stuff pure Windows/Linux/Mac developers can take for granted.
If you're willing to wait for future versions, I get the feeling KOffice will be one serious office suite in the next few years, and optimized for KDE, which (as of version three) is already immensely fast. OO is my suite of choice right now, but I'm looking forward to the day when I have an office suite built for my OS and GUI of choice.
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