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

who needs this when open office has debs now.

[Anonymous Coward]

its very exciting.

you can get them here.

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

[flewp]

When you say single office suite standard, do you mean a single office package, like SOT Office, StarOffice, etc? Or do you mean so that the file types are all standardized so that there could be a lot of different office suites, but they all followed a standard, so all the files were compatible with each office suite? I think either way, it's a good idea, but it's hard to say which would help more. If one office suite could capture the majority of the non-MS-Office market that was able to read/write a lot of formats, I think that would be ideal.

Re:Too much competition

[Tazzy531]

I agree to an extent. However, there is one important aspect that many people do not realize is that compatibility is only part of the issue. The key selling point of an OSS office suite is the relatively low cost of ownership. But to calculate this total cost of ownership, you need to factor in a number of other variables. The most important, as you mentioned, is compatibility. If a person is going to spend 20 hours writing a report, does he have to spend another 5 hours to get it to a readable format for his boss? (Getting your boss to switch to your software is out of the question in many environments) 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.

I think the most important thing that OSS Office suites need to focus on is compatibility with the majority of the office suite out there (in this case MS Office). This doesn't mean that you need to run the file through another program to convert it or have to do something different so that it is compatible with MS Office...it should just be. This will wrestle some users away from the grips of MS

Secondly, [I think this is something that everyone overlooks], consumers don't like change. Even a change in a look and feel is a drastic difference. One thing that I still haven't found in the Linux Office Suites is the whole MS Word/Office look and feel. The pulldown menus and the icons just don't look and feel right. 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.

Once you get critical mass, you can then define your own look and feel. Until then...you need to imitate...

Re:Too much competition

[eugene ts wong]

What the Linux community really needs is a single office suite standard, eliminating the compatibility issues.

I agree. I think that the standards that they need to agree on are file formats, and the desire to reuse as much code as possible.

Other than that, I'd encourage them to make as many skins and interfaces as possible. I believe that it's good to have variation so that people can customize according to their needs. For example, I have a 386 with 8MB of RAM and an approx. 540MB harddrive. I'd love to install a Linux desktop on it, but it's not going to be easy! :^) If there were a trimmed down version to meet my needs, then that would be great. A featureful, non-trimmed down version would really help those with lots of hardware.

Other variations may include plugins, so that documents can be browsed on the web, and we can finally get rid of pdf files.

Any thoughts and comments?

Re:Too much competition

[Anonymous Coward]

It's impossible. I have yet to see ONE office suite that didn't produce "erroneous" Word-documents for the simplest of examples. The freeware 602 PRO PC SUITE is probably the best among them, but it too fails to capture all the quirks. However, when it comes to reproducing all the bugs MS has introduced in their formats, that is next to impossible to accomplish without either specs or sourcecode.

To say that MS is backwards compatible is hypocritical to say the least. I know you didn't say it, but the grand-parent post implied it.

If the DOJ-case is to have any merit at all, MS should be forced to open up all their specs on their formats. Down to the nitty gritty details + all the flaws that are necessary to reproduce so-called "bug-free" Word documents (there really ain't no such thang baby!). That would allow REAL competition.

Word would be great if it weren't for all those quirks and bugs though. I've seen so-called Word-experts struggle for hours to do simple things correctly in Word.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You haven't used MS Office very much, have you?

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

[Lumpy]

but I have too much trouble getting them to print directly to the fax machine to not waste a page of paper by printing it and then walking to the fax machine and faxing it. I was told by the sales manager, "the sales people like to proofread it after it prints. I then replied, "why? do we have a problem with the printer changing the words or spelling? how does it change from the screen to paper? " I am all for increasing productivity and accuracy, but management is willing to cater to laziness and stupidity when it comes to sales-people instead of allowing operations staff to streamline and increase savings.

Chances are, even if you have a nice webpage to collect information, the sales people will fill it out and print it, then get it to you.

sales people like to print things.. Hell I had a salesperson that would print,copy then fax every item.... why? they needed a copy for themselves, I asked what they do with the page they print, they replied.. "I faxed it silly!"

sales people = the stupidest people on the planet.. and it's genetic.

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

[Surak]

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.


One thing I've noticed within the past year or so is the huge increase in the number of competitors for operating systems in the computer industry.

While competition may spur innovation in most cases, I don't believe it to be true when taken to this degree for operating systems.
The main reason behind this belief is simply the fact that the reason most people don't adopt secondary operating systems is because of the different standards. People use MS Windows because they know installing new hardware and software will not cause any compatibility issues, because it is a fair assumption that all hardware and software are compatible with Windows. What the marketplace really needs is a operating system standard, eliminating the compatibility issues. Then we can work on competition.

