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An Early Look at StarOffice 8
polar_bear` writes "NewsForge has an early review of Sun's StarOffice 8, set to be released in mid-October. From the article: 'StarOffice 8 is not perfect, but it is an excellent value for businesses that do not depend on proprietary Microsoft formats for production work.'" And yes, for the uninitiated, NewsForge is still owned by the same parent company as Slashdot.
From http://about.openoffice.org/index.html
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.
I thought OpenOffice was originally based on StarOffice?
It was. Just like Mozilla and Netscape. Serpent eating tail....
Another way to look at it is that OOo was released as an open source version of the pre-StarOffice 6.0 codebase. OOo forms the basic foundation on which StarOffice 6.0 and later is built on.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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Is it necessary to disclose such potential conflicts of interest in so surley a manner? These clarifications are not a "favor" for the uninitiated, they are made in the interests of full disclosure; standards that all good reporting must adhere to.
http://about.openoffice.org/index.html
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.
The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats and other resources.
A FAQ addresses the changing differences between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.
Star office used to be a free as in beer, binary only application.
Correction. StarOffice was a commercial product that was intended as an alternative office suite. Sometime around the 5.x versions StarDivision began giving the office suite away to home users as a method of druming up consumer and business awareness. This gained them kudos from places like Lockergnome who were always on the lookout for cool new stuff. Shortly thereafter, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and made StarOffice a free download. After the initial "cool factor" died down from that, Sun split the OOo and StarOffice projects.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sun also provides corporate support for OpenOffice, however since StarOffice is more or less free when you buy a support contract, it doesn't make much sense to use it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I run Fedora Core 4 on an AMD 64 laptop. I had problems with OpenOffice not recognizing my JVM. After some research, I found out that OO.o is a 32 bit application and will not recognize/work with 64 bit JVMs. I installed a 32 bit JVM and was able to get OO.o to recognize it. Since Star Office is based on OO.o, I assume the problem the author had with SO and the Java installer is similar.
I wrote a more detailed article on getting OO.o to work with Java on 64 bit platforms, it can be found here
Expert Java EE Consulting
According to Sun, it's supposed to be released today.
There is already an OpenOffice.org 2.0 review up.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Release Candidate 1 should be out within the next 48 hours.
Take OpenOffice as an example, the startup time scales QUADRATICALLY with the version number:
Starting OOdraw on my laptop:
69 secs for opening oodraw2 (1.9.126)
21 secs for opening oodraw (1.1.4)
So (2.0/1.1)^2 = 3.3, and 69s/21s = 3.3
Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY longer to start the same basic application?
I'll be sticking with Openoffice 1.1 over OO2 or Staroffice8 thank you very much.
What normally takes say 10 seconds with Word took over 15 mins! I assumed that this was a one time hit converting from MS Office format, so I saved the document in OO native format so I would subsequently time opening from the native format. Took 15 mins to save the bloody thing and the same to open it again.
I've seen that with every version of StarOffice I've used. What drastically improved it for me was saving the original Word format in .RTF or .HTML and then opening in StarOffice, saving as a StarOffice document, and running with that.
Speed was greatly improved once I was 'divorced' from the .doc format, which I presume happened when I saved as .RTF or .HTML in MS Word.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
StarOffice uses the same native theming code that I originally wrote (any many others extended) for OpenOffice.org. Same stuff, same look, same capabilities.
http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/ooo-nwf.html