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StarOffice 6.0
Lawrence Teo writes "News.com,
Infoworld.com,
and
eWeek
are all reporting that Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which will be released on May 21, will cost a measly $75.95. That's less than a quarter the cost of Microsoft Office. Details are also available at Sun's own StarOffice 6.0 website." Sun's press release mentions the new features, although if you're familiar with openoffice.org, you've got a pretty good idea of what StarOffice has to offer. An anonymous reader also points out that Sun has effectively one-upped Microsoft's various schemes to get its software into schools by making an unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education.
You can already pre-order it here
Wow. Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also planning their so called next-gen Office which is also supposedly based on XML. That zdnet article is pretty interesting.. it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm getting .NET-phobia) and StarOffice.
Since I primarily use any office suite for word processing, I just downloaded AbiWord. Slashdot ran a story earlier, too, about this.
If you use databases, I am sure you can find some open source version DB software somewhere. Same with spreadsheets and presentations. As for scheduling, let's just say, pen and back of hand work fine.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Hmmm... Free StarOffice for Chinese kids...
One can only hope that the rollout will be done in a more responsible way that the Korean K12 Internet Access initiative. If you're the unlucky recipient of spam, chances are that a lot of it is sent to you courtesy of the Korean school system. All 16,000 schools got a preconfigured PC with some Windows toolkit on it that will connect anyone on the Internet to anyone else for any purpose. Kewl. Of course, none of the educators were educated into being good Internet citizens, and with English skills at a minimum the non-Korean speaking world now has a problem.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
That was a consideration. Sun's decision to charge is based on research that showed enterprise users were not adopting StarOffice 5.2, the previous version of the product, in a significant way because they questioned Sun's commitment to a product it was giving away for free and which did not come with support and training.
Seems that there are a lot of "Why StarOffice, and not OpenOffice.org?" posts out there. To make things easier, here's where you can find the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
Star Office still has the Adabas database component and some extra file/print filters.
These items were proprietary code that Sun could not open source because they were not part of the Star Office purchase.
Open Office doesn't have these items, but most people won't need them. That along with commercial support are the only real differences. If you don't need a GUI database and you don't need commercial support, get Open Office.
Sun is not counting on Star Office to be a cash cow ($76Million isn't chump change, but it won't change the world either). The cost associated with Star Office is to help pay for support infrastructure, which in turn makes companies who feel that only supported software is worth using (a logical concept for an Enterprise level company) feel comfortable buying Star Office.
I've been using Open Office for months and, especially because of the last 2 releases, have gone ahead and removed Office 2000 and Star Office 5.2.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
The best part about purchasing the single-user license is that you can install it on up to 5 workstations. This eliminates the "What do you mean I can't install Office on two computers?"
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
The difference?
A database program, for one. More licensed clip art and fonts, for another.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No, the code base is the same. Sun released the code base but didn't fork their own development separate from Open Office.
As others have said, Open Office is missing components (db, fonts, templates), though.
From the General FAQ:
Q. What are the differences between StarOffice 6.0 software and the OpenOffice.org 1.0?
A. StarOffice 6.0 softwre is a commercial product aimed at organizations and consumers while OpenOffice.org 1.0 is aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community. StarOffice includes licensed-in, third-party technology such as:
In addition to product differences, StarOffice offers:
As for me, I've installed OpenOffice 1.0 (I'm a TeX sort of chap), buy I can see this being great for businesses.
I've read a couple post'ers comment on font issues in Linux. Here's how to solve the one I had, sacrificing a bit of startup time; I assume this will fix similar behavior in other Linux installs of OOo 1.0:
:-)
-----
Find user/psprint/pspfontcache from whatever directory your soffice binary is in
either delete this file or rename it
make a new, empty "pspfontcache" file and make it READ-ONLY ("touch pspfontcache && chmod 444 pspfontcache")
-----
The issue has something to do w/ font caching; I got this fix from OOo's IssueZilla.
There, OOo is now that much more useful for Linux users.
For the record, I'd look into SO 6.0 if it had a *usable* database component (I hate to admit it, but, like M$ Access).
According to Sun's FAQ: Schools and educational institutions can receive StarOffice 6.0 office suite for the cost of media and shipping. For more details visit Sun's StarOffice Education Web site. Perhaps the article should have said "including China".
