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. "

Comments

Cross platform Opensource Music apps

[bstadil]

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.

LDS church now using Open Office

[3arwax]

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.

Re:Taking a foothold

[Zebrastripe]

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.

Re:Its True

[Creepy]

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.

What is still needed...

[Rick Genter]

...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.