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."

Comments

now to show this to.....

[jr87]

my PHB

• this is the one thing he has been using against me for not adapting open office and sticking with microsoft. finally support is here and he is out of excuses

Re:Good News!!

[KrispyKringle]

They already offered similar support for StarOffice, as I understand it. StarOffice has a decent penetration, but not compared to MS's. I don't see a huge difference here, since the cost of StarOffice was already pretty miniscule by site-licensing standards. And as stated in the article, most of the people using OO at the outset were individuals.

So I don't see any reason to believe that many companies that weren't interested in StarOffice will be interested in OO; the price difference between StarOffice and MS Office is so great compared to that between StarOffice and OO that if the first didn't sway them, the second probably won't, either (many simply want to use ``the standard'', often so they can implement VB plugins or macros or somesuch).

Re:No support for Mac OS X

[acidtripp101]

Well, that would make sense.
My theory behind this support is that the two programs are VERY similar (they literally are based on the same code), so Sun is just trying to open another cash flow by offering support for a program that is essentially the same as the one they currently support.
For example, if you offered support for your own proprietary version of notepad, wouldn't it make sence to offer support to notepad as well. You get paid either way, so why open as many channels for money to flow through as possible.

So, the reason that they don't offer support for OSX is because they don't have any experience with it themselves, otherwise they probably would.

Re:OpenOffice Problems.

[rascal1182]

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.