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

Further Enterprise Acceptance?

[xeno_gearz]

I welcome Sun's support to OpenOffice.org. With options such as this, OpenOffice will likely have more market penetration in the Enterprise Environment. It's interesting to ponder if perhaps this will provide more of an impetus for managers to shift from proprietary solutions to Open Source. As we are aware of, management often does not wish to stray form the "tried and true" (I recall the saying, "Nobody gets fired for buying Intel and running Windows").

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.

A good thing

[line.at.infinity]

This means they don't have to spend as much money on usability testings... Use the customers for feedback.

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:now to show this to.....

[the_mad_poster]

A true PHB will NEVER run out of excuses, they'll just constantly come up with wierder and stupider ones.

My latest stonewall to implementing something quality vs. something venduh:

"We are pushing to remove all freeware because of liability concerns."

Which translates to:

"Even though we have hundreds of trial-expired, unlicensed copies of Winzip, countless installations of Acrobat Reader, numerous installations of unlicensed trial versions of system tools, IIS, etc., we're not going to let you install PostgreSQL for development testing because we're idiots and our heads are filled with warm, tasty tapioca pudding."

Re:now to show this to.....

[Anonymous Coward]

In many cases, I think the real reason companies, or managers, to be more specific, don't want to use free alternatives is simple CYA. Suppose a company buys a software package that doesn't work as advertised, say, from Microsoft. In a case like that, who catches hell from upper management? Not the manager who approved the purchase. Microsoft, or at least the sales rep, catches hell. This doesn't mean there'll be a satisfactory resolution to the situation, but it decreases the likelihood that the person who appreoved the purchase will get in hot water.

Suppose, OTOH, that a manager decides to go with OpenOffice on the advice of one of us here. Will OO.o work as well as MS Office? Most likely, yes, but that manager, who probably doesn't have much experience with it, will develop ulcers worrying about what might happen to him if something goes wrong. If he has money that he can spend on MS Office, he'd rather do that than get called on the carpet for trying to take the cheap way out and making a huge mess of things.

If you want to advocate open source alternatives in a business environment, you have to do so in a way that will present little risk that anyone's job security will be on the line. Making the software available for people to take home might be a good plan, as would be installing it on machines with no equivalent commercial software installed. For instance, at a company I worked for, the computers in our call center had no word processing software installed, and management was adamant that pirated software would not be tolerated. So, when some of us techs needed to write up a support manual, someone suggested StarOffice, which was then downloaded and installed. Many people had never heard of it, but it definitely made a good impression. Turns out that we were closed down before the software had a chance to spread to other desktops, but many people were exposed to it, and good exposure never hurts.

What I'd really like to see is some of the low-end PC makers bundling OpenOffice with their machines. This would add value to the machines in the minds of consumers, and it'd get the program some extra exposure. eMachines, Systemax, are you listening?

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:Good News!!

[line.at.infinity]

This is good because now Open Office will compete with Microsoft Office on *every* level.

Are you saying that MS Office also provides free tech support? Even to those who haven't paid for MS products? If so, there should be more people taking advantage of this.

Re:Just by star then?

[penguinoid]

Re:Just by star then?

In Corporate America, they teach you how to spell "buy". Misspelling "buy" is an unforgivable crime. Buy, buy, buy. Buy from us. From U.S.

Re:Newsgroup support.

[Heartz]

Try the Open Office forums at http://www.oooforum.org.

I get all my tech issues resolved by the friendly folk over there.

Re:The first one's free

[tealover]

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

Very true. This is really more about PR than anything else. Remember, it's much easier to promise support than to deliver it.

And a big plus: it flips a solar middle finger at Microsoft. Jyahh!

No, this is all about Sun trying to stay alive. They've been flipping the finger at Microsoft for years and where has that gotten them (same with Oracle). If they hadn't been so focused on Microsoft and tried to create strategies to combat the commodization of their hardware, perhaps they wouldn't be in the position they're in now.

I mean let's be realistic...if promising application support is big news from Sun, then they're about on their last legs.

Any bets what M$ will do?

[turniponion]

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.

Re:OpenOffice Problems.

[acidtripp101]

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.

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.

Re:Good News!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nice troll, but in case you haven't noticed most of these Office programs are a lot more complicated than your average everyday application. You could probably spend weeks learning how to use the various features of Word alone. Sure, if you're going to use it as a plain text editor it may seem easy, but once you start getting into advanced formatting and embedding objects into the documents it gets much more complex for the average person.

Re:Good News!!

[cfuse]

lots of companies will only buy wares that have support, even if they never get the support itself.

I always laugh when Microsoft issues a end of life/end of support statement - I can never tell the difference between their support and their lack of support.

So what's the big deal?

[paul248]

Sun already offers support for all life on earth.