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New OpenOffice.org-Based Office Suite
Voidhobo writes: "SOT, a Linux-distributor from the home-country of Linux, is offering SOT Office, a free productivity suite partly based on OpenOffice, for Linux and Windows. According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice." OpenOffice is great, so I hope their claims have merit.
Does Open Office have that talking paperclip dude?? If not then it's just a cheap immitation.
its very exciting.
you can get them here.
(A) an OpenOffice based Office project
or(B) Sex with a mare
The main reason behind this belief is simply the fact that the reason most people don't adopt secondary office suites is because of the different standards. People use MS Office because they know sending a co-worker a PowerPoint presentation or an Excel spreadsheet will not cause any compatibility issues, because it is a fair assumption that this person also has MS Office. What the Linux community really needs is a single office suite standard, eliminating the compatibility issues. Then we can work on competition.
you also need a cute animated ant on the paperclip dude shoulder to help you with the paperclip dude.
I wonder how long, if ever it will be before this gets ported to OSX. That's a platform that seems to be getting a lot of growth as a unix, with the powerbook routinely being rated as one of the best unix portables available. This is a platform that, while it has office, really needs a free suite of office programs for those of us who don't want to use Microsoft's products but need the compatability, and this program seems like it would fit the bill exactly.
The screenshots show an application that's identical to OpenOffice, save only the name, and the colours used in the instaler. Makes you wonder, what's the point?!
/. story; it's just a niche-market re-branding of a free software product. Stick to OpenOffice, it already rocks.
Why does this even merit a
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
After: Most people don't adopt secondary office suites because of the different standards.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
I don't think offering a new office suite is really a good idea. There should only be one office suite that everyone uses. Who cares if you can make them all compatible.
People don't like choices. People don't like spending the time choosing between products and comparing them to see which one is the best. What they do want is one choice. That is why Microsoft is doing so well. Windows has everything they need and they don't need to compare anything to get the product.
Linux on the otherhand is just a mass of choices. You want security, you take this distro. You want compatability, you take this distro. That is why Linux will never make it on the desktop. People are just overwhelmed at the amount of choices.
If you really want to dethrone Microsoft Office, promote StarOffice/OpenOffice as the ONE choice in opensource/free office suites.
Actually, I think they're going to code in Binky the Cheerful Winking papeclip from Ubersoft: http://www.ubersoft.net/features/askbinky/index.ht ml
(Aye Aye skipper... I notice you're opening a word document, would you like me to help you forward all your spam to bill G?
I downloaded their new (renamed) distro SOT Linux along with SOT Office (Linux and Windows) Saturday night. SOT Linux installed very nicely as did both versions of SOT Office. So far I have nothing to complain about. Nice distro and VERY nice installer.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
Alternatively, we could all speak Russian and be communists. That would be fine as well
So I'm a pervert. Welcome to the Internet.
So what additional functionality does SOT Office offer over Open Office?
I had a quick look at their web site and I couldn't find anything about this.
totally! du hast, motherfucka
Finally, a voice of reason in this insane world.
"SOT, a Linux-distributor from the home-country of Linux"
:)
Linux is now a country? It wasn't enough that it was ported to MIPS, Dreamcast, etc? They had to get a government to run it???
Oh you mean Finland...my bad
That is, a rebranding, for a niche market (though I am at a loss to say exactly what that niche would be). I am in agreement with you -- perhaps they're trying for venture capital? Seems needless to me too. It would make sense (maybe) if they re-badged an existing proprietary product, or if the size of the original proved impossible to download cleanly through a fast connection. Perhaps the Bezier curves capability mentioned by another poster is much improved over OOffice. I don't know as I've not used that part too much at all. In that case, however, it would make much more sense to just simply release the filters/modules/whatever for this part as an upstream add-on to OOffice and let everyone know about it. Oh well. I won't switch, at any rate.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice
.wpd format...
Is it compatible with WordPerfect? Nearly all of the word processor files I have are in
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Where is the port to the coolest unix variant on the market ?
If you really look at what is happening is that that SOT distribution has chosen OpenOffice as the office suit. So that's the only (default) choice for that distro's users. It's obviously openoffice so it's oo compatible as well as msoffice compatible.
If anyone else wants to custom install this SOT on other distro, it may be someone that is not the average user. Don't be folled by the apparent number of competitors. You only have. The KDE suit, the Gnome suit, and openoffice. Everything else is next to unusuable.
If sun bundles gnome with sun computers, you will get openoffice. If it's not a corporate targeted distro you may have gnumeric, abiword. If the distro focuses on KDE, kword and family.
I like having 3 alternatives. In the opensource arena you can't can't afford to put everything into one basquet. If you do that you risk losing everithing if a project fades away. And that has already happened.
Anyway i agree that 1 perfect aplication is better than 3 half working ones!
unfinished: (adj.)
Well,
As far as I know, their primary target is the Finnish audience. They have added features like Finnish spelling and the package has also Finnish menus etc.
This actually makes sense, many Finnish government agencis are currently considering switching to linux and the Finnish office software is something which is really requited. The Finnish Custon uses already Open Office btw.
Ville
You can get Vigor, a vi clone with a talking (and evil) paper-clip assistant!
