Slashdot Mirror
Sun May Buy StarDivision
ChrisRijk writes "The Register is
reporting that according to the German mag c't, next month Sun will buy
StarDivision, whose major product is StarOffice. With Sun's financial and development resