Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice.org
CWmike writes "Preston Gralla has a decent idea that could move the office needle: If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner. Imagine if a version of it were available as a Web service from Google, combined with massive amounts of Google storage. Integrated with Google Docs, it would also allow online collaboration. For those who wanted more features, the full OpenOffice suite would be available as a client — supported by Google. wouldn't be at all surprised to see this happen. Just yesterday, IBM announced that it was selling support for its free Symphony office suite. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Google doing the same for OpenOffice, after it integrates it with Google Docs."
And ... thats a good thing, right?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Never! When satan skates to work!
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
What does OpenOffice offer the average user that Google Docs is lacking?
And why would Google use OpenOffice to fill that gap when they could just improve Google Docs?
Seamless integration between oo.o, gmail and googles online suite of office apps sounds too good to be true.
You can already import and export to OpenOffice from Google Docs. What more do we really need? Furthermore, I doubt that Google would gain much from taking sides. They are the premier provider of web services and that is where they should stay. Desktop applications are the past, web services are the future. Microsoft Office as a desktop application will eventually fade, too.
:)
Now, if Google wanted to give OOo a nice grant, that would be most welcome
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Imagine the repercussions if a large technology company like Sun Microsystems helped the development and support of OpenOffice.
They could twin its codebase with their own corporate version and then the sky would truly be the limit.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
this term, it does not mean what you think it does
Microsoft isn't going to get knocked out by FOSS. Yes, FOSS will eat into its profit margins (and already has), and will give it stiff competition, but let's be real here, mmm-k? Microsoft and it's hundred billion in cash isn't going anywhere.
But please don't tell anyone else, okay?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I was working with a teacher on Sunday night trying to prepare a presentation in OpenOffice (it was running incredibly slowly) and she said "I hate OpenOffice". She isn't a geek, she doesn't particularly like computers, but to her it was a huge disappointment to have to use OpenOffice instead of being able to use PowerPoint.
So far from a knockout punch, I think OpenOffice barely registers in terms of it's disruptive influence. I don't use it, my employees don't use it and everyone I know who has to use it hates it. Perhaps it's time as a community we considered alternatives. The "quality" of OpenOffice isn't something I think people are particularly happy with.
--- Nick, hard at work
I mean if they just want a conversion system then use docvert software... but OOo isn't web software.
If Google provided it's own document editor ala OpenOffice sure, but OpenOffice itself is klunky junk. The only reason open source people tout it is because it's the only game in town -- not because it's a Microsoft Office killer. It clearly isn't yet.
OOo needs to be redone from ground up like Netscape 4 needed to be redone years ago. It's slow, ugly and buggy. ODF is a great format. That piece of junk does it serious injustice.
you have a very poor standard for quality if open office meets it.
I like OOo but would rather not see ads integrated into it. Google selling support for it? I don't see that happening - they aren't in the selling support business, they are in the search and targeted advertising business. The idea of integrating OOo and google docs is nice, but selling support isn't a good model for individual users, ads are.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ooo2gd
why would they do such a thing?
google rulez!!
openoffice wasn't meant to be a web app, and google docs was. this doesn't make any sense.
There's a whole lot more to corporate networking and considering that a LOT of the guys out there in the IT departments know nothing about other OS:es (imagine getting them to get kerberos working without Active Directory to help them) not to mention a whole load of other pieces of software that people use and need.... Well, let's just say it will take longer than you think.
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
Google claims that section 11.1 of their ToS doesn't mean they control copyright on all docs created with Google Docs, but then again, I'm not going to take legal advice from the people shoving me the document I'm going to sign. Would you take legal advice from your spouse's divorce lawyer when arguing who owned your house?
File -> Download File As -> pdf
Used to give OpenOffice.org as the pdf creator (within pdf tags), it now gives "Prince 6.0 (www.princexml.com)". So IMHO Google docs are moving away from OpenOffice.org... when will they scrap Impress and just start from scratch on their powerpoint clone?
.ppt doesn't work properly under powerpoint 80% of the time, etc.
