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Sun to Offer Support for OpenOffice.org
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge.com [ed. note: Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN] is reporting that Sun announced today they will offer both free and for-pay support for OpenOffice.org. The story says the cost will be about the same as that it is charging for StarOffice, the proprietary cousin of OO.org."
This is good because now Open Office will compete with Microsoft Office on *every* level.
While I personally can't see the need to pay for programs that are easier to use than my electric toothbrush or mom's VCR, I bet lots of less-than-dextrous-office-chimps have oodles of questions and concerns about the new office programs.
Where this really hits home is in those dreaded product direction meetings; now we can fight for OO by saying things like, "well it comes with Sun's free techsup and if we extra care, we can order it at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft product support!"
Buh Bye Billy Gates; I knew you shouldn't have pissed off most of your users.
Is there a reason then a user would not just buy StarOffice if they wanted this support? is it CALs?
Each time I demonstrate Open Office to a friend, they are surprised that such an interoperable (With MS Office) office suite exists. My favorite is to provide them with a copy of the Open CD, which has a number of free and Open Source Software distributions.
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
This means they don't have to spend as much money on usability testings... Use the customers for feedback.
This is one thing that will help companies except open source is support. Companies are scared of open source to some degree as if something like OO goes wrong there is no-one who can offer support there and then.
Its nice to have someone to speak to on the phone who know what they are talking about as well as sometimes having someone to blame
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Sun Microsystems took a couple of big steps forward to benefit the open source community Wednesday by announcing full-service support [...] for OpenOffice.org software and a free, trial-preview version of the its latest developers' package, now dubbed Java Studio Creator.
...so that you can compare them. Or am I being overly cynical?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I tried OO.o for a while. I was quite surprised to not find newsgroups particularly for OO.o. Would it be difficult to have these newsgroups created and propogated to the various servers? That way users can help each other in an easily reachable manner.
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
To be honest, I can't imagine what kind of support you need for an office suite once it is install (maybe that's it!), however, if this means the leary will consider OpenOffice, woo hoo! I work in education and OpenOffice has allowed once-useless donated computers to become a real tool without massive costs for licenses.
This is a good thing, though. Not because the Sun support will really help all that many folks, but because of the appearance of legitimacy it lends to OOO.
And a big plus: it flips a solar middle finger at Microsoft. Jyahh!
sigs, as if you care.
Seems to me this is may be the sort of large enterprise lip-service support that comes with most software. Basically help with and install issue or maybe a bug, but if you want help with how to do something - you are still out of luck.
Better than offering support as described above (which should be free IMHO), would be to get O'Reilly et al to write looks about OO.o and the migration from office. Even specific edditions for Office 97/2000/XP would be applicable.
That would be better that someone helping me install the software.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
My bad. Sorry.
Also, after I read the rest of the FA, I found
Sun donated the source code for StarOffice.com in July 2000 to OpenOffice.org
Me a bad boy.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This might be enough to make me go back to OO. I'm using Office at the moment because my university centres its first year Computing-for-Idiots course around Office products, so using OO means extra work figuring out how to do things by yourself.
boom boom boom
Prarent is an imposter karma whore. See the difference:
CowboyNeal (real name)
CoboyNeal (imposter parent)
Yay, another phone number to call and wait in line for - I'm sure that MSO users will relish the benefits of installing OOo and waiting in the phone queue to Sun for support - can we look forward to extra fees too?
Seriously, this is excellent news IMHO, given that Sun already has the infrastructure to support SO, they can leverage the same for OOo.
As others have (or will) point(ed) out, this is no guarantee for more market penetration, but I'm sure that small business users will be able to at least feel more comfortable with the concept of a central support point.
Of course, it will take some time until end-users will leverage the Internet for support. To this day it still amazes me that users will phone me to solve their IT problem - generally in the form of: "I'm getting 'error 43b: The widget cannot be broken.' errors, how do I fix it?" - my response is to uhm and ah for as long as it takes to type the error into Google and hit return.