"BOHFs (Bunches of Helpful Fixes) are occasional updates to SOT Office. To install a BOHF you will need an installation key, which can be obtained by signing up for the SOT Office Annual Maintenance program. We strongly recommend you update SOT Office to the latest available version before using it for the first time."
cost for the SOT Office Annual Maintenance program: 80.74 USD including TAX 22%
The description doesn't seem very different from OpenOffice(.org!!!11). It makes me think if the "partly based on OpenOffice.org" actually means everything but the name and graphics...
Not that there's anything wrong in repackaging GPL'ed software, as long as you give the credit where credit is due, and the source of course. Which they seem to do.
Huh? If anything, big corporations and the Nazis had a very cozy relationship.
Will this thing make my machine hang during installation like OpenOffice does?
(OpenOffice hangs my machine when attempting to run it with DRI enabled, apparently a known bug or something).
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
It's just Open Office rebranded I guess.
I can hardly believe they have invested
any serious money in it having seen the
professionalism of their previous products.
I wonder how can anybody have the guts to
boast that way.
i'm using debian, and the fonts are terrible! (the fonts used by the program for things such as menus).
Anyone know how to fix the problem?
Do other distros have this problem?
I just saw the screenshots for SOT, and the fonts looked as they should.
So Sun os 'es thier soffice code and now these butt monkeys steal it, brand it as a commercial product and SELL it (or services related to it) as a COMPETITOR to star office. I know that this is perfectly allowed in the oss world, but it just seems kind of sleezy to me. -- Unless they are contributing something worthwhile to the development of open office, of course.
At first glance it seems that they are not.
To put it another way: they hate the GPL, they hate Opensource and they hate the way people have taken off their Office Suite and are now doing something about it. Check their press releases for this one, cause I don't have the URL on me.
Move faster
SOT is a little odd, but the one that got me was Bunch of Helpful Fixes (BOHF). When I saw BOHF I immediately thought "Bastard Operator from Hell".
Maybe the first BOHF will add Back Orifice functionality to SOT Office, so you can take over all the MS boxes on your net. And an exuses database.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Have you used the OS X port of OO?
...didn't think so.
Or in question form...."what port of OO for OS X?"
I disagree. We have two standards for storing office-like information: the current, MS-office doc, xls and ppt, and more importantly, the upcoming, most likely an XML-variant. As long as all these office-suites comply to both the current and the upcoming standard, the only reason not to want so much different suites is fragmentation of the sparse resource of open sources programmers, because to make a good open source office suite, you need a whole lot of voluntary programming hours.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Sex with anything is better than ummm.... sex with open office.
I tried to help...they've prioritized the OS X version so far down, it's a fight just to get them to respond to e-mails. When it looked like anything worth compiling was 24 months out, I figured my time was best spent elsewhere.
What kind of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning around the earth
and there's not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.
People have asked what's the difference between SOT Office and Open Office. Seems to me that the main difference is that there is a FINNISH version ov SOT Office that they sell for 99 EUR. So the english vesion is free, but you'll have to pay for finnish spell-check helps etc.
The link leads to a legit website, and this article is about OpenOffice.
Please read the posts before you moderate.
I hope this shows the corporate world how profitable open source can be.
By releasing the source code to open office Sun stands to make MILLIONS on this.
Once again the open source model triumphs in the marketplace.
It may be illegal in America, but in Europe this law would not apply. In most of the world, its not even likely to apply, and if it did, the police are more worried about guns and drugs than MS file formats.You may wish to emigrate.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I thought this too - at first until I realized that it's actually a great thing that this can even be done. Think about it -- all this can possibly do is spur a common file format while encouraging business to utilize the same code/core base. The only thing that can happen is for more people to come in contact with OpenOffice (albeit by a different name). And a broader exposure to OO is bad how? Besides, one can't even begin imagining having this kind of flexibility with MS Office. If you want MS Office you will always / only have MS Office and couldn't possibly include it in your business model if you plan on making some $ for yourself ...
"SOME OTHER TYPEWRITER". But when you talk about SOT while you're at work, you call it "Word ST". just my $0.02
I tried out SOT and to my amazement it had no support for UTF-8, only for UTF-7 and UTF-16 (at least it claimed support for those two). This seems ridiculous. UTF-8 is the most important form of Unicode. Any app that supports Unicode really must do UTF-8 first of all.
Is this a problem in OpenOffice generally? Or is is something peculiar to SOT?
Don't complain about lack of choices!
Turns out that whenever I'm miles away from a phone line on someone else's PC they only have Acrobat 3 and the document requires 5. :)
Personally I find pdf documents an absolute nightmare to read, and searching, placeholding etc even more of an effort. And for such a great document standard, it sure takes a lot of processing power to do anything (scrolling, loading) quickly, not to mention the fact that its flexibility encourages people do do insane things like embed images in every page. Mmmm, forty page documents that come out at 80 megabytes. Tasty.
I agree with the sentiment that it's ludicrous to do away with a format designed to be portable and stardard, but just because it's portable doesn't mean I actually _like_ it.
- Chris
Even all the new vendors of the office suite choose XML as the standard, they have difficulties break through the market, as most of the documents in the world are still coded in obsolete format.
from a chinese company called "linux2000". the site is in chinese only, so are the interface and instruction of the installation (the help files are not yet translated tho), but if you can read chinese or are feeling advanturous, here's the rpm package for linux(for redhat) and here's the zip version for windoze.