I mean, all just praises for the OOo and all hypothetical future popularity-dreams aside, they don't stand a chance at competing with MS Office if they don't actually deliver a solid software package.
I really like Writer, but Impress is a nightmare. The controls don't function well, the interface is messy and unintuitive, the design functionality is rubbish, it's conversion to
tried to print labels or envelopes in OpenOffice. That is a common administrative function in most offices, yet OpenOffice sucks royally at this simple task compared to MS Office.
It annoys the hell out of me trying to use it as a 'real' office suite. The excel and powerpoint clones just aren't up to the task. It's ok for quick, casual tasks but so is Google docs. I don't see the advantage for google in adopting it.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
The article mentioned IBM. IBM is in the business of selling solutions to businesses. Clearly selling support falls within that definition. They are supporting a client they developed because they support total solutions, not random mix and match. IBM was able to climb back up and deliver a blow to MS in this area because MS was busy building monopolies, not supporting customers.
Google likely has little to worry about from MS. Google is about selling ads, and that is it. It is like TV. Provide a simple to understand product, sometimes useful like the news, sometimes fun, and people will watch the ads. It works. MS, OTOH, is only interested in monopoly positions. They want to take over the living room. They want to take over the search space. They want to take over the web. Nothing is said of providing customer with solutions, or competing within a space. So they go the search route by figuring out how to leverage the desktop monopoly to force people to use thier search engine, rather than building a search engine people want to use, never realizing that search is not the issue, but ads are, and maybe there are other ways to drive ads, other than search, like, i don't know, office apps. But who was there first in office apps on the web? Google. Because google gets it, and MS does not.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
>What does OpenOffice offer the average
>user that Google Docs is lacking?
Why should we ever improve on software? Why should software ever do more than perform basic tasks poorly?
These are the attitudes behind your statement. Google docs is not as good as open office. Open office is not as good as microsoft office.
The arguments that people usually make are, "do you really need those extra features?" and to some extent it is true. I don't *absolutely* need everything that Microsoft Office has to offer, and so I save myself some money and download Star Office via the google pack.
Indeed, a lot of free and open source software tries to succeed, not by being the best software of its kind, but by being the *cheapest* software of its kind. Sometimes that strategy works, and sometimes it doesn't, but as a *developer* I'm always kind of disgusted by it.
Really, what's the point of being a software developer if all you ever aspire to do is put out crappy software that people will only use because it is free?
Get your -1 Troll points ready, but unfortunately this is the truth. Sun has a stranglehold on OOo, which often stops developers from contributing code, or playing nice. Because of that, there are a variety of OOo forks out there. China's RedOffice has an Office 2007 ribbon-type sidebar that looks very promising. Symphony's UI is a huge step up over OOo. Go-oo.org and OxygenOffice provide many often requested features, templates, fonts, clip-art, a better solver, etc. NeoOffice seems to be the only one really focusing on solid Mac integration.
All these improvements could be contributed upstream, but because of Sun's tight gripped control, they won't be. Sun isn't just going to hhand it over to Google, and I doubt Google is just going to sell Sun's product, unless Google felt like they had a strong-enough influence in the product's development.
I agree that Google Docs is poor in its execution, but I doubt that OOo is the way to go for them. I see a product like Zimbra, that was developed with the web in mind, not an app forced into a browser, and that is where the future lies.
When Google has an office suite that was designed with a web interface in mind, that works as fast as Zimbra, please let me know.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Google hired developers to work on OpenOffice.org, but found it difficult to fill all the vacancies. They seemed unwilling to work on the project understaffed and the people they hired now work on other things.
You can see a C|Net article about their hiring from a while back:
http://news.cnet.com/Google-throws-bodies-at-OpenOffice/2100-7344_3-5920762.html
KOffice is cleaner -- there's more hope there.
Also, since when is Google Docs under the GPL?
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Google Docs?
