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.

Comments

Too much competition

[CmdrTaco (editor)]

One thing I've noticed within the past year or so is the huge increase in the number of competitors for office suites in the open source/Linux community. While competition may spur innovation in most cases, I don't believe it to be true when taken to this degree for open source software.

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.

Re:Too much competition

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I've noticed within the past year or so is the huge increase in the number of competitors for office suites in the open source/Linux community. While competition may spur innovation in most cases, I don't believe it to be true when taken to this degree for open source software.

No, I'd say it's still a good thing. Economic Darwinism will wind up killing off all but the best values. This was the same situation we had in the DOS world around 1985. Give it time. I expect Linux will eventually become credible on the desktop, just not as quickly as people might like. Be patient, it doesn't have to happen tomorrow. It will happen when the platform is ready.

Re:Too much competition

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion Microsoft Office is one of the best software packages ever produced. The Excel application is superb for modelling systems that does not require advanced math like that in Matlab or SPSS. They're in for some tough technical/engineering competition with Microsoft here.

Now to another question that I think would be of importance to a large chunk of the Slashdot readers: What will the economic effects for the software industry be if software such as Office (which is a huge driver for software revenue and profits) is given away for free? Note that I'm talking about the broad ideological wishing here that all software should be free and open, not just MS Office.

Since a lot of you are pursuing a career in software or systems I find the strive towards free software a bit strange. How many engineers (and for that sake.. people like managers and support staff) are involved in the MS Office product? Tens of thousands make their living of that product. That would NOT be possible if Microsoft did not pull in the cash to fund the product and made a profit (which is a requirement for entering into a business segment).

While I must say that it is very nice to have free software such as operating systems, compilers etc available instead of having to buy (or copy..) expensive software, I think that this is doing more damage than good to the people involved in software development. Think about it: If there was no free Internet server, no free database engine and so on, COMPANIES (not CompSci-students) would buy those product to realise products and systems. Is it really that wrong to ask a software development company to pay money for all the bleeding edge tools that make their work so much easier? After all, that money goes back into the software industry and generates some important figures for those working in the industry. 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 used to think that it was great to be able to set up an entire advanced Internet-system for free, just download and boot up OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL and so on and your're off to coding your CGIs and apps in C and C++ on that nice free compiler (which is not only free, but also best). My thoughts have changed: That WAS nice when you were either a student with no cash wishing to work with technology to learn (been there) OR you were in the process of starting a business in a field related and wanted free software to run everything (been there too). BUT when you think of multi-billion-dollar companies re-building their software budgets and moving to free software to cut costs, it's a whole other thing.

Anyway, don't you people here think that the money made from proprietary (open or closed) software sold for raw cash is what funds this industry? I mean, do you all want to work as sysadmins on Linux and databaseadmins on MySQL instead of software engineers & technical managers on projects that aim to sell the software you have created?

Re:Too much competition

[Anonymous Coward]

"... we can finally get rid of pdf files".
Honestly, I don't understand: you say that standards are a good thing, yet you don't like pdf files. I have to ask you, did even once a PDF file go wrong on your computer while display right on a coleague? To me, pdf (and ps, of course) are the best document formats out there. Simple, easily convertible to text (if needed), with no problems, and based on STANDARDS.

PS: Does MS Office work on your computer [the 386]? Just curious.

Re:Too much competition

[Lumpy]

Wrong...

No office worker even thinks about these things because they dont have a choice. Most of the time a large corperation or company will get a site license from microsoft for the operating system (the IT manager is a complete idiot if he doesn't) and Microsoft offer's the Office suite site license for the same number of client machines at a significant discount. Well, now you just saved some money (at first glance you save money) so if you sign the agreement for the Operating system product you usually pick the OS+Office product they offer for only a little more money.

This is why Office is so prevalent. It's shoved out there to corperate and large businesses BY microsoft (Duh, a company shoving their products! what a concept!)

Second... Most IT managers or CTO's are clueless about what is actually available to save the company money and as alternatives.. They are too busy in meetings, board meetings, Focus groups, fact-finding missions on silly topics, and networking( No not real networking, that thing they call golfing+taking someone to a 3 hour lunch... I have noticed that the higher yo go in a company the less the person actually does that is work, and the more they do that is considered Goofing-off if you or I were to do it... oh well back to the issue)

It is NOT compatability, or a concern for the other person's ability to read something. That problem went away in the 1990's. Wordperfect was able to open office documents, and Office was able to read Wordperfect documents. and Now the other apps do the same (With the exception to the presentation graphics programs, but allowing a sales person to email someone a 120Meg presentation is damned silly. Teach these idiot salespeope how to distill it to a PDF file. Open office should save everything as a known format, (RTF... Oh! I can hear the groans already! Please someone show me a document that HAS to have macros, and other useless drivel in it... Dont try and show me a form they fill out, as printing it, writing in the spaces, and faxing it to you does the SAME THING, as does, just typing on the blanks and re-emaillling it does.... the point of all these documents is to convey information not to stroke someone ego.. as they are more and more trying to do.

finally, linux DOES have a single office standard... it's called open Office. everything else is just a spin-off or a tangent.

Re:Too much competition

[peddrenth]

I've seen so-called Word-experts struggle for hours to do simple things correctly in Word.

As the saying goes, "I need a word processor which knows how to number its pages..."

(says someone using LaTeX. WhooHoo! no need for a word processor ever again!)

Re:Too much competition

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Dont try and show me a form they fill out, as printing it, writing in the spaces, and faxing it to you does the SAME THING, as does, just typing on the blanks and re-emaillling it does....