I do not see source code packages anywhere on the site, which bothers me a little, so I went to read the license agreements on openoffice. There're two licenses you can choose, LGPL and SISSL. It seems that SISSL doesn't require the vendor to opensource their mods as long as the files produced remains fully compatible with what openoffice produces. If my understanding is wrong, I'd appreciate it if somebody could clear it up for me. As much as I would like openoffice based products to succeed in China, I would hate it if there's foul play here.
I should also point out that these programs are said to be "trial versions" which should expire on June 30, 2002, but later version should be available (for free, I suppose?) before then.
ps: I do not work for them.It's not a country. It's an interplanetary empire.
bleh... I want to speak Italian and be a Fascist... Or speak Japanese and be a militarist! ^_^
That's what I need. I just can't afford that kind of money for a database program. Besides that I don't want to trust my data with M$.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
"he KDE suit, the Gnome suit, and openoffice."
Hmmm. Is the difference between these based on the cut of the pant leg or are they both based on the emperor's suit and thus should not be worn in an open office?
Stream of consciousness installation process for Windows version (on WinXP)...
So there we go. It looks like Word, it opens Word, it saves Word (so far), but it's got bugs (I'm back to German as the default language again), the spell checking works unusually (which means badly if you're trying to attract Word users), and there's no word count. My god, there's no word count. I really cannot do without a word count.
But it's free, and it looks good. I'm certainly going to stick with it for a few days and see if I fall in love. Definitely worth trying... unless you need a word count. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Anyone that wants to can download basically any package, program, or font they want via Usenet. But enough people don't to keep companies afloat. These people are going into PC Word, or the American equivilent, and actually picking software off a shelf and paying what most /.ers would regard as a rip-off price for it at a till.
If a program is not on those shelves, and the vast majority of Linux software isn't in a state a retailer would even consider, then the only audience is the people to whom downloading for free is the norm and that is the single worst market for making money. It's a good market, by and large, for getting free development help, but it's not going to pay the rent.
So the keys are distribution and packaging (including a decent manual), not end-user cost.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Nice, easy, simple 'n neat.
99% of the crap in MS Office is not used by 99% of users.
Lets face it for the vast majority of people wordpad & RTF files are all they need.
Goatse.cx runs on Linxu! Maybe they used that crap to create the site?
This is a release of OpenOffice.org 641c (the release from 3 months ago) with the names changed and a finnish dictionary added.
OpenOffice.org themselves are just about to release 1.0 which will be massivley improved on this old build.
Whilst OpenOffice.org approve of people using their code in their own value added packages you should be aware that they are using old (and actually fairly buggy) code.
http://www.nedrichards.com
1. As a desktop database or as a client front-end for an enterprise database, MS Access is an EXCELLENT product. It provides support for all features needed to produce well-normalized databases, has the ability to link to and use many data sources (xbase, jet, oracle, ms sql server, text files, excel, lotus notes, to name a few), a very good report writer, and has an excellent 4GL environment. Access is one of Microsoft's better products. It iss a TALL order for the open source community to even meet, let alone exceed!
MS-Access has had problems when it is misused. This is especially the case when it is adopted as a "poor man's" enterprise database for web sites. If your site has more than a 5 concurrent users, it makes sense to move to something like MS SQL Server.
2. MySQL is limited, especially in its lack of support for stored procedures and referential integrity. The Database Expert Fabian Pascal has made some good points on MySQL's failings at his site DB Debunking http://www.dbdebunk.com/
If it's about excahngability, what we need is more open standards not less competition.
And if it's about compatibility, people who program alternat office programs already work hard on that but they won't achieve. Because M$ is always at least one step ahead and we all know they don't have any scruples chosing their weapons to fight alternatives that become dangerous to their market share. And they have the means, BG alone could spend more than 10$ on every person in the world from his private wealth.
So what is really needed to take a considerable market share from M$ Office is more people to tell the truth about M$. But that isn't:
"Now the reason why MS Office is so popular is that...it is worth the extra $200 that you have to spend to save a couple hours here and a couple hours there per project."
No, M$ Office isn't worth extra 200 bucks, it is that M$, by deliberately implementing incompatibilities in their code, have you spend extra 200$ if you don't use exactly the same version of their Office program like the person you have to exchange your documents with.
> Once you get people to use your software and not realize that they are not using MS Word, you've succeeded in achieving what you need to do.
Well that's equally impossible to achieve as M$ changes the L&F of it's programs between versions.
Wich also shows that a difference in the L&F isn't that important. What is important is that people know why they should avoid M$. And to convince them of that you will have to fight the multi-million dollar PR machine of M$. So what is needed is more people to realize that they have to fight M$ if they want alternatives to succeed, who don't buy anything from M$, not even a mouse, who make it clear that M$ is shit, even if people start calling them zealots.
I use it for the same reason I use other Microsoft products. I don't consider any of the office programs I use the best, but I use them anyway because that is what I need to be compatible with teachers at school and coworkers at work.
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I've been using Microsoft Office for years. That being entrenched, I wonder how it is Star Office, Open Office, and perhaps others, are coming out with supposedly compettive offerings with less features. Here's the pieces of MIcrosoft Office that have come bundled with one version or another, in the frequency that I use, or have used, them:
- Microsoft Outlook (PIM)
- MIcrosoft Word (Word Processor)
- Microsoft Excel (Spreadsheet)
- MIcrosoft Access (RDBMS)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (Presentation)
Before anyone slams me on Access, it was my first introduction to an RDBMS and served as a proof-of-concept learning tool -- light-years ahead of no DB offering at allSo, for me at least, both Star Office and Open Office appear to be missing the PIM (not just e-mail!) functionality thus eliminating them from consideration. I suspect from my peer's reactions that I'm nearly alone in actually using a PIM.