The user is continually flabbergasted that I know the answer. I then tell them that I just used Google, how I used it and that they could too - for some reason they still call me... go figure.
Go Sun!
|>>?
... for anyone who read the AOL PC story last week. AOL's ad clearly lists the Office suite supported by Sun.
But The more people that switch to OO, the more attractive switching to Linux becomes. If your company is already using OO then they could switch to Linux and let their users keep the same office suite.
In Conclusion: Go OpenOffice Go
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
According to Sun's official OpenOffice support page, OpenOffice 1.1 is only supported on Windows, Solaris, and Linux...in other words, only platforms where StarOffice also exists...
My guess is that it's not TRUE support (ie You can't call up and ask how to align your margins just so).
It's more likely that this is just "Put the CD in the tray, click this, then that, etc."
OR, since StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are so similar, Sun feels that they can support both (I'm guessing this wouldn't be the free support). To be honest, it makes sence to try to open a new cash flow, because the products are VERY similar.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
If OO competes too well with M$word, then Micro$oft is likely to make their next version incompatible with OO or incompitable enough that people will be reluctant to switch. Then there's "shovel wear", the mass of M$ stuff that they charge you for (it's in the price for that new computer) but they pretend is free, which fools the masses into believing the only reason to use OO or other non-M$ wear is to save a buck.
-Turnip Onion --- Neither micro nor $oft. Linux is a fine tool.
Do you think the actual phone support reps will be in India? Just curious, not that its a bad thing... There have been a lot of slashdot stories about open source projects over there lately and it would seem to make sense.
SCO: 800-726-8649
Verisign: 800-361-8319, 888-642-9675
Diebold: 800-433-VOTE (8683)
Have you tried OpenOffice on Win2k/XP? I tried it and recall it was pretty decently speedy - mind you this was a while ago, so my memory would be faulty. These days I use Office XP, despite the feel-bad MS factor, since I have lots of document exchange to do with Windows users, and I don't want my files to be imported "almost right".
compiled with -o4 -funroll-loops and Open Office 1.1.1 installed with Ximian enchancements
I'm hoping that was a typo, because I'm 90% sure that there is no -O4 option to GCC. -O(1|2|3|s) is valid, but -O4 doesn't do jack. (which might be why you aren't getting the performance you should.)
Another option would be to put your proccessor in make.conf (Can't remember where it is off th top of my head, but scan through make.conf and you'll find it). It will then use processor specific optimizations to speed up programs. This will effectivly make any binaries processor specific (ie p3 binaries can only run on a p3), but it should speed things up even more.
Gentoo 1.4 with kernel 2.6.0-test12
exclusiveley for games thanks to the Optimized gaming kernel and WineX
Sorry dude, but that just makes me thing you're a troll. Those two are mutually exclusive. You can't be running 2.6.0-test* while at the exact same time running the gaming sources. can't happen unless you are running bochs or something, in which case it's no wonder you're getting horrible performance.
My suggestion would be to install the binary port for openoffice (ie emerge openoffice-bin). Sometimes the larger programs seem to choke on certain processor optimizations. For example, I had problems when I compiled my own firebird, so I installed the binary version, and it fixed everything.
Either do that, or try recompiling it with the -Os option. Since it will be optimized for size, it won't take as long to load the binary into memory, and you'll (hopefully) see some performance gains. This seems to be the common consensus on the gentoo forums, anyway.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
StarOffice is Sun's product, designed for businesses; OpenOffice is what individuals use at home (why pay when there's no real difference?). Sun wants people to be comfortable with StarOffice and perhaps suggest/demand/support its use in offices, so what they're doing is supporting the home users of the almost identical home counterpart.
Basically, they're encouraging people to use a free product at home so that they can charge for it in the office. It's a very smart move.
GL
Sooner or later, MS is going to integrate MS Office into their operating system (in the name of enhancement)... deja vu... all over again..
