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New OpenOffice.org-Based Office Suite
Voidhobo writes: "SOT, a Linux-distributor from the home-country of Linux, is offering SOT Office, a free productivity suite partly based on OpenOffice, for Linux and Windows. According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice." OpenOffice is great, so I hope their claims have merit.
its very exciting.
you can get them here.
I wonder how long, if ever it will be before this gets ported to OSX. That's a platform that seems to be getting a lot of growth as a unix, with the powerbook routinely being rated as one of the best unix portables available. This is a platform that, while it has office, really needs a free suite of office programs for those of us who don't want to use Microsoft's products but need the compatability, and this program seems like it would fit the bill exactly.
The screenshots show an application that's identical to OpenOffice, save only the name, and the colours used in the instaler. Makes you wonder, what's the point?!
/. story; it's just a niche-market re-branding of a free software product. Stick to OpenOffice, it already rocks.
Why does this even merit a
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"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
I downloaded their new (renamed) distro SOT Linux along with SOT Office (Linux and Windows) Saturday night. SOT Linux installed very nicely as did both versions of SOT Office. So far I have nothing to complain about. Nice distro and VERY nice installer.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
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.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
Well,
As far as I know, their primary target is the Finnish audience. They have added features like Finnish spelling and the package has also Finnish menus etc.
This actually makes sense, many Finnish government agencis are currently considering switching to linux and the Finnish office software is something which is really requited. The Finnish Custon uses already Open Office btw.
Ville
You can get Vigor, a vi clone with a talking (and evil) paper-clip assistant!
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...."
SOT is a little odd, but the one that got me was Bunch of Helpful Fixes (BOHF). When I saw BOHF I immediately thought "Bastard Operator from Hell".
Maybe the first BOHF will add Back Orifice functionality to SOT Office, so you can take over all the MS boxes on your net. And an exuses database.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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
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:
Stream of consciousness installation process for Windows version (on WinXP)...
So there we go. It looks like Word, it opens Word, it saves Word (so far), but it's got bugs (I'm back to German as the default language again), the spell checking works unusually (which means badly if you're trying to attract Word users), and there's no word count. My god, there's no word count. I really cannot do without a word count.
But it's free, and it looks good. I'm certainly going to stick with it for a few days and see if I fall in love. Definitely worth trying... unless you need a word count. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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!
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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
i think the functionality office provides us with is very cool, but the way we are forced to approach it via the gui stinks. hold your horses, and read further to hear my favorite view of the future:
;-) but: as long as the document-standards are open, since anyone can then build any gui layer on it they like!
i a not-so-distant future, the desktop will probably not be ruled by "office suites that need to be able to do anything including coffeemaking".
while i enjoy the efforts the open source community is putting into creating ms-office work-a-likes, that market will be history. everything is going to be webservices-based, and perhaps we will even reach the state where documents do not need to be tied to an application, but there will just be a unified (xml) document format, which can contain calculation-functionality (a-la excel) but also good layout functions to make it look nice. the whole idea of presentation software, wordprocessors, and drawing programs as separate entities is ridiculous anyhow in my perception. just choose the output device (printer, posterprinter, screen, beamer, webpage) and build the document.
as it is now, several (often small) companies exist merely because of the need to adapt the swiss-army-knife that office is into a specific tool that suits the client situation. there's money to be made there even if there is no officesuite, since there is always going to be a need for specific solutions.
so if you ask me: get rid of all those office suites, build something that can do all the things i mentioned before, and build gui layers on top of it that can handle the specific objects within the documents, like editing text, database connection, performing calculations, making drawings/graphs, etc...
we have all the tools. we have well worked out markup languages, style sheets, etc. we have good databases, good toolkits to build guis. things could become *really* platform independent, and we wouldn't have to worry about how to fit our grand scheme into the current situation, created by software giants as our favorite one from redmond.
money can be made by providing services to companies that need specific functionality, and not by making software that still needs to be adapted to do the job. whether the solution i propose is done using open software or closed software doesn't make a difference. (to me it does, but let's not go into the open = better than closed subject
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.
If a SW package 'A' has less value then 'B', then one should probably use 'B'. Closed / Open source doesn't have any bearing. The OSS argument is that many OSS sw packages bring similar, and in some cases greater value to the table than closed source software.
There are certianly exceptions. But for the most part, I see companies taken to the cleaners for software whole capabilities they will never truely exercise. (Could have bought something smaller and less expensive)
I'd love to see any data/examples you have on this. I think history paints a somewhat different picture. As a software company (be it MS, Oracle, IBM, McAffee, etc) finds a successful product, they tend to expand in their own industry and dominate it. I highly doubt that you can find ANY example to support your ideas above. On the contrary, we have MS (desktop and office suites), Oracle (DB), IBM (used to dominate on servers, DB, etc), McAfee (anti-virus).Further, the billions made by SW companies goes into the hands of Executives, Share Holders and VCs NOT into the hands of the everyday worker. I'm not a class warrior, but let's call a spade a spade.
On the contrary, the best example I've seen used OSS software when they started out and MIGRATED to more robust closed source solutions as NEEDED (think sprial dev methodology). If they had gone straight to the expensive solution, they would have managed to waste a lot of money on stuff they didn't need and would have needed to purchase more sw later (as some requirements weren't totally hashed out early on). NO, I really don't. And I DON'T work as a sysadmin, I AM a software engineer who does development and integration work. When I'm building custom SW, more of the money spent on development goes to me as oppoesed to a COTS company where I'm also supporting the beaurocracy.Again, I'm not opposed to closed source, I almost took a job with a closed source company, but I think it's incredibly mis-leading to say that closed source software drives the industry when most programers don't make their living writing closed source software..
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
if someone can send me the files. email me if you have the binaries, and i'll put up a mirror to relieve the load on their ftp servers.
-- john