I'm not affiliated with these guys:
http://www.ulteo.com/
You have 1GB of storage with the free account and can use OO.org as a webservice. They also have a "Virtual Desktop" which is a stripped-down KDE environment with OO in Windows thanks to CoLinux.
I tried it out and found the Virtual Desktop fairly impressive- the sort of thing that Joe Schmoe can use well; but unfortunately adding programs to it is a hassle which makes it unsuitable for my (admittedly fairly specific) needs. Their "online desktop" has other apps besides just OO.org- I think it's just the exact same set of applications that are available in the Virtual Desktop.
Some of you may be interested in trying it out.
Care about privacy? Read this!
But this article isn't referring to Google Docs per se but the widgets that allow desktop integration - which is what the OP was whining about.
Okay, they're not released under the GPL, I'll give you that, but they are released under the Apache License which is still pretty much "here's the source code, have a play with it".
I just don't get you people that moan about getting stuff for free - who gives a shit? If you don't like it then either contribute some useful criticism or piss off and try something else. You've not lost anything in the process...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'd rather they (or anyone else) would develop a word processor that doesn't make me want to cut my hands off and write raw HTML by whistling morse code into a telephone because it would suck less.
I am SO tired of every word processor out there, including the one by the white kool aid clan, mimicking the worst drawbacks of word because it makes it a bit easier to roundtrip documents to and from Word. I'd rather have the native format something like Docbook, but I'll take HTML if that's the only way to get real nested document structures and markup as THE native format.
Haha, this is so naive, its like one of batmans rants!
M$'s revenue was down 24% last quarter over the last year. The knock out punch is putting something out that convinces the market NOT to buy M$ Office. The prospect of platform independence, lower cost and higher reliability can convince wavering corporate IT managers that an upgrade to M$XML and ten more years of file format lock in is a bad idea.
Don't feel bad for the Soft, it's something they have done again and again to other companies, even when the other company's tech was better. The SCO, Get the Facts, and patent attacks are all evidence of the same kind of behavior. They deserve to fail.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Personally I'd rather Google developed a whole new desktop office suite... preferable one that wasn't a total hog.
...isn't that an implicit admission that the product you are supporting is buggy, flawed, and/or has insufficient documentation?
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It's analogous to using $your_favourite_mail_client to access Gmail via IMAP. You still have the web interface if you want/need to use it but you can also take advantage of a familiar application running locally that's specifically designed for the task.
Stupid flounders!
No ads in my Office docs, please. And if they're all going to be stored at Google, I'd rather they're stored encrypted with a password I enter into the page, decrypted on my machine inside the local page's Javascript, rather than encrypted and searchable at Google. I don't want to trust some secret code at their servers. But the local clientside Javascript would be open source, so experts can inspect it for snooping. Maybe just let me store selected metadata, like tags, for searching at the Google servers.
Now that would kill Microsoft. Not just the accessibility, but the trustworthiness. Microsoft is totally lost on that valuable feature.
--
make install -not war
Umm, eLECtric SHEEP as they await the emergence of GOOPENOffice.org(#sm*)?
(Sorry, I just HAD to... release... that one...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The fact that a few potential employers complained of not being able to open my OO.o drafted resume was reason enough to switch back to MS permanently.
Moan? I wasn't moaning, I was just questioning the OP's statement about it being a GPL fanboy's wet dream. Where in my post did I complain that it's not GPL? You're confusing my pedantism with whining, which is totally different. I use Google Docs every day, in fact it just saved my ass today because my new laptop doesn't have Office and I needed to finish up a presentation for a class. I don't think anyone's whining here, especially not the OP or me. And by widgets, do you mean API? I'm kind of confused by that statement.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Seriously, why should Google want to focus on delivering a knockout to Microsoft? Google doesn't need to do an office suite, and Google doesn't need to do an OS. Google's doing just fine being Google.
Were there a lot of people running around in 1980 saying Apple Computer had to start building mainframes in order to knock out IBM? I mean, that would make just as much sense.
IBM tried to knock out Microsoft with OS/2. How'd that work out?