I had used a version of StarOffice on Windows 2000 a few years back, and found it to be somewhat slow and occasionally counterintuitive.
However, for ~6 months I have been using OpenOffice on my Windows XP box. I was prompted again to make the switch because I desired a German dictionary as well for the spell checker. It's a lot speedier than I remember StarOffice to be (and I'm still running on the same machine).
I have kept around MS Office at my wife's insistance, but I do all my work in OOo, especially because I work frequently on Linux at school/work (and am using it more frequently at home, too). I love the pdf exporter, and my documents (albeit, never very complex) have imported just fine.
"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
As I recall -On will use the highest valid. So -O6 will equate to -O3 for most platforms. It isn't in the GCC man page... damn you GCC!
;) [30MB of ram is a bitch much to type hello world on a page...]
Though given the size of OpenOffice maybe -Os would have been better
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Seriously, I don't think it is problematic for them anyway. SO is not that diffrent and we've already seen many similar Sun moves in the Java world.
What about the Liebermann computer? I keep hearing that the website is the biggest fake ever.
So I want to know, is the Liebermann refrence part of the troll since it's fake, or are the computers for sale on that site for real?
The old saying that anything too good to be true probably isn't true keeps echoing in my mind... but it looks pretty legit.
Anyone know for certain?
With support now for OO, and with their Java Desktop + Suse Linux (Due out Dec. 12) coming with tech support (including "migration support")they might JUST have a combination that can best M$, and actually compete for the average user's desktop. That is, if the initial install is at least as easy as Windows. I'll let you know next week.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
2.6.0-test12 You would think that someone from the future would have a faster computer. Or is time travel a new feature in test12 since I would upgrade for it. but really I wish that trolls stop using stats like that and non excistent kernels for a computer and at least try to make it believable.
There is no 2.6.0-test12 yet. And tinkering with the compile flags will do you more harm than good. There were extensive discussion about that on LKML, there was even a patch to compile the kernel with -Os that went into -mm for a while (I'm not sure if it's still there), but it was later found that it miscompiled some bits. Oh, and -O4 doesn't buy you anything -- gcc optimization limit is -O3, so you can even do a -O9, the end result is the same. Also, -funroll-loops will more than likely do you more harm than good, since it makes the code definitely larger and may or may not speed it up -- but the hypothetical increase in speed (probably just statistical noise in any comparison) is vastly lost in the cache misses because of the larger size of the code.
Sun already offers support for all life on earth.
...with version 2.0 - at least I think so. There are significant Mac OSX updates planned for that version. Right now, OOo runs as a straight Unix app on OSX - not something Sun would want to support.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I run WineX 3.2 on 2.6.0-test11 (there is no test12, fwiw). Works beautifully, even on my ancient 450MHz K6-2.
An important thing to note when optimizing is that things that expand code size can result in cache misses (due to the size of the code) much more readily, resulting in slower code. I would recommend not unrolling loops unless they're Small, and running with -Os.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
This is one thing that will help companies except open source is support.
Except: Used to differentiate excluded objects from an otherwise complete group; for instance, "All of the dogs at the park, except the two golden retreivers, are Welsh Corgis."
Accept: To welcome or tolerate; for instance, "People probably won't accept the fact that I'm trying to be helpful rather than pedantic with this comment."
What... looks like you can charge for support for a open source product yet still offer it for free? OMG, somebody tell Redhat (I'm extremely disappointed that the only linux they offer for free is considered bleeding edge, semi-stable, and subject to be unsupported by them software wise after three months).
Hmmm... Pie...
"man gcc" is deprecated. See the gcc.texinfo or the Info file, both of which I currently lack access to so I cannot tell you if they have the information you require, but I'll bet they do.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Does file format for Office really matter anymore?
OpenOffice.org Writer stores its documents in XML.
Microsoft Word 2003 stores its documents in XML.
Since MS are highly unlikely to downgrade their own product, you can almost guarantee any changes to the format will merely require changing a few stylesheets.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
... everything at home was free, and everything at work was twice expensive? My God I think I just figured out how to finance Utopia!
There's no openoffice 1.1.1 in portage either.
It would be something of a desparation move if they did. Right now, OSes and Office suites provide two distinct and large profit streams. It is common opinion that Windows and Office are the only things making MS money. In any case, that is where they make most of their money.
Sure they could integrate at least a significant portion of Office into Windows to kill nascent competition. But this would reduce them to one primary profit center that would be smaller than the two separate ones. I suppose they could sell an "Advanced Office Funtionality" package but it wouldn't be as profitable. It couldn't be. They would have to integrate at least as much functionality as OpenOffice provides and not significantly raise the price of Windows.
It might even make things easier on their competition. Since OpenOffice functionality becomes the basic benchmark, their competitors would know to explicity target the what the "Advanced Functionality" product provides.
If nothing else, such an integration move would tell me that Open and StarOffice have caused MS significant pain.
since most software get-ups are very poor about the quality of their "support", unless it's tiered and you select the most expensive plan, which essentially gets you a line to the desk phone of the development team.
No... the logic is that the company will never pay for support because they'll be wasting their money if the did pay for it. But it's a good safety net to appease any naive decision maker who hasn't actually called up the support staff before in their life, and feels they need some level of assurance.
(I'm not saying this is universally true of all software vendors, but generally true. If you work in IT, you can name the ones you'd actually want to deal with on the phone, so it's an informed decision there)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
To my way of thinking this is where the honest money in the IT business should be made: Support, Support, Support. Instead of paying lawyers bundles of cash protecting intellectual property, train and pay support personnel that can actually help people. I have the crazy idea that a lot of people might be willing to pay for such service especially if the service were effective and, hence, not outrageously expensive. There is, of course, the obvious caveat that the so called nerds that don't need that sort of thing won't be anxious to pay but there are still a lot of semi-computer-literate users out there that could benefit and know it. redsilo
FYI, Oracle's internal IT is rolling out Linux (based on RH AS 3.0) as a supported Desktop option to all its employees worldwide -- everyone from secretaries to salespeople to the hardcode RDBMS programmers.
They're including OpenOffice 1.1 in the mix (as well as Moz 1.5, etc)
Um, I hate to rain on this parade, but I downloaded Open Office 1.0.2, used it for a couple of months, and was thrilled...at first. It was really great to be able to use free software. Worked great.
.doc and .xls, just in case, and I am sure glad I did. After several months of use, I started to notice weird errors in my Excel files. The screen on Excel was all wigged out, and some of the formatting was trashed. I had to go back to older versions of my files, and re-enter data. Not fun.
Using OO, I saved my existing files in the Microsoft file formats as
After 3-4 months of this, I recently switched back to MS Office, whereupon I found that my Excel files had weird errors, which I now manually had to go fix. In addition, sometimes I couldn't type in the data entry box, or see what I was typing. Similarly, my resume in Word lost its proper formatting and bullet points. I am not at all a happy camper about this, and have fully switched back to MS Office.
Don't bother to write me about how much better OO 1.1 is, I've got work to do. I'm a small business owner, and I don't have time for this nonsense. It's easier just to pay the hardware vendor a couple of hundred extra dollars every 3-4 years, when I replace my PC. Time is money.
For the record, I don't use Macros or anything fancy, just normal Excel with some formatting, and I also use 'window freeze' and group/ungroup. This is all on Windows 98.
OpenOffice IS StarOffice and vise versa.
Here is the history:
StarOffice was created by a group in Europe.
Sun Microsystems bought it and released it.
StarOffice 5.2 was free for a scaled down version.
StarOffice 6.0 they split it into two groups, OpenOffice the free version and the paid version. Open Office is like the free version of 5.2 (just version 6.0). It helps people with some confusion.