(I'm demonstrating the absurd by being absurd. :)

Re:Too much competition

[mark_lybarger]

really, what good does it do to send someone a file that you know they can't use? start a little flame war? most people don't actively choose an office suite. if it's in the workplace, some upper manager decided to get M$ office for everybody, of decided to use something else. unless you're dealing with that decision maker, it's pointless (and even if you are it's still a mute issue).

sure, the M$ office compeditors need to put lots into development to make their products compeditive with M$, but they also need to have the best filters. the linux office applications (or free windows) i use are the ones with the best office import/export functionality. it would be nice if M$ of course opened up their office format, but wouldn't that really lead to a loss in sales? it doesnt' seem like a good business practice that the board of directors would likely go for.

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.

Re:Too much competition

[Pantheraleo]

I think there already is a single office suite standard for Linux / Unix and it is StarOffice / OpenOffice. The main reason for this is its compatibility with MS Office is almost perfect (not quite, but almost).

I'm a technical author, and my publisher requires me to submit documents in MS Word format using a template they provide and with revision tracking features enabled. StarOffice's MS compatibility is so good that I can use it to do all of my work. My publisher can't even tell that that I am not using Word. StarOffice imports the templates with no problems and does the revision tracking with no problems either.

Basically, and Office package that is going to have any chance of becoming a Linux standard is going to have to have MS Office compatibility that is damn near perfect since almost all Linux / Unix users are going to have to share documents with Windows users running MS Office. So far, StarOffice / OpenOffice is the only package that even comes close to being MS Office compatible. It will be the standard because people can exchange documents with MS Office users and be virtually sure that there will not be problems.

Personally, I would rather see something like Abiword's format become the standard (Abiword uses XML as its native document format). This format makes it really easy to work with documents in other applications (XML modules in Perl and Python for example).

Re:Too much competition

[alext]

when Mono becomes mature, and some poor soul does a functional port of things like the Forms library

...and when MS decides not to sue the copiers of their Forms library...

Remember, Forms Dotnet is not standardized, nor are the database APIs - in fact 1000-odd of the 1200 APIs in Dotnet are not standardized or open in any sense.

I agree with the poster - start with PostgreSQL and the like (or a Java database) to build a sensible alternative to Access.

Re:Too much competition

[pmz]

... Microsoft Office is one of the best software packages ever produced.

At first, I thought that this may have been valid at one time or another, but, then, I realized it isn't. A recent example: even with its auto-super-helpful features disabled, Word 2000 still makes "decisions" for me and crashes frequently. An earlier example: I remember when formatting a nice paper was a piece of cake in Lotus Ami Pro (or even LaTeX, for that matter), but when I tried to do the same basic operations, such as foot notes, in Word, I wasted an entire evening trying. I quickly found that the Word user interface is really pretty crappy.

You may have had better experience with Excel, and that is fine. But, as a whole, Microsoft Office is at best average and more likely mediocre. It solves many problems poorly and a very few problems well. I'd argue that it has caused more problems via its unreliable file maintenance (trust me, I've seen files disappear and files that simply go bad during normal use) than it has solved through its encyclopedic set of "features".

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?

In the long run, the economic effect can only be positive.

For starters, the Market has made it very clear that office productivity suites are desirable. This is evident in the massively wide-spread use of them and the many many different office suites that came and went.

However, Microsoft, over the years, has taken steps to ensure that its office suite is the one used by pretty much everyone. The end result is that Microsoft Office file formats have become a defacto standard communications protocol. One may think that this is a good thing, but I don't.

Currently, this widely used communications protocol is proprietary, which means you really don't know how your information is transmitted. You don't know how to fix it if it breaks, so, if your file becomes corrupted, a text editor won't be able to save you (let's hope your IT dept. keeps good daily backups). If you have a very large number of documents, you don't know how to query them efficiently for various data (how does one search what are effectively random binary files?). How will you access these files in ten years, when there isn't even a guarantee that Microsoft will still be here (this is true of any company)? If Microsoft dissolves and you didn't save the CD-ROM for Office 95...well, those files might just as well be deleted.

My argument, here, is that using the proprietary Microsoft communications protocol in Office is risky. Very risky. For some reason, our society at large has not grasped that our important data is simply not accessible to us without Microsoft getting it for us. From a risk management point of view, this is a terrible position for any company or individual to be in.