Novell tried to knock out Microsoft with its purchases of Unix, Digital Research, and WordPerfect. How'd that work out?
Sun has been trying to out Microsoft with Java and StarOffice and whatnot. How's that working out?
And now, Microsoft's been obsessively focused with trying to knock out Google, pouring billions more into MSN. How's that working out?
ooo2goo
meep
Am I the only one that thinks this article a bit presumptuous? Google has been in the internet business "for a while", and has been "mildly successful". I _think_ they can set their own business plan, and doing support on a desktop multiplatform application is a bit of a stretch from "search".
-ellie
Wulfstan's comments, imagine the re: PERCUSSIONS if IBM chimed in with Lotus SmartSuite to:
-- bring more sanity to OO.o,
-- collage or commingle or merge the two, and
-- merge the best of the two to Google's things.
THAT could probably kneecap msoft, or ankle-cap them (either is FINE, as long as msoft is hobbling with it's ass ever-precariously closer to its bone-shards on the ground...lowering the PUCKER and still raising the FACTOR...)
Sun could be the Hammer (put a cap in ms' ass) and IBM could be the Sickle, (cut them down to size)... imagine the gory glory... it would be gorious and glorious...
(hold on.... somebody's knocking the door...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Wow, in the comments posted so far I'm seeing a lot of Microsoft sycophants trying to convince us that OOo is some sort of buggy amateur project. I guess when you threaten a cash cow like MS Office you're going to get a lot of pushback.
Anyway, given the architecture of OOo it really would be easy to get its full functionality running inside a web browser. Remember that in order to be cross-platform, OOo contains a UI layer that abstracts and decouples the operating system's widget set from the core application logic. (It even has a "headless" mode that has no UI at all -- this can be used when all you need is to do some scripted tasks, etc.)
So it would theoretically be pretty easy to have a bunch of application servers running the OOo core and then, instead of displaying the UI using a traditional widget set (like GTK on Linux, for example), it could remote the UI out to a thin layer running on the user's browser. It would be simple using Flash, but I'll bet the Google wizards could even build it using AJAX and get something pretty functional.
Kicking and screaming will the obsolete idea of "desktop software" be dragged away, but it's inevitable that something like this will eventually replace it.
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I hate it that OpenOffice is so often associated as "one of the best open source software" among with Linux and Firefox. Every time I've tried OOo (on Linux) I've immediately hated it. It's slow, bloated and annoying to use. Disabling its annoying "helpful" features takes a lot of time. So a while ago I bought MS Office 2008 for Mac, in part just so that I can say I would rather buy MS Office than use OOo for free.
(And no, I won't try to help them make it better just because it's open source. I'm busy enough as it is with my own open source projects.)
Google is an advertising company. They might make a little money providing search, but they make most of their money selling advertising (which is why the spend so much time developing products that people will want to use, it gets them eyeballs).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
GNUmeric was always able to handle everything I've throw in it's way.
Office 97 was the power/performance peak, for me at least.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Sure, why not add another non-money maker to Google's stable of non-money makers. I'm sure Ballmer would love it, and possibly suggest a few other projects they can buy into. Maybe Google can buy out AOL, too! And how about drkoop.com? Or Global Crossing? Or Worldcom?
It's a whole new economy! Bubble 2.0, baby!
OpenOffice is nice, but I hope Google embraces it and improves it to the point that we don't need Word anymore!
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ed > ooo
I use openoffice.org (can't beat the price), but let's not kid ourselves -- this is just one way of many in which it's simply not there yet.
... (like they did with Android) and roll their own office suite. The first versions don't have to be terribly sophisticated. OO.org is a writeoff at this point I'm afraid. It's slow, bloated, buggy and annoyingly incompatible (nothing major, just an occasional incompatibility here and there). This new suite should focus squarely on online, maybe considering offline story more as a V2 feature.
Open office is 100 time worse than MS office and 50 times worse than google docs.
Unless OOo
1) gets real table styles
2) stops garbling flowcharts when resized
3) fixes the ancient "hyperlink bar" relic from Star Office
4) stops asking for Java to run a Basic macro
I am not using it again.
