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Desktop Apps Ripe Turf for Open Source
Amy Kucharik writes "Two new reports on open source validate office suite application alternatives like OpenOffice.org and StarOffice and their push into the mainstream against market giant Microsoft Office. "
There is an interesting writeup about opensource music apps over at News Forge today. Just installed wxMusic and it looks excellent for large music collections.
Help fight continental drift.
especially in education, where $$$ are often tight, and users rarely need all the features of MSOffice. That's also a good way to get the word out to parents as well.
Case in point - our local high school has a class that requires a PowerPoint presentation as part of the class. The teacher insisted on PP and was a bit taken back when I suggested to one parent that OO has a perfectly good presentation package and doesn't require shelling out the $$$ for MSOffice; and you can test for compatibility with MS's free PP viewer as well.
Despite living an affluent district, many parent's can't afford the $125 or so for a student edition MS Office and may not even have a PC that can run it, so OO is a very viable alternative.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Here is something interesting. The LDS Church is now distributing Open Office for use on machines at local meetinghouses. This is very interesting because they are very very careful at which software they use.
It's already happening. My kids are supposed to turn in a lot of their 'reports' in .ppt format. MS-Works does a really poor job of that, and I wasn't spending 200+ on office. OpenOffice does a fine job of creating good reports and then rendering them in the PPT format. My cost - $0.
my guess would be that it came with OpenOffice for two reasons
1) Sun can divert (most of the) support to OpenOffice.org
2) Sun does not have to pay for the commercial fonts or other commercial add-ons (pdf exporter is one, I think) in Star Office and pass the cost on to you, the consumer.
It still astounds me that the linked article mentions Star Office as being free at one point, which it's not. The whole purpose of Sun making a commercial version available was to make the option more appealing to businesses - offer support as well as a set of professionally done fonts.
...is a good project management application. I just scanned SourceForge.net but didn't find one. IMHO this is sorely lacking in the Open Source world. So much so that I've thought about writing my own (I wrote one that was curses(3)-based back in the early '80s :-). Does anyone have any pointers to a decent[1] project management app? Or should I start coding? ;-)
[1] decent == Can track resources, tasks, costs; can perform some sort of resource auto-leveling; can report resource conflicts; supports GANTT charts; has a relatively easy-to-use UI.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
If there were Outlook replacements and Exchange replacements, then corporations could swap out one or the other rather than having to jump immediately into the water.
Especially more so in the fact that if you swap out Exchange and keep Outlook 2000, then your IT department will have saved a bucket-load of cash end whilst the end-users will never know the difference and never need retraining.
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Are you aware that the source to OpenOffice is available under LGPL. In what way does software based on that license represent keeping all our egs in one basket?
I have made extensive use of the change tracking features in Word documents opened in OpenOffice and exchanged with people using MS Word. It appeared to work flawlessly, and I never let on to my collaborators that I was using anything other than Word.
Rather than create a patch, you might try running updated or more standards-conforming software.
"RH Linux" hasn't been around for a couple years (I can only assume you're running RH8 or 9, forgive me if it's RHEL). A fresh install of Fedora would alleviate all of your problems, trust me. I've been running various linux distributions (Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora) over the last six years, and I've never run into any of the problems you describe.
It would appear that the Firefox people aren't leaving the linux world behind, they're leaving you behind personally. Could it be that their newest binary releases aren't supported on an old version of Red Hat (same for OOo)?
These are simply not problems experienced by the majority of users, and as such, are a little hard to understand.
I just timed my machine. It's not a powerhouse, just a standard issue Work machine.
Microsoft Word XP: 9 seconds.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.1: 24 seconds. It took 9 seconds just to see the splash screen. (However, I don't keep the 'quicklaunch' systemtray application running, so with that it might be a bit faster.)
That's an eternity in computer-use-time.
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Well the problem is if you do serious work with word (huge documents) then it basically falls apart.
I don't think that your argument with PDF is valid. I mean it is nice feature of OOo, but it can be also acomplished in any other Windows app that can print. You just install Cute PDF Writer (free as in beer) and have another printer installed that splits out PDF. Also I would be concerned with quality of OOo generated PDF. I personally use LyX and Scribus for my office publishing and they make very good quality PDF, but OOo f.e. does not make clickable links on export and so on...
From my experience I know that OOo is mostly used by organizations as it is:
1] Cheap (well MSO is well overpriced).
2] Is open - your data remains open.
IMHO the second point is most important - right now lots of goverments and organizations are considering options for publishing documents, and they are certainly not about closed formats anymore, they want standard open format, not loads of features - only basic like to get the job done. You really don't need VBS to make documents archive. You need readable open format to integrate with search engines (various), good indexing and flexibility and that is what OOo will give.
Sure OOo is way to heavy, interface needs polish but this is changing. I think version 2.0 (probably patched like Ximian version) will be much better and OOo is off to consume lots of MSO market share. Open formats and price will do this. When lots of agencies, goverments and so on will start to publish data in native OOo formats there will be no need to use MSO. Despite of yours data already stored in MSO - but hey if MSO wants to be competitive it must also support these open formats - so it would be easy to transfer all your existing data to new format using MSO (in some automated manner) and then when you are free just dump MSO.
Either because of price or opennes.