Reducing this risk is why I choose do document software, write e-mail, take notes, etc. in plain text or plain-text-based file formats, such as TeX and SGML. This way, if I have the file in hand--but the software that created it is unavailable--it is trivial for me to write my own program to decode it again if all else fails. From a risk management point of view, this is nearly ideal.

I think many people spend more time than they will admit to dealing with this proprietary communications protocol. Dealing with subtle incompatibilties. Dealing with data corruption. Doing everything manually, for cripes sake, when a text-based format would allow automation through scripts.

When--not if--we are finally using open file formats, such as the XML formats with Open Office, we will notice a general improvement in the quality of our communications. These open files allow for flexibility that can be invaluable when large amounts of data need to be processed or when the office suite isn't available and we just need a few tidbits of information. It may not be possible to quantify the impact of these improvements, but they will certainly be good for our society.

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.

Out of the millions of engineers, managers, and support staff in the world, a few thousand displaced is kinda sad, but it really is a small number of people. The people who used to make a living selling Microsoft Office will adjust. What happens to them is no different than what happens to realestate agents or car salesmen when segments of our economy take a dive. Volatility is nothing new. That's why community colleges are successful. They are an integral part of retraining our workforce as the markets evolve.

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.

Free Software is a real part of the software industry. Yes, it does affect the commercial parts of that industry. However, I, a software engineer, don't mind. I will adapt to the presence of Free Software. All Free Software does is alter what is marketable. I will find something new to produce and sell, and I might be successful at it. This is how the free market worked before and nothing has changed.

We shouldn't try to do something foolish, such as suppressing Free Software in the hopes of creating jobs, when the Market obviously wants something else. This is what the U.S. goverment tries frequently often with debatable results.

I used to think that it was great to be able to set up an entire advanced Internet-system for free...

It still is. The Internet is about community; it is part of our civilisation's infrastructure.

... 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?

No. As I stated above, there will always be marketable software that remains unwritten. There will always be new problems that need solving, and there will always be people (sometimes called entrepeneurs) who are up to the task.

Re:Too much competition

[cscx]

Two things:

1) RTF is actually a stripped-down DOC format.

2) Word files are for the most part backwards compatible. Files created in Office xp, for example, can be opened in Office 97 (no one still runs Office 95, DO THEY?) w/o a problem. The only difference is that formatting applied in the newer versions of office, like say double-strike-squiggly-cool-flashing-green underlining format, that was unavailable in the earlier version, will be missing. But everything else will work fine, so that is FUD.

I think some people need to come to the realization that although you may absolutely HATE Word or Office, it IS the standard, whether you like it or not. Kind of reminds me of a class I took last year where the professor posted some of his materials in Word format. One of the "I use Linux but OpenOffice blows" idiots in the class thought he could raise beef with the professor and make his free software political statement, right there in front of us. Well, basically he was told to fuck off by the professor, and had to end up using Word anyway (Office is available to any registered student for $5). Pretty funny, actually.

Re:Too much competition

[GreyPoopon]

no one still runs Office 95, DO THEY?

I do, not that I actually use it very much anymore. But I absolutely REFUSE to pay $$$ just because they made the new format incompatible with the old. Besides, I think I installed the Word 97 filter some time ago.

...although you may absolutely HATE Word or Office, it IS the standard, whether you like it or not.

How can you call something that has never been approved by a standards body, and is proprietary (no public spec) a standard? Standards require that a body of disconnected companies agree. Since the format is not open, there has been no opportunity to do that. Just because it is the most widely used doesn't make it the standard.

What people are suggesting is that we come up with a STANDARD, OPEN format that all developers of office suites can agree on, thus greatly enabling interoperability. It's not likely that Microsoft will ever agree to that, but maybe somebody can fudge together an add-in module that allows Microsoft Word users to read and save documents in the new format. Continuing loyalty to a totally closed specification doesn't help ANYBODY, not even yourself in the long run.

Re:Too much competition

[cscx]

I hope you understand that by "standard" I meant "most widely used and accepted format." I guess you can say that Pepsi or Coke are the "standard" by the same logic --- it doesn't have to be approved by any organization, yet how many people do you see drink Coke vs. say, RC or Virgin Cola?

Re:Too much competition

[4of12]

I hope you understand that by "standard" I meant "most widely used and accepted format." I guess you can say that Pepsi or Coke are the "standard" by the same logic

Good analogy.

Reminds me of the good old days when Coca Cola had cocaine as one of it's ingredients, as if the sugar and caffeine were insufficiently addictive.

Heroin-ware is just painful to stop using, even if you curse it, pay a lot of money for it and all your friends are doing it.

I think OpenOffice could supplant Microsoft Office if it develops adequate import filters for all versions of MS Word and simultaneously develops a powerful, robust and flexible XML for its native format.