The LGPL. Will please please read the licenses they advocate. The LesserGPL allows Sun to take openoffice, use it and add closed source code. All the stuff they take from OpenOffice must have it's sorce readily available - and it does. But closed code can exist in the same project as LGPL code.
If you've never bought sun software at the enterprise level, you wouldn't know...
Sun has a discount level associated with every product. The level is identified with a letter: A, D, and H for most hardware, B and P for most software, some other codes.
They negotiate discount levels with just about anybody - the bigger the institution, the steeper the discount. For example, a certain institution that I know of (I don't know if this is technically NDA so I won't mention names) has a 38% category A discount (with which we buy Sun Fire 3800s and up), a 20% category H discount (for netras and the like), and a 38% category B discount (for software like staroffice). So when we buy Solaris media with documentation, instead of $100 we pay $62.
Of course we have a site license for Solaris and StarOffice, so in reality we don't pay per seat. But when my boss got confused, we paid $62 for staroffice...
This is a standard discount with which we buy online. I know that another institution had a category A of only about 30% and a category H of about 15%... each group negotiates separately.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
More like semi-XML-like garbage in a HTML file. It seems to work (you can save as 'HTML' and get the formatting back into Word), but yeah calling it XML was an overstatement.
Read the article
It's free for all education institutions anyway, period. You just have to buy the media. It's the same deal for solaris. We usually pay about twenty-something bucks I believe for the media. Plus not everyone is going to need the media. And you may even be able to distribute backups internally in your educational instition ( read the licence ).
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
SteelX wrote:
.NET-phobia)
.Net's crown jewel (and the bane of privacy organizations everywhere). Hailstorm (supprise, supprise) has fallen flat on its face, and now Microsoft announces that it too will be joining Office. Also joining Office will be the subscription fees to pay for Hailstorm (and while you are at it, Microsoft hopes you will pay for Office over and over again too).
> Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also
> planning their so called next-gen Office
Actually, that was Microsoft being caught with nothing to offer when a new competitor had a new version. They can't let a competitor be in the news without blabing about themselves, so they mumbled some things about their next Office version (due in another six months to a year at the earliest). Of course they are still trying to get people to upgrade to Office XP, when many are still running Office 97, and I've even heard of one person who was still on Office 95.
> it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm
> getting
Here's a nice story that might make you feel better. Once upon a time, Microsoft spent much time and money researching a brilliant new idea. They brought it to market, and named it Bob. Poor Bob fell flat on his face and immediately died (I believe the cause was terminal stupidity, but I could be wrong). (Un)fortunately, the cute cudly assistants from Bobland were rescued and went to live in Office, where they lived happily ever after (until Microsoft recently made them disabled by default).
History, thankfully, repeats itself (because Microsoft never seems to learn). In the late 90's, Microsoft spent much more time and money researching the Millenium Project (yep, Millenium also starred as the alien that Godzilla nuked in "Godzilla 2000 Millenium"). Millenium used Java (and a JVM named "Borg") instead of C#, but it was basically the same thing that Microsoft is bringing to market under the name of ".Net". Hailstorm was to be
Sooner or later, every product of Microsoft's that people hate will be bundled with either their OS or their office suite. With any luck, both Windows and Office will become so universally hated that people will switch to all the better alternatives that are out there (and more will come the more people want them).
What happens when you embrace and extend Godzilla? Nuclear heartburn!
See "Godzilla 2000" (released in Japan as "Godzilla 2000 Millenium") for details.
FUD Part 1:
:)
"Companies considering a switch to StarOffice or a competing product won't find the move cheap. Gartner estimates that the average cost per user would be about $1,200, which works out to about $800 for labor and $400 for productivity. In contrast, companies upgrading to Office every two years would spend about $550 per user, or $700 every four years. That means many businesses would take eight years to recover their initial investment.
" (note: Was Gartner the company that made some pro MS statements in a report, and forgot to clean the MS-signed footnotes? Can't recall but i think it was them)
FUD Part 2:
"Whenever you put StarOffice on the desktop, you're taking a risk," Smith said. "You're moving to something that's not tried and supported...There's no guarantee that file compatibility won't be a problem."
Are we happy now?
unfinished: (adj.)