Go on, I dare you. Take a sheet of labels, and print a number on them from 1..10.
Create a data source which has a column with numbers 1..10 (you will find OOo MS Office compliant to the point of being unable top handle anything but a line starting at cell A1 as column titles but I digress), and then get that on one label at the time so you end up with label 1 "1" right up to label 10 with "10".
If you manage with 2.4 or 3.0, well done. It starts with not being able to handle a data source until it's registered. Admittedly, that is a very powerful facility but it's a freight truck approach to transporting an egg, i.e. total overkill which nukes usability. You don't stand a chance unless you start again from scratch and register your spreadsheet as a data source, a joyful process in itself, and then you're still not out of the woods. Better buy lots of window envelopes. And don't send any end of year presents.. Oh, and for extra fun, try to go back a step when you realised you made an error.
In Word you must start up the mail merge wizard, also not terribly obvious but the process is at least manageable. It is plain stupid in OOo as far as I can see, which is a royal shame because the rest just works. On Linux I have yet to see it crash.
Insert
Have always hated open office for its slow speed (even after disabling java) but I recently tried OpenOffice 3.0 Beta and its extremely fast - no difference from MSO 2003. Plus a lot of new features incl office 2007 document support some new eye candy. Do try it once before dismissing OOo. You'll be surprised. - http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/
I dont particulary like OpenOffice since i have never liked how MS Office works. They both tend to be everything instead of doing one task and doing it good and flexible.
Personally id rather have it that spreadsheets, databases and presentations became uncoupled. Someone confused being able to copy data between formats to be able to edit a spreadsheet in a word document in a presentation that lies in a word document.
HTTP/1.1 400
- It is slow
- It is at times unstable
- If a user cannot achieve their tasks in OO in less or equal time to Office, then OO has failed
Our company prefers to implement open source solutions, simply because it means the customer's budget can be allocated more towards services and customization rather than license fees.
That being said, trying to wrangle with OO when you're doing simple tasks such as drafting documents, contracts and presentations becomes a technical debugging exercise... means that this software goes out the window.
I tried to like it, but they really need to focus on getting performance and core functionality polished until it's so reliable day to day users can get their tasks done without thinking about the tool. Adding feature after feature and increasing bloat is the same direction that MS is taking the next version of Office, but at the very least, the performance and basic functions are working. The same definitely cannot be said of OO. If they want to be a MS Office alternative, they should not emulate MS's path of counting the # of features. Core functionality and reliable performance would definitely at least win this user's usage.
The point, I believe, is that Office is Microsoft's biggest source of revenue, accounting for 90% of the revenue from its business division.(ref)
If Google killed MS Office, it would be a huge blow to Microsoft.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Not really, I have written integration software for tools I have never used (not even for testing, the "other side" did all the tests).
You can be a programmer an casual user at the same time.
Seriously. Everything[1] Google does, they do well. Internet search, desktop search, usenet, picasa, Google Earth/Maps, browser applications like Docs and Gmail, all phenomenal successes.
OOo is a piece of crap. No, really. I do not think you could come up with a worse productivity suite without specifically designing it that way, and you certainly wouldn't have as much adoption.
OOo is a (bad) clone of Word, mixed in with XML-pedantry and a really bad case of the second-system effect (made all the worse because none of the people involved had anything to do with the first system, which is Word itself).
It, in a nutshell, shows the reason why getting free software onto the desktop has been so difficult: half the community is focused on feature-for-feature competitiveness and replication of the original product, and measures its success in market-share, and the other half of the community just hates MS software and tries to do the exact opposite, under the guise of "doing it right the first time." As a result we get something that actually manages to be slower than its MS equivalent in every respect, because on top of all the original features we copied without trying much in the way of procedural abstraction or optimization, we have even more stupid ideas bolted on, like using compressed XML files for the native data format, questionable default parameters that someone decided are "more correct", and the occasional bizarre bug.