It would help, of course, if it were distributed for free on 30 million CDs...

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.

Re:OSX Port

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Maybe because the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice doesn't exist yet? (So far they only have 90% of the code _compiling_, much less running correctly.)

I love my Mac, but unfortunately the majority of Mac developers are not used to the idea of open source. Hardly anyone is interested in working on this project.

Re:OSX Port

[TandyMasterControl]

Because it doesn't exist? And maybe these helpful Finns could supply one porting the same OpenOffice source they're using to release modified X86 versions for windows and linux?

That could be why.

Check the screenshots

[Morthaur]

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?!

Why does this even merit a /. story; it's just a niche-market re-branding of a free software product. Stick to OpenOffice, it already rocks.

Re:question

[kraf]

I don't get it why people are so harsh on the paperclip.
You can change it to a cute little doggie !
The doggie has helped me lot in my productivity and in making my desktop frendlier.

Too much wordiness repeating uneeded words

[JamesOfTheDesert]

Before basic editing: 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.

After: Most people don't adopt secondary office suites because of the different standards.

Re:Too much wordiness repeating uneeded words

[Error27]

You are obsolutely correct of course, but I say if he spends all his time impersonating CmdrTaco then he's already far too lame to worry about little things like bad prose.

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.

Re:I don't think this is a good idea

[glwtta]

Brilliant, I guess we can all go home then. Thank you for your help in solving this.

Re:I don't think this is a good idea

[blakestah]

how many people do you think a large corporation would need to control slashdot moderation? Imagine, reading and posting to slashdot all day with 10-20 ids and getting PAID for it! I want that job!! ;-)

One person. 20 /. IDs, all of which post regularly. Then, wait for an appropriate article, make a few anonymous posts, and mod them up. Both articles were posted in the first 20 minutes (key for /.), both were instantly mod'd to +5, and in the long haul both are losing moderation points.

Like I said - a well-conducted troll, or a corporate marketing department. This wouldn't take that much time, and might easily be considered worth it.

Re:I don't think this is a good idea

[blakestah]

I modded him up because I believe in what he said. Sometimes too much choice is confusing for the end user, a valid point.

Well done.

I modded you as troll because beyond being offtopic, your spewing uninformed conspiracy theories.

Uninformed ? Come on, get real. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that someone was playing /. to sway opinion. The only question is whether that was someone just playing, or someone being paid to do it.

SOT Linux and Office

[Lucky_Pierre]

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.

Re:SOT Linux and Office

[jejones]

Well...I grabbed SOT Office for Linux in RPM format.rpm -i did its thing, but: running the setup program cheerfully copied 250+ megabytes of stuff per run. Also, anything in SOT Office but the setup program gives me the splash screen and then goes away when I try to run it. (Admittedly I'm using RH Skipjack Beta 2, so it's not clear whose fault this is.) It's going to have to make my coffee for me and shine my shoes in the morning to be worth a quarter of a gigabyte per user...

You mentioned the point in your post

[twilight30]

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.

Re:Difference between SOT and OpenOffice?

[sleontuX]

For example i can read russian doc's.
Or i can make presentations and they are saved in powerpoint format.

WordPerfect

[AntiNorm]

According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice

Is it compatible with WordPerfect? Nearly all of the word processor files I have are in .wpd format...

Re:WordPerfect

[mstyne]

It would seem that it doesn't handle .wpd. However, it looks like you can open Microsoft Word files going back as far as Office 95. It also handles Star Office's Star Writer format. I'm going to look into both this and the original Open Office, as my Star Office 6.0 Beta is slated to expire in June.

Re:I do think it is a good idea

[fferreres]

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!

Target: Finnish Goverment

[villoks]

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

Who needs Office?

[Lemmy Caution]

You can get Vigor, a vi clone with a talking (and evil) paper-clip assistant!

Re:Who needs Office?

[anpe]

Sure, plus you can use Vim Scripting for Applications that allows you to create QT based apps and LaTeX templates in a WYSIWYG(c) manner.

Nice, but...

[Jethro]

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).

Re:Nice, but...

[joto]

Well, that's kind of being overly harsh on DRI, isn't it. At least it's good for games, and other stuff were you need fast graphics.

But so far, my experience with DRI has led me to disable it as well. And it will be, untill I can at least safely run simple things such as glxgears without guaranteed lockdown of my X-server.

Actually, the instability of Xfree86 is a big pain in the ass for new users, and for people helping them convert. People come to linux for increased stability, and the first thing that happens after they randomly try some stuff on the foot-menu, is that their X-server locks up, rendering their keyboard, monitor and mouse unusable. Yay for stability!

Ok, enough ranting. I should probably be contributing something instead.

Re:Nice, but...

[Jethro]

I actually still have that from the good ol' StarOffice 5 days or something. So that doesn't actually do it.

Re:question

[cscx]

Y'know, I always thought that MS Agent (the API that brings you all the talking characters) could use a BOFH character.

"Save there again and that's the last time you open THAT document."

"I've taken the liberty of password protecting all your Word documents with a random alphanumeric password. If you can't hack in to your own documents than you shouldn't be using Office in the first place...."

Odd acronyms

[steveha]

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

Re:Odd acronyms

[Stephen VanDahm]

"When I saw BOHF I immediately thought "Bastard Operator from Hell.'"

Bastard Operator Harassment of Finland. For starters, the minimum system requirements call for 64 MB more RAM than you have, regardless of how much RAM you have. And they have a talking paperclip that, rather than trying to help you, tells you to RTFM, which is, of course, written in Russian. This product is exciting news, because in spite of everything, it's still more cost effective and easier to use than MS Office.

Every worker his own suite!

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

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.

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.

Re:This is now illegal

[saphena]

It's really hard to imagine what law they might use to outlaw the actual reading and writing of "their" file formats and I've just had a quick look round their website and found nothing.

It's almost certainly illegal to reverse engineer one of their applications to deduce the file format but, if you can manage without doing that, it should be perfectly legal whatever they say.

Why the hell is parent offtopic?

[popeyethesailor]

The link leads to a legit website, and this article is about OpenOffice.
Please read the posts before you moderate.

woo

[nomadic]

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.

Re:woo

[nomadic]

It was sarcasm. I was mocking the people on slashdot who constantly claim how OSS is a better business model.

No UTF-8

[bertilow]

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?

Re:What's the difference?

[Arker]

Under the GPL they can charge, not just for the updates, but for the main package as well if they want to.

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.

Their obligation here is to make the source available to anyone they distribute the binary to. Period. They can charge as much or as little as they want for the binary, and be fine with the GPL, as long as the source is there too.

Re:Difference between SOT and OpenOffice?

[Arker]

Apparently most of their work has been in localisation. I understand it works better than straight openoffice for Finnish and other languages used in the area, it can spellcheck Finnish documents and so forth.

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:This is now illegal

[reddogcandy]

It is not "illegal" in any country. You are thinking about the End User License Agreement for MSDN Library, which potentially makes it a license violation (which isn't the same as a violation of public statutes or criminal code). I will quote: "you may use documentation identified in the Library as the file format specification for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and/or Microsoft PowerPoint ('File Format Documentation') solely in conjunction with your development of software product(s) that operate in conjunction with Windows, Windows NT, or Windows 2000 that are not general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, database management, or presentation graphics software products or an integrated work or product suite whose components include one or more general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products. Note: A product that includes limited word-processing, spreadsheet, database, or presentation graphics components along with other components that provide significant and primary value, such as an accounting product with limited spreadsheet capability, is not considered to be a 'general-purpose' product. For licensing terms relating to use of the File Format Documentation for purposes other than the use described above, please contact Microsoft Corporation."

I will point out several things:

• The EULA covers use of Microsoft's documentation. If you don't use Microsoft's documentation to implement your file format compatibility, the EULA doesn't apply to you.
• Although this provision remains in the current EULA for MSDN Library, Microsoft stopped including the Office file format specifications in MSDN Library years ago, so it's somewhat difficult to violate this provision today.
• Most of the Office applications are moving gradually to using XML-based formats. Although Microsoft has implemented proprietary schemas and styles, all of it is still readily visible as plain text and fundamentally easier to inspect and reverse-engineer. The absence of documentation will only grow less and less important as XML takes over.

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.

Real time review...

[Rogerborg]

Stream of consciousness installation process for Windows version (on WinXP)...