I know there are open source PIMs out there. Why they haven't been integrated is beyond me. Is there anything else people feel are missing from these office suites? Perhaps something that exists and could be integrated?
With all the word processors available now-- OpenOffice, StarOffice, SOT Office, Microsoft Word, Wordperfect, etc. - where can I find a comparison guide to evalutate which is the best for me??
Go to File -> Properties and click on the Statistics tab.
Just wait a few weeks... We're on it..
i think the functionality office provides us with is very cool, but the way we are forced to approach it via the gui stinks. hold your horses, and read further to hear my favorite view of the future:
;-) but: as long as the document-standards are open, since anyone can then build any gui layer on it they like!
i a not-so-distant future, the desktop will probably not be ruled by "office suites that need to be able to do anything including coffeemaking".
while i enjoy the efforts the open source community is putting into creating ms-office work-a-likes, that market will be history. everything is going to be webservices-based, and perhaps we will even reach the state where documents do not need to be tied to an application, but there will just be a unified (xml) document format, which can contain calculation-functionality (a-la excel) but also good layout functions to make it look nice. the whole idea of presentation software, wordprocessors, and drawing programs as separate entities is ridiculous anyhow in my perception. just choose the output device (printer, posterprinter, screen, beamer, webpage) and build the document.
as it is now, several (often small) companies exist merely because of the need to adapt the swiss-army-knife that office is into a specific tool that suits the client situation. there's money to be made there even if there is no officesuite, since there is always going to be a need for specific solutions.
so if you ask me: get rid of all those office suites, build something that can do all the things i mentioned before, and build gui layers on top of it that can handle the specific objects within the documents, like editing text, database connection, performing calculations, making drawings/graphs, etc...
we have all the tools. we have well worked out markup languages, style sheets, etc. we have good databases, good toolkits to build guis. things could become *really* platform independent, and we wouldn't have to worry about how to fit our grand scheme into the current situation, created by software giants as our favorite one from redmond.
money can be made by providing services to companies that need specific functionality, and not by making software that still needs to be adapted to do the job. whether the solution i propose is done using open software or closed software doesn't make a difference. (to me it does, but let's not go into the open = better than closed subject
On the OpenOffice.org discuss list, someone ran a diff against OOo source code. In twelve modules he examined, only a single line was changed. (The word 'close' was exchanged against its Finn counterpart. Apparently the OOo translation missed one string in the resources.) Calling this 'partly based' on OpenOffice.org is certainly misleading. This IS OpenOffice.org (version 641C, actually), only with a name change and a price tag.
Additionally, they seem to have no intention of feeding changes back into OOo. Not nice! Legal, but certainly against the OpenSource spirit. I hope they will reconsider.
OpenOffice, while a great suite and a step towards a consistent, competitive linux office suite...is a DOG. It takes forever to open on high end PC's and its stability is not its strong point. SOT Office loads MUCH faster and is far more stable. Looks like SOT streamlined and bug fixed the hell out of OpenOffice. It looks like its just a rebranded OO641c, but its much better, I just deleted Open Office from my drive and I'm keeping SOT.
The above poster makes (IMHO) an interesting point, however people should not take this as the opinion of the real CmdrTaco of
Use OpenOffice. All the others SUCK!
Mein Gott! A Nazi with dyslexia!
And poke her, with the soft cushions!!!
I can assure you that I have made money on free software, no doubt. In what way does that make the above comment a sign of misunderstanding free software?
If a startup has it's budget rearranged and its development software/infrastructure/serverOS/etc costs cut down to 10% of what it would costs to buy that software from Sun, Microsoft, SCO or other companies selling it. Or, if a 45 000 employee blue-chip global company decides to cut its use of Office, switch to opensource DBMS instead of Oracle and other licenced "normal" software products just because the products suddenly appear for free download provided by a group of OSS-advocates; pick your case: the software industry will lose revenues in both.
I agree that there is new software to be developed and that can be done instead of the products and business opportunities being wasted by being given away. But:
If that is the case, why are so many software engineers unemployed right now and how many will be in the future?
What is to say that the OSS-movement can make the call which software to open up for free and which not to? What is there that says that any future products will not also be beaten to death by a bunch of OSS-people who can't stand that a few companies usually make a huge pile of money?
Remember: There is a huge difference between a couple of MSc-students creating firewalls, DNSes and cool OS-derivaties and a Gobal megacorporation that can cut tens of millions of dollars in IT-spending/software-spending by using free software. The step of the OSS-movement into applications and business productivity software will show mainly in the later category, I assure you.
Aren't there better stuff to create and give away than an Office-suite if the goal is to create more business and jobs for people in the software industry and not just to get Microsoft on its knees?
The huge market growth of (proprietary closed source) companies like Microsoft draws a lot of investors to the IT and software industries, maybe its not that bad if they make lots of profits and show VCs and investors that it can be a nice thing to put money into software companies?
Office? Let them have it, they're obviously best at producing and selling it anyway.
A run-of-the-mill code-jockey can pretty easily pull down $60k per year in the US. That's more than a hundred copies of Microsoft Office XP at MS's recommended selling price.
What will the economic effect of having office applications open source and free of charge? Office software is infrastructure. Free office software is pretty closely equivalent to free roads and highways in the US -- a tremendous economic boon.
Wish I'd known about this before I spent 300 dollars on MS Office 2000.
Really, these guys are v. smart by releasing both a version for Windows and Linux.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
If a SW package 'A' has less value then 'B', then one should probably use 'B'. Closed / Open source doesn't have any bearing. The OSS argument is that many OSS sw packages bring similar, and in some cases greater value to the table than closed source software.
There are certianly exceptions. But for the most part, I see companies taken to the cleaners for software whole capabilities they will never truely exercise. (Could have bought something smaller and less expensive)
I'd love to see any data/examples you have on this. I think history paints a somewhat different picture. As a software company (be it MS, Oracle, IBM, McAffee, etc) finds a successful product, they tend to expand in their own industry and dominate it. I highly doubt that you can find ANY example to support your ideas above. On the contrary, we have MS (desktop and office suites), Oracle (DB), IBM (used to dominate on servers, DB, etc), McAfee (anti-virus).Further, the billions made by SW companies goes into the hands of Executives, Share Holders and VCs NOT into the hands of the everyday worker. I'm not a class warrior, but let's call a spade a spade.
On the contrary, the best example I've seen used OSS software when they started out and MIGRATED to more robust closed source solutions as NEEDED (think sprial dev methodology). If they had gone straight to the expensive solution, they would have managed to waste a lot of money on stuff they didn't need and would have needed to purchase more sw later (as some requirements weren't totally hashed out early on). NO, I really don't. And I DON'T work as a sysadmin, I AM a software engineer who does development and integration work. When I'm building custom SW, more of the money spent on development goes to me as oppoesed to a COTS company where I'm also supporting the beaurocracy.Again, I'm not opposed to closed source, I almost took a job with a closed source company, but I think it's incredibly mis-leading to say that closed source software drives the industry when most programers don't make their living writing closed source software..
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
if someone can send me the files. email me if you have the binaries, and i'll put up a mirror to relieve the load on their ftp servers.
-- john
Why doesn't SO/OO have a database module? Yes, yes, I know you can wade through all the Adabas D stuff with SO (only), but I mean just something simple like Access for average Joe to use. To inventory an office, make an address book, make a library catalog....why can't SO/OO do this when it is becoming a mature app that Sun is actually trying to market????
Or am I just missing something- in other words, there's no Access "equivalent" in SO/OO, or actually in the rest of the free software world...
When a standard is developed for Linux that is 100% compatible with m$ office, then I will make the switch. I am so tired of trying so called "fully compatible" office suites only to find documents developed in m$ word look horrible.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. But until there is a truly 100% compatible office suite available, it's m$ office for me.
Fortunately, crossover office would allow me to use m$ office in my Linux environment. But why would my company shell out $50.00 when I am the only one using Linux?
Standards, then competition. The problem with open source/free software today is everyone is working on an individual basis, rather than working together to reach the same goal. In the movie, "Bugs Life", they realized there were more ants (us) than grasshoppers (M$), and made them their slaves. If we banded together, we could blow M$ off the map!
I just gave SOT Office a whirl w/ a couple of word documents to see how well it imported them. The first was a simple word document with little formatting and all text. It imported w/ no visable changes as far as I could tell.
The second 2 documents were more complex, encompasing images, heavy formatting, tables, etc. The first had many images and tables. The only mistake I could find on this one was that the print margins looked to be much smaller than what the document actually had or required.
The last document was an IEEE formatted paper. This one had a few more problems. Many images were in tables to acomodate a caption and span the 2 columns of the paper. these tables were often misaligned in places (aligned w/ the edge of the page rather than column.) Also, the text incorrectly wrapped around the table, appearing underneath it instead. Finally, at the typ of the paper, the author block appears on top of the paper title rather than immediately under.
I do think it did a relatively good job though. Considering the formatting problems and workarounds I had creating the IEEE paper in word, I wouldn't expect another office suite to pick the document up correctly. The other correct enough to be printed given 10sec to change the margins. Over all I am impressed and will probably use SOT office as my linux office until I can come to a final conclusion for an office suite.
I do security
Set up a web site or local server that a user could submit a document and have it translated into their format of choice.
Translation could be done by a small number of copies of native applications rather then by a hack.
That would sure put one copy of M$ Office to good use:)
According to SOT's website, the key to unlock patche is only available when you subscribe to their support - for 90 euro a year. They imply that the free SOF Office needs to be patched before it is usable.
Hey, has anyone else found that the SOT office conflicts with the staroffice 5.2 that you already have installed (under Linux)
No, the primary problem here is that his thinking is completely confined within the narrow box that seems so common. How in the hell can one believe that it's better for us to waste effort building the same product over and over again, to restrict viewing source code from which others can learn, and to make the number of useful products one can have be limited by one's funds when it doesn't have to be?
If every piece of software that was useful for large numbers of people was open sourced, guess what would happen: those currently wasted development hours and dollars would be spent on research, or technical support, or, god forbid, charity. The world would be a better place.