The same sort of thing is starting to happen to Firefox, too. It started out just trying to be fast, but then a number of advocates got on board and decided that more people should use it, and in order to get them to do that the browser should try to be all things to all people. Now Firefox is getting bigger, more bloated, and slower, and in a few years will just be another bald, fat, middle-aged, useless browser program that got passed by.
All this is a long way of saying that Google shouldn't touch OOo with a ten-foot pole. It goes against everything they stand for: simplicity, usability, obviousness.
[1]: Except Orkut. Sorry.
We developers know the value of separating the content from the presentation in developing software, why do we then insist that they be intermingled in developing documents? I don't give a damn about what my documents look like until I present them, it's the content that matters while I'm editing them. I'd rather edit text in emacs than in a word processor.
Well, in reality, Google already has quite a few desktop apps that don't really get them any advertising but just increase their product image
The real problem with this idea is the lossy nature of an OO.o document on GDocs. Docs doesn't have anywhere near the document fidelity that OO.o has -- in fact, it's really more like HTML. You could actually edit the HTML by hand until recently (which I used to do quite often in GDocs early days).
Put identity in the browser.
Hi, anyone noticed www.zoho.com by the way ? Its far better than GoogleDocs and already available as Webservice with OpenOffice Import and tons of other Features and Applications! Take a look, maybe Google is interested in this great Service... Greetings from the Errorcode408
Sun is strangling it to death, quite rapidly. No-one in their right mind would consider investing in it - particularly not Google. They refuse to accept contributions under the project's own license eg. just to keep their "mine, all mine!" code ownership.
especially these self-proclaimed "smart" people here in /.? Remember the day when you guys use every imaginable negative adjective to derive bloatware of which Openoffice is a perfect embodiment?
If you want to help an office suite, help Koffice. It's a massive project, but much cleaner.
Not a sentence!
which is totally what she said
Jesus, 145 mb for Windows? Good to see that the OOo code bloat is alive, well, and growing...
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/announcementbeta.html
This is version 3 and one of main new features is "a new zoom control on the status bar"?? The other big "improvement" seems to be shiney new icons. That's pathetic.
No mention of performance improvements at all.
Just a thought, but wouldn't they have to standardize some OpenOffice in order to offer support?
I remember looking to the sonicwall vpn applicance a ways back and I found a couple of things that I didn't like about it.
The sonicwall VPN appliance requires a plugin for it to work with your browser, and I'm not sure if they make plugins for non-IE browsers or not. Also, I'm pretty sure that the plugin requires admin access to install, so it really doesn't add much benefit for IT over a typical VPN client.
... says a thousand words.
That was kind of the point. I guess no one got it until you spelled it out.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Google already offers a free copy of Star Office, the Sun proprietary version of Open Office for free as part of Google Apps on Windows. The support business is left to Sun for making it available thru Google. Since the Online Google docs are compatable with the Sun (and OOo) product, it is already there without the overhead of support.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
I believe the correct term is pedantry.
</pedantry>
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
The license may give you a lot of freedom now; however, Sun still has the power to change it.
Look at all the great things Sun has developed in the past; however, they attempt to push their control over it and ruin great things. Java comes to mind; Sun decided M$ was taking too many liberties with it so they put their foot down. M$'s response was to develop C#, which only helped drive a divide from Java, and hinder its spread and mass appeal.
On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that Sun would embrace a collaborative effort to take on M$ with Google. However, at the end of the day I lack any sort of respect for the management at Sun and think they are dead set at sitting in the middle, or bottom, of the pack.
Good game sir, good game.
All your base are belong to Wii.
I think i inadvertently might appear to have slighted "TheKompany". That was not my intent. I bored ahead in my drivel, but TheKompany's products are not in the "unpolished" category. I was referring to the majority of things that are rushed out the door without polishing for end users.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I installed it, and got my PhD thesis written in 2001, and everything, everything loaded perfectly: huge images, tables, equations. So I, for one, welcome our new openoffice overlords.
Umm, MS office 2003 is around 400 MB.