• Tricky getting to the file. ftp server is hosed. http gets there eventually, then serves at 109KB/s. Nice. Now serving over gnutella, "soto_en.exe", incidentally, 41MB or so.
• Unzips OK. Installer is nice and clear. Still can't understand why it needs 102MB of disk space though.
• Hey, where's the clickthough? The fuck? Did I blink and miss it? Can I just use this thing?
• Start->Program->SOT Office 2002, let's see, "Text Document", that's 90% of the use cases.
• Do I want to import my Windows Address Book? OK then, do it.
• Fails. More information. Ah, it's looking for an Outlook Express address book. Fair enough, I'm not using that P.O.S.
• OK, a blank document. Looks pretty much like any StarOffice/OpenOffice/Word clone. I could easily forget this isn't Word.
• The basic test: open a Word '97 .doc... 100,000 words (yes, I'm one of those poor struggling "content producers" you keep hearing about), no styles (ask me about styles in StarOffice 5.2 or Office '97 under Wine for that matter, go on, ask me). Opens fast, looks fine, the endnotes are all intact.
• OK, options, Load/Save. Looks just like Word. Autosave every minute, create backup (oh yes). Oh, default save format? "SOT Office 6.0 Text Document"? A quick save reveals that this is a binary format, not anything sane like XML. So, no, I don't bloody well think so. Word 97/2000/XP, please. "This may cause data loss.". I'll take that risk. If I can't use this to reliably read/write Word 97 .doc binary formats, it's no use to me (sorry, but it isn't).
• Languages now. Again, looks just like Word 97. Default locale, set as English (UK), language as English (UK).
• Spellcheck time! Uh, "The spellcheck is complete". I don't think so. Try again. Apparently it's complete. No, it clearly isn't. What's going on? Oh, there's no dictionary for English (UK), only for English (US) and Finnish. It would be handy if it could actually say that.
• Back to the web site. Uh, sotoffice, addon, dict... it's empty. No English (UK) dictionary for me. Damn. OK, get it later, press on with English (US). No, dammit, it's still not checking. Come back to this.
• OK, try loading a Word '97 document with embedded images. Hurrah! There they are, in the right place. Actually, in better places than in Word '97, it's fixed the image that was spilling over the page end. Make some mods, save it out, load it back into Word (this is vital). It look fine.
• Back to the spellchecker again. Let's check those languages. Ah, what? It's changed to German. Hmm, wasn't that a "feature" of StarOffice 6 beta?
• No, I absolutely cannot figure out how to get it to perform a spell check (or to tell me why it isn't). Also, I can't see a word count tool or find it in the help; this is an astonishing omission.

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. ;-)

Re:Real time review...

[Rogerborg]

• IIRC, the default format of all OpenOffice derivitives is binary, because it's just gzipped XML.

You remember correctly. It's zipped 672K of XML down to 208K. The original binary Word '97 .doc is 1056K!

Thanks for the info.

Re:Real time review...

[Roblimo]

OpenOffice/StarOffice word count:

Click on "file," then on "properties," then on statistics.

Dumb, but it's there. I have not yet found a way to have a "running" word count or to count words in a highlighted block or a portion of the document instead of the whole thing.

- Robin

Re:Real time review...

[Surak]

OK, options, Load/Save. Looks just like Word. Autosave every minute, create backup (oh yes). Oh, default save format? "SOT Office 6.0 Text Document"? A quick save reveals that this is a binary format, not anything sane like XML. So, no, I don't bloody well think so. Word 97/2000/XP, please. "This may cause data loss.". I'll take that risk. If I can't use this to reliably read/write Word 97 .doc binary formats, it's no use to me (sorry, but it isn't).


If it uses the same format as OpenOffice, then the file format is a set of XML files that are zipped (as in PKZIP format)

Re:Real time review...

[Rogerborg]

• OpenOffice/StarOffice word count: Click on "file," then on "properties," then on statistics.

Thanks! Yes, that's less than ideal. I guess it's only professional wordsmiths that really rely no it, but (as has been pointed out elsewhere) it's the first thing that a reviewer will notice.

I'm getting to like it more. Still can't figure out the spell check though. ;-)

Re:Real time review...

[Uggy]

Go to File --> Properties

You'll see word count and bunch of other stuff there.

Re:Real time review...

[gnugnugnu]

Abiword, Dia, and many KDE applications use gzip compression but openoffice/staroffice use zip compression.

This document explains the rationale behind the ZIP-based package format. The decision was made after an elaborate discussion on the XML dev mailing list, whose archive can be consulted for additional detail.

I feel strongly that files should not be compressed by default to avoid confusion.
Zip does at least allow variable/partial compresion so if they cared to there could be a text comment explaining that it is in fact zip compressed XML and still compress the rest of the document.

Re:Real time review...

[spasm]

"Spellcheck time! Uh, "The spellcheck is complete". I don't think so. Try again."

That's weird - the problem goes the other way with 'standard' open office & SO6 - save a document as W98/00 and Word would refuse to spellcheck it. The workaround is to select all & set language to [anything]. Fixed in the development version of openoffice, but needs the workaround in the stable release.

Re:Real time review...

[eggz128]

OpenOffice.org's additional dictionaries are here. English UK is there too.