The only difference is StarOffice has better support and more features. Nobody can say "OO is better than SO" because it's the SAME DAMN THING. Yea OO is open source but in order to get it into program it has to be okayed by the committee.
Hey why not try out the support services they just announced for a question like that? But in answer, you do it just the same way you would in Excel. Put a $ before anything you don't want to change, like "sum(c$4:e$4)"
See exact same comment here
Precede the cell designators with a "$", e.g. $A$1, specifies A1 and only A1. It works the same in both an OO spreadsheet and in Excel.
Unfortunately, some of the calculations in OO also get iffy with larger numbers just as Excel's do. The stdev() function for instance starts to return crap between 10,000,000 and 100,000,000. If you take a small set of numbers like 100, 101, 102, and 103, and then pad zeros to yield larger numbers like 1000, 1001, etc., the stdev() value should be the same for each series. Around 1*10^8 rounding error creeps in and instead of properly calculating the stdev()it starts yielding a zero value. There is no warning that precision has suffered either.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Ask him for the name of a software vendor that provides "liability". Find an EULA from said software vendor. Have your boss read it (and weep hopefully).
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
If there is one thing Sun could do to boost OOo that would be to buy the openoffice trademark so that the product can actually be promoted as "OpenOffice" and not "OpenOffice.org".
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Trying to steer away from standards and compatability doesn't always work.
It's intersting to note that back in the days when WordPerfect was the main word processor that everyone used, it too tried exactly the same file format tactics that Microsoft tries today. Before MS Word was popular, Microsoft went to special effort to support WordPerfect formats as reliably as possible. WordPerfect, on the other hand, only supported Microsoft formats on the order of 95%. (After all, why make it easy for customers to switch to the competition?)
There were several things going on, but certainly one of them was that people were deciding to go with the product that would most reliably support both formats than with the product that didn't support key parts of one of them. The result was that MS Word won out, having promoted full compatibility with competitors' products. Meanwhile WordPerfect faded into obscurity.
It might seem to be a disadvantage to be compatible with competitors. Sometimes it's a disadvantage not to be, though. This is especially true if the competitors initially have a market significant enough to be noticed (even if it's small), and offer full compatibility with your product.
I looked in "info gcc" under optimization... surprise surprise it's the same text from the GCC man page...
Anyways, yeah -O4 is fairly stupid on two levels. 1. Bloat sucks. 2. It's not meaningful to GCC beyond -O3 anyways.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You're putting me on, right? Did you file a bug yet?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
No cuz
a) I really don't care
b) Someone else will do it [nice thing about OSS]
c) I love this show.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
My guess is that it's not TRUE support (ie You can't call up and ask how to align your margins just so).
It's more likely that this is just "Put the CD in the tray, click this, then that, etc."
What the hell are you basing this on? Sun is providing true support, whatever the hell that means. If you have a question about any feature in the product, even if the person you're talking with on the phone doesn't know the answer, he can escalate it all the way to the guy that developed that feature if necessary, since he also works for Sun.
Is this not full support? Is there some other type of support you were thinking of when you wrote that like a personal assistant that will come over to your house and put your coffee mug in your coffee mug holder (CD-ROM tray) for you?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Uh, I hate stupidty: Here is my translation to English:
"I downloaded OpenOffice 1.0.2, which is a year old by now. I used it for a couple of months. It "worked great".
Then, after 3-4 months without problems, I switched back to MS Office. The problems began. I noticed that MS Office has weird errors with excel files produced by other software. Then I noticed that MS Word has a problem with bullet points in OpenOffice-1.0 documents saved as word file. I did then not use OpenOffice-1.1, where all these bugs of MSOffice have been worked around, but I decided to STAY with Microsoft Office. In fact I won't use anything else in the future.
No I've got work to do and don't have time for nonsense. BTW, I still have time to post to slashdot.
For the record, I don't know how to use Macros, just Excel and formatting. This is all on Windows98."
Moritz