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OpenOffice 641d Released, Next Stop: 1.0

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the moving-towards-office-killer dept.

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.""

5 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. How can they be close to version 1 ? by msergeant · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...
  2. Feature set? by RedWizzard · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "...we would like you to download it, test it, and finally vote on the feature set.""
    A bit late to be voting on the feature set, don't you think?
  3. sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works by mmusn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Where is the slowness coming from? by mark_lybarger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Where is the slowness coming from? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Insightful
    One thing I have wondered using OpenOffice (and als o Mozilla) is: How do they manage to make them so slow?!

    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.