I'm not suprised you couldn't find it, it's buried quite deep :)

Re:Real time review...

[Rogerborg]

• the workaround is to select all & set language to [anything]

Tried that, setting it to English (US). Still no luck. I'm sure I'll figure it out in the next five minutes, but it's such a basic issue that if it's not immediately obvious, it's going to hurt takeup.

It's distribution, not price

[nagora]

Actually, it's just difficult to get people to pay for any software that they can download but can't buy in a shop.

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

Try ClarisWorks, I mean AppleWorks

[DABANSHEE]

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.

What really comprises an Office Suite?

[Trinition]

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:

1. Microsoft Outlook (PIM)
2. MIcrosoft Word (Word Processor)
3. Microsoft Excel (Spreadsheet)
4. MIcrosoft Access (RDBMS)
5. 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 all

So, 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?

Re:What really comprises an Office Suite?

[Paranoid]

I know there are open source PIMs out there. Why they haven't been integrated is beyond me.

Yes, there are. However, out of curiosity, what purpose would integrating them serve? It just seems like a waste of bandwidth to make everyone download pieces they won't use, to me.

A linux distribution should put different pieces in different packages. If you think its more convenient to be able to deploy everything at once, you can create a metapackage named "task-openoffice" which depends on everything else, and just install that.

Re:What really comprises an Office Suite?

[Paranoid]

Which is why such people install the prominently placed everything-officelike-under-the-sun package which depends on and therefore installs everything else. I don't have a problem with an all-encompassing package, I just demand modularity - even the MS Office installer allows you to choose which things should be installed, after all.

Re:What really comprises an Office Suite?

[Paranoid]

It's awfully handy to have programs that can talk to each other.

I suppose I can see some logic in that. This is why gnome's invented things like Bonobo and libGAL, I suppose (although I'm not too familiar with either, let alone what KDE's come up with).

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:OpenOffice fonts!

[cowbutt]

You'll only get anti-aliased fonts if you're using XFree 4.1 or newer and have AA properly configured.

The screenshots don't show anti-aliased fonts, so I assume you've got a different problem. If the fonts are generally lumpy, it's possible that your Xserver is running with a non-standard or non-square resolution. Force it to 75dpi x 75dpi by starting it with -dpi 75.

XFree 4 appears to query the monitor using DDC and set the dpi settings accordingly by default. Some monitors give out duff information...

--

Wish I'd known about this b4 I spent 300 dollars

[dh003i]

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.

**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..

Re:**sigh** There always one...

[HiThere]

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.

Umnh ... value is the crucial term here. The first sentence is correct. With the second sentence you seem to have slipped into the false equating of value with $$. The monetary worth is certainly a part of the value, but it's far from being the whole thing. This is why sole-source agreements routinely need to be justified beyond just saying "it's cheaper". Sole-source in and of itself is a significant cost. The more imprtant a component of your business something is, the stronger the justification for sole-source needs to be. Think of it as a kind of insurance against future "accidents". If something could put your company out of business, then a sole-source justification is nearly impossible.

People just got into the habit of thinking of software as a kind of fringe item that merely helped make things a bit more efficient. And they didn't change their way of thinking appropriately as the "fringe component" gradually worked its way into the center of their business activities. Now I doubt that many companies could either make their payroll or do their taxes without computer assistance. This is a quite central vulnerability. So sole source justification should be on the level of "this is sufficiently important to put the company out of business". But habit is a strong thing, so people still haven't started thinking of it in that way.

Open source, and esp. Free Software, is insurance against the sole-source vulnerability. This is a value that very few items of proprietary software bring to the table.

i can put up a mirror...

[gimpboy]

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.

Only problem?!?

[wurp]

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.

We need competent reviewers

[ChrisWong]

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.

ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!

[fmaxwell]

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.

Re:ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!

[AxelBoldt]

[about Microsoft Office:]

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.

You didn't mention the artificial inefficiencies introduced by EULA-protected software:

• Restrictions on how and when software can be used.
• Restrictions on what other products can be used in conjunction with the software.
• Restrictions on what can be said about the software.
• Requirement to keep proof of purchase for an indefinite amount of time, lest the company be subject to a disruptive audit.

These artificial inefficiencies reduce productivitiy and will therefore be swept aside by market forces. Reduced productivity means lower living standards for everybody; if you read your Niemoeller quote right, and include all of society in your consideration, not just EULA-software writers, then you'll have to agree that the death of the EULA model is desirable. Right now, it survives only because of companies that have been convicted of abusing their software monopoly. But there is no question that the EULA-software model is fighting a losing battle. Nobody can argue that "that's what consumers want". Consumers want high quality software, minus the restrictions, and that's exactly what they are going to get.

Re:ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!

[fmaxwell]

Well, if the required functionality can be obtained for free, I prefer free.

I'm a software engineer, so I prefer to see software engineers paid to create software. I don't want to see the entire team that works on Microsoft Office get laid off. I don't want them out on the street competing for jobs and driving wages down (what happens when there are more workers than jobs for them to fill).

I use free software and am not violently opposed to it. I recognize that we can't all justify going out and purchasing lots of expensive packages for personal use. But when I specify a product for my company to buy, I prefer commercial software. I think it's hypocritical for a professional software engineer, paid to develop software, to look for ways to keep from paying other software engineers.

Re:ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!

[fmaxwell]

I think it's dishonest to recommend anything other than that which best serves your employer's needs (whether it's open or closed-source.)

How is it "dishonest" for me to "prefer commercial software" and to not "look for ways to keep from paying other software engineers"?

Here's a wake-up call for you: Your employer is not looking out for your interests. They are looking out for theirs. They would love to see the bottom drop out of the programming market so that they could pay you half (or less) of what you earn now. If using open source software helped put a few more software engineers on the street, they'd be happy to use it.

Here's a hypothetical: Suppose you found open-source software that would eliminate your employer's need to keep you and four of your coworkers employed. Would it be "dishonest" not to recommend it?

If software engineers don't start considering the health of their profession, they are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Huh???

[crisco]

1) RTF is actually a stripped-down DOC format.

RTF is a markup style format that looks something like:

{\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.

2) Word files are for the most part backwards compatible.

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.

Re:Huh???

[darien]

As I read it (i.e. cursorily), the RTF spec allows you to encode application-specific data - so no necessary loss of formatting information - and other word processors can simply ignore the parts they don't understand.

Re:Huh???

[crisco]

That could be the case. I've had the impression that the .doc format was a series of object states serialized to disk, hence the binary format, backwards compatibility problems and difficulty parsing it. However that isn't even a very informed impression. But Word could be built around a capable RTF importer / exporter along with object serialization / deserialization capabilities.

Microsoft does make a RTF specification available, but I don't see any clear answers to the question at hand.

i don't think so

[SethJohnson]

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 is unlike a traditional manufacturing concern like Ford where the profit margin rides barely above the cost to manufacture each car.

Once the cost to produce is covered, you would normally expect the price to drop on a given product. That would be the case in an environment where competition influences pricing. Since microsoft has no competition in this area, it can keep the price abnormally high. Compare this to the current release of Lightwave. That app sells probably a millionth of the number of copies that msOffice sells each year. The app costs $1500. With normal economies of scale, microsoft should be able to sell msOffice for a dime. Why should it? There's no competition out there. That's where free software comes in. As long as there is no pressure for microsoft to lower the price, they'll keep gouging customers. "You don't like the price of our office suite? Go build your own." That's precisely what we're doing.

if they make lots of profits and show VCs and investors that it can be a nice thing to put money into software companies?

I think you need to talk to more people involved in startups who have solicited money from VC's. You want to guarantee yourself NO money from a group of investors? Mention that your product is intended to compete in any way with microsoft. They're the 900 pound gorilla in so many markets. Investors know that throwing money at anything that would attempt to compete with microsoft is basically guaranteeing failure. The more areas where microsoft takes over, the fewer areas a startup can try to develop a business plan. Notice that there are no big companies forming in areas where microsoft has taken over. Anybody that's big was started before microsoft became the goliath- Netscape, Apple, Real Networks, AOL, and Sun. If you want a fewer number of opportunities for new companies to grow, continue to buy and use msOffice. Otherwise, support free software.

competition

[Hanzie]

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

Re:I do think it is a good idea

[fferreres]

Please lecture me. I'm still learning the vocavulary. It's quite extensive and i make mistakes. Anyway...

Federico

Re:Difference between SOT and OpenOffice?

[prostoalex]

Well, here's my 2 cents on Russian documents. I installed OpenOffice under XP, and had a Word document typed up in Cyrillic, but under 2000. So while in XP I open up the document in OpenOffice, opens okay, I type two more pages, to make a total of ten, and then save it back to MS Word format since that's the way my editors want it.

Reboot into 2000, get my MS Word with Russian spellchecker, open up and... You guessed it, 10 pages of nothing but ????? for Cyrillic characters with occasional English words interweaved (the text was a software review, so it had lots of English words and names).

No one mentions the word OpenOffice in my house again.

Reply from the SOT folks

[tdye]

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