Wait. Spooling to a printer, scrawling information on a dead tree, walking to a phone line, using an obsolencent technology to push a (bad) facsimile of the dead tree through copper wire, having the recipient print out another (nearly illegible) copy on a different dead tree, then store the dead tree in a large metal box.... This is the same as editing a file directly, remailing it to the author, and keeping it in machine-readable form while storing it as a handful of magnetic domains?

There are some things that should be paper-archived. But most things should live in the machine. A golden rule from my days at NASA, learned when a transcription error rendered useless six months of IUE data, was: Nothing that has been entered into a computer should ever be entered again!

Re:Too much competition

[Roblimo]

The only problem with this thesis is that 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.

Make it easier and more cost-effective to produce custom applications (by, say opening the source code for the "base" applications), and you almost certainly create more software development jobs than you lose by turning base applications and operating systems into commodities.

Another thing to consider is that (gasp) there is life beyond software. Most companies that use computers (and software) aren't in the computer business, but use those computers to help produce something else, like animated movies or car parts. Heck, even airlines, hotels, and stock brokerages use computers these days, and if they can have computers that run a little better/faster/cheaper because of Open Source software, they can provide their products or services at a lower price.

Not that any of this matters to those whose only ambition in life is to write shrinkwrap software, but I thought I would throw it in here anyway.

- Robin

Re:Too much competition

[xonker]

More revenues and profit for software companies leads to:

Fewer jobs at the companies that have to pay for software licenses.
Smaller profit margins for companies that have to pay for software licenses.
Fewer new companies being created due to the higher startup costs of buying software licenses.

Free Software and Open Source leads to:
More jobs for engineers at companies who need people to modify freely available software.
Higher profit margins for companies not paying insane license fees to Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc.
Startup companies being able to spend money on their business rather than software licenses.
Adding features to software because they're necessary, not because marketing wants another bullet on the box.
Software being released/deployed when it's ready, not when a company needs to generate revenue.
A less jarring upgrade cycle for companies that actually use the software.
Not being left with your dick in your hand when the company that makes your proprietary accounting package goes out of business without passing on the source code or any means of future support and leaving your data in a proprietary and inaccesible format.
No BSA.
No companies paying off their congresscritter to pass the DCMA.

Bottom line - proprietary software hurts a lot more companies than it helps.

If you want to work for Microsoft, Free Software might be a bad thing. If you want to do real and useful work with a tool that works well it's a very good thing.

Never forget that Microsoft Office, Windows, Visual Studio and so on are designed primarily with one goal in mind: maximizing Microsoft's profit margin. That goal directly conflicts with the goal of a company that uses those tools - namely, to spend as little as possible to get the job done well. The same is true of just about any proprietary software package - the number one goal of Adobe, Macromedia, Quark and every other proprietary company is to sell more licenses. That means that their goal is to cause their customers to buy more software, more rapidly, than they would want to. Spending more IT budget on licensing than personnel - meaning, in reality, fewer jobs. If every company had one or two people supporting Linux and OpenOffice, say, there'd be a hell of a lot more jobs than are created than the 10,000 or so created by Microsoft.

I mean, do you all want to work as sysadmins on Linux and databaseadmins on MySQL instead of software engineers & technical managers on projects that aim to sell the software you have created?

Yes. Working on a team with the goal of selling software means having to work closely with marketing and salescritters. That's punishment enough for anyone.

OSX Port

[OptimizedPrime]

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.

I don't think this is a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Have you seen this with MS Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ...

Quite a few times actually.

[thumperward]

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

Re:Quite a few times actually.

[peddrenth]

PDF is a useful intermediate stage between the computer and a printer, but it's not good for much else.

I find it great for previewing pdflatex files before I print them, but trying to read internet documents on Acrobat Reader is just painful. Please can they fix the broken up/down pageup/pagedown buttons?

Acrobat reader on linux stands out like a sore thumb for the same reason: "We know best, we'll program our own GUI" so it looks like a malformed concrete block amongst pretty aqua-themed gnome apps.

Re:What's the difference?

[Arthur Dent 75]

Arker wrote on 29/04/02 10:02:

Why do people persist in spreading this myth that the GPL forbids charging for programs? It does not, in fact, any license which does is NOT considered Free by the FSF and is not GPL compatible.

In fact the GPL makes charging for programs very difficult. Anyone who receives the program also receives the source code and may distribute modified versions of it without paying the original author. So if I charge for a software that is under the GPL anyone who buys a distribution of this software (e.g. a CD) would be able to distribute it for free.

Of course a real charge (that is significantly higher than the distribution cost) is not forbidden, but it won't be easy to get anyone to pay it.

paradigm shift needed

[koekepeer]

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:

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 ;-) but: as long as the document-standards are open, since anyone can then build any gui layer on it they like!

Re:Every worker his own suite!

[Tony-A]

The XML-variant is going to win.
Methinks you're right. What's critical is the ability to send a document from the latest and greatest to someone running something that noone has ever hear of and hasn't been updated in the last five years and the recipient can actually read the *expletive-deleted* thing.
Anything less and you've sabotaged yourself.
The reason for standards is so you don't have to care what brand you're using.

**sigh** There always one...

[rutledjw]

No, I don't think you could have possibly missed the point by a greater degree. Software, in whatever form, provides a service. It's an OS, a webserver, an appserver, a ... That's it. Further, a decision to use SW or not should be based on the value this software brings to the table.

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)

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. 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.

BUT when you think of multi-billion-dollar companies re-building their software budgets and moving to free software to cut costs, it's a whole other thing.

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).

don't you people here think that the money made from proprietary (open or closed) software sold for raw cash is what funds this industry?

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..