Getting rid of work is mostly what software is all about. We equate getting rid of work too much with getting rid of jobs. They are not the same. All human progress comes from getting rid of work. And we either find more work to do, that makes everyone's lives a little bit better, or we slow down on how much of our lives we spend doing work. Or should we still all be out building houses with our bare hands, adding numbers with pencil and paper, and plowing our fields with mules? After all, power tools, computers, and tractors have eliminated lots of work. Astonishingly, we have found more to do and lead better lives for it.
Right now, it's hard to evaluate office suites for the office environment. The problem, I think, is that techie reviewers usually are not familiar with the problems that they are used to solve. I don't care how well SOT imports memos: there are bigger things.
Excel is an amazing program. Think of it as a visual development platform complete with an IDE with context sensitive help, huge function library, built-in goal-seeking/optimization engine, cross-tabbing, statistics engine, monte carlo simulations, graphing, GUI (you can embed buttons/menus), DB functionality etc. Oh, and WYSIWYG reporting/printing comes free. People develop sophisticated business applications with Excel. Text books exist for this purpose. Real programmers may like to say "use a real programming language!", but the fact is that nonprogrammers can very quickly crank out powerful, maintainable apps relatively free of bugs. And many do: it's the right tool for many jobs.
So what does this have to do with the success of a new office suite? The question is the ease of migration. It's one thing to preserve the formatting of a Word memo. It's another to be able to import sophisticated Excel applications with confidence. Otherwise, the penetration of a rival office suite into the corporate environment will be severely hampered.
I agree with you completely. This constant push to come up with free alternatives to successful commercial packages is generally harmful to the software industry and those employed in it.
So many Slashdot readers want to make a career in software development yet many of them believe that all software should be free. I read some of the absurd counter-arguments to your well-reasoned post and they've got more holes in them than swiss cheese. The claim that significant numbers of companies will hire programmers to modify free GPL office suites is absurd. Companies don't modify word processors and spreadsheets. They use them. They don't want to be in a position where they would have to pay a programming staff to migrate customizations to each new version as it came out.
Similarly ridiculous is the the claim that there is a real and significant market for software engineers to modify GPL software in general. Most of us think it's cool when companies run Linux/BSD. How many of those companies are paying people to modify, say, KDE, Gnome, or Mozilla? (Note that I said "how many of those companies are" and not "is your company." One person posting a response that his company pays him to modify GPL software and 50 other posters saying "yeah, what he said" does not mean that there is a burgeoning market.)
One poster said:
the huge,overwhelming, vast majority of software engineers and developers do not work on mass-market software packages, but on custom and/or specialized software for internal corporate use.
This is wrong-headed on so many counts. First, what do you think it will do to salaries in general if a large percentage of developers of mass-market software find themselves unemployed -- and eyeing the same jobs you are interested in?
What a self-centered attitude! The people that write commercial software are fellow programmers and yet you don't care about them because they are in the minority. It reminds me of this verse by Pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Those of us who are, or aspire to be, software engineers should be supporting all software engingeers -- not just those working in the exact same sub-field as ours.
Like the original poster, I don't have any desire to end up as a system administrator or someone doing phone support for Redhat. Because of that, I try to find good commercial products that meet my company's needs. While I feel that Microsoft Office is bloated with too many esoteric features, it is a very good office suite -- regardless of my distaste for Microsoft as a company. The creation of it has meant employment for many skilled software engineers. For that reason, I hope that it continues to enjoy commercial success and that any competitor that may someday supplant it is also a commercial software product.
I always laugh when I think about the paperclip, because it reminds me of my first time meeting Mr.Paperclip.
;)
I had just installed Office 97 (at least I think it was Office 97). I went into to Outlook, had not configured any mailboxes, so all that was there was that little welcome email. So, I was poking around at all the options, and was looking at the "properties" of the welcome message. Several levels in I found the "UID" for the message, a long hex string. Strangely, in the middle of that hex string, were the words, in caps, "LOVECANAL". Obviously a little joke from developers they expected few to come across. There, in the bottom right hand corner, was the little paperclip dude, looking up at the UID, then looking at me, winking, over and over.
I politely declined the overture. Sure glad it wasn't the little doggie, I would have been scarred for life.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl {\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}}
\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs20 Hello World\par
}
DOC format is a binary format that includes a great deal more information and takes much more room and looks nothing like RTF. Microsoft confuses the matter by ignoring the file extension when it parses the filetype and contents. You can rename a RTF or even an HTML to DOC and Word will happily parse it as best it can.
For the most part. IIRC, Word 95 was a quick 32 bit port of Word 6. Word 97 was a rewrite, with a correspondingly different binary file format that Word 95 couldn't handle. This caused great problems for companies who were slowly adopting Word 97. Sure, you could change the filetype when you saved and I believe you could change the defaults somewhere but how many drones are going to figure this out. To them, it just doesn't work. Incidentally, this is probably what people have in mind that Microsoft intentionally breaks backwards compatibility to force upgrades. Following this, Microsoft learned to make the file formats backwards compatible.I think you are trying to make the point that the Office file formats are a de facto standard, regardless of what is actually useful or compatible. I happen to agree, though I hate Word for its quirks and difficulty in doing anything more than the simplest thing.
Bleh!
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I installed the Linux version over the weekend. While I am no where near someone who could stress test an office suite (I use the word processor as a glorified text editor and that's about it), I can sat that it looks cleaner and runs faster than OpenOffice. It seems to do what it says it does. I haven't tried any of the import/export filters yet but if it can handle MS formats "close enough" it just might become my default office suite. Maybe.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
68.2MB deb package...
Whoever did that beast should learn how debian works. Why would you make a single deb package that large? You should split it to 20-30 deb packages with valid dependencies. Now it is considerably less useful than it could be.
It's called "product evangelism". Not only do you get paid for posting on Slashdot, you also get to do USENET, and irc, depending on how you think you can best get your product endorsement out.
I think the government has the same problem. Having two parties is inefficient, and it hurts my brain to have to decide between TWO DIFFERENT parties. If there were one party that could give me everything I wanted, that would be infinitely better. That's what people want.
...Or the few. Or something in reverse, as SPOCK said to Kirk :)
:) but just wait until the exists a BOSS (Boring Open Source Software) group who does the hard work for fame and glory. ..um is.. no well .. as it has been :)
Investors and VCs mainly look at the shining top companies, they don't have the time to dwelve through the top-20 000-software-companies-of-the-world-list, therefore successful giants and especially those who run really fast are excellent subjects for an entrepreneur riding an elevator with a VC.
OK. Many good points (combined of course with some fanaticism from the few as in any religious debate.
I'll take on some of these arguments:
Consider this: Microsoft charges something like $500 for each copy of msOffice. The cost to create msOffice is static. No matter how many copies of the product they sell, it does not cost the company more money to produce it.
This might be true in some cases but as with most high technology products where the "producing" is very related to the Research & Development of the company, the money spent on R&D is a pretty blind percentage of the revenue and profits. If it drops, so does R&D. In Microsofts case (according at least to Sun Microsystems.. but anyway) a lot of the revenues from MS Office goes into the R&D of other MS products such as Windows Server software (which of course Sun cares extra about).
I think you need to talk to more people involved in startups who have solicited money from VC's.
While I have no experience of the US VC-market (other than meeting US VC-analysts and directors over here) I can put 3 successful rounds of financing and a couple of not so successful on my resume as a founder and CTO of a European software company with PRE-money VC-valuations of about $20 million (and wow yes thats right, our company is still around). I know what I'm talking about. You made the mistake to interpret what I said as if I would compete with Microsoft, which I wouldn't (I know that wont pull out the bucks with VCs). The point here is that VCs and investors rely HEAVILY on industry reports and analysis provided by major research companies, combined with the stock performance of major listed companies (such as Microsoft) when making their judgements, if the industry AS A WHOLE is doing good, they usually won't be worried about whether you will later have to share your profits with Microsoft or any other company or be bought out early (the sooner the VC-better). If the major software companies (and their stocks) perform well, so does the probability of your sales forecasts in the VC spreadsheets. Note once again: You doesn't have to sell the same products as Microsoft to be put in the same business category by a VC or investor.
"Boring" programs that are expensive to develop with a narrow but deep market must be paid for.
Haha, yeah thats at least some comfort
A run-of-the-mill code-jockey can pretty easily pull down $60k per year in the US. That's more than a hundred copies of Microsoft Office XP at MS's recommended selling price.
As mentioned in another posters message earlier, this is not true. In order to put a money-value on the specific software created by a specific developer, you have to compute the limit of NPV with time set for eternety (the arithmetic serie will converge quite early though if the discount rate used is fairly high) to get the right dollar value today of all the payments partly for the specific programmers feature. Microsoft and other companies can therefore pay a developer up to the sum of NPVs his feature will be worth in all future sales before they cut a loss on his "production".
More revenues and profit for software companies leads to: More jobs for engineers More venture capital investments More new companies being started to share (and make smaller) that profit (microeconomic fact actually, despite the position of Microsoft) I'd love to see any data/examples you have on this. I think history paints a somewhat different picture.
If you don't think about only the top 5 software companies but instead think of the top 5000 companies, the success of a few excellent companies has led to venture capital (and thereby everything from pension funds to wealthy rockstars sweaty bucks) being invested in new and smaller software companies. Some of these have survived and made a profit, others have died. One thing is true though, without the enourmous growth of companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Oracle and a couple of 50-100 more successful companies the investment market for software businesses wouldn't be as nice as it
Further, the billions made by SW companies goes into the hands of Executives, Share Holders and VCs NOT into the hands of the everyday worker. I'm not a class warrior, but let's call a spade a spade.
Yes, I just made that point. The profits of large software companies attract the three groups of people you mentioned above which pretty much equals a positive VC and investment climate for software startups. If the Executives, Share Holders and VCs make money, they're happy, and when they're happy they invest in new companies hoping to get more of the good stuff.
I disagree with you on the arguments being ridiculous, they do have merit. I don't agree with them, but they still have merit. The tactic MS used in killing off browsers reinforces the point of the grandparent post.
IE was essentially free software, and killed netscape. RMS's 'Free Software' (quotes and names used for clarity) will kill off mass marketed commercial alternatives. ESR makes the point that most programmers, however, do custom work not for resale.
The logical extension is that the generic software is all going to end up free, and the programmers money will have to come in from custom work. This is already the case in the PRC, where copyright enforcement is antiethical to the ideals of the communist government.
Stallman, on the other hand, is more of a capitalist, who wants ownership of all the software in the universe. Since it's free, everyone else can own it all too, and we all benefit. Stallman is using copyright in his own way to bring this about.
I think that free software is going to kill off the commercial, mass market software, like office. MS Office will eventually become free as in beer. At that time, it will become open source, because people will only use it if they can customize it. MS will only make money on office from packaging, and value add. The lock-in days are coming to a close.
Remember, MS Office is running out of steam as a cash cow, because 97 was good enough. 2000 proved that 97 was good enough. XP is only purchased because 2000 licenses aren't generally available. Star office actually is beginning to compete. The US market for new versions of office is drying up, and overseas, people don't want to pay. MS can influence high government officials to make office mandatory, (see Mexico), but the inevitable scandals always cause people to wonder 'Why are strongarm tactics necessary, unless better alternatives exist?"
Will this end MS? Hell no. MS high command has already won the PC battlefield, and have moved on. There are VP's tasked with milking all the money out that is left, but MS Embedded in cell phones is the next exciting war. They'll probably win that too.
MS will keep alive as long as there is new technology to embrace and extend.
hanzie
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Please lecture me. I'm still learning the vocavulary. It's quite extensive and i make mistakes. Anyway...
Federico
unfinished: (adj.)
So how well do you speak and write his language, you asshole.
The original phrase's verb would be "cogitare", meaning "to think", 1st person singular is "cogito". Supposed you wanted to refer to something like "codere", take "codeo, ergo sum". BTW, there's a nice page to play around with latin vocab here.
What we need to save ourselves from -You know who- to force his own private standards upon us is not another office suite but a real, open international standard for office files enforced by a renowned organisation such as the International Standards Organisation. When governements and organisms such as United Nations will start to request ISO compatible files, even Microsoft will comply!
The Model T Any color you want so long as it's black era is over.
I'm running XFree86 4.1 and it still doesn't work. My AA is configured and looks beautiful in KDE with the hacked xft. I'm wondering if it might be a SuSE problem??
oh yes, i'm aware of that. and so does msoffice (or does it?). don't get me wrong, staroffice is a good thing, but i think we should look ahead instead of duplicating functionality.
.NET strategies. i say beat them at their own game.
and still, the file formats are closely tied to the applications, and it's the applications that are not very effective IMHO. i would like a "universal document format", and a gui shell that would basically edit document structure (layout), and several plugin-like apps that take care of calculations, database connectivity, etc. the gui shell should be as easily replacible as anything, the document format should *not* be tied to the application. all these things network transparent.
i would guess microsoft is heading in the same direction (sort of) with their
at times like these i wish i had taken programming courses. here's an itch i'd surely scratch.
FWIW at this late date...
--
From: SOT 24/7 Support Team [mailto:support@sot.com]
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 9:04 PM
To: tony@bluetree.ie
Subject: Re: SOT Office
Hello,
Here are the differences you have asked about.
Differences between OpenOffice and SOTO:
*Finnish language support:
- graphical user interface
- manual
- spellchecker
*Set of primitive templates
*More advanced online help
*Latest Microsoft filters
*Easy access to applications from menu, like word processing, spreadsheet
and graphic applications modules
*Easy installation/deinstallation on Linux by RPM package
*Hyphenation support
On CD:
Both versions for Linux and Windows
Both versions for English and Finnish languages
Sources available
SOTO manual for English and Finnish language in pdf format
Best regards,
Roman Rudenko
--
SOT 24/7 Support Team support@sot.com
tel. +372 6419875
http://www.sot.com Web page
https://www.sot.com Online Shop
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
In the early thread, someone mentioned that the Office suite needs a PIM. At OpenOffice.org, we had a lively discussion on this topic and concluded that, even if you dont think The Office Suite should have a PIM, MS has already defined the category to include the PIM through thier bundling of Outlook. Although Ximin's Evolution is a very good, drop-in Outlook replacement for Linux, there's nothing comparable on Windows. For these reasons, OpenOffice.org has an active Groupware Project at http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/groupware/index.h tml
that I encourage people to check out.
OpenOffice has evolved...have you?
History cannot be proven by science. By definition, history is not repeatable.
No offense Mr. Wong, but that sig is incorrect. That's not an assertion by definition. To argue by definition, you would have to be able to say that history is a scientific experiment with results that cannot be duplicated. The catch is that history isn't a scientific experiment with results that cannot be duplicated. Quite to the contrary, history is more like a highly subjective research project compiled by a wide variety of scholars that is constantly re-editied and modified to fit with the presently accepted facts. The nature of this type of research insures that there will be ongoing instances of repition because there's a limited set of themes with salient values in the research that will inevitably recurr --notably, records of wars, documents of inventions, various social discourses etc.
I recommend you re-think this sig.
Your friend AC
Well, you said it yourself. History is subjective. I agree with that. Science isn't subjective. It appears that way, because it is so often abused.
Historical events aren't repeatable. You can't have another WWII. You could have WWIII, with different/similar players, but not another WWII. You can repeat many types of events, but not repeat a specific event.
We can study history and use logic. In courts, lawyers sometimes turn to scientists, but the actual event isn't repeated. It's only the certain types of events.
The strength of science is to prove that certain things can happen. It's good for contradicting people when they say, "You can't do that.".
"You can't fly."
"I can fly with a plane or a glider. Watch. I'll show you."
Sincerely, and with thanks,
Eugene T.S. Wong