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.

Comments

Re:What is based on what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OpenOffice

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[TheRaven64]

3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo.

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.

OpenOffice will not recognize 64 bit JVMs

[heffel]

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

Re:No compelling features over OOo 2.0?

[hexene]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Release Candidate 1 should be out within the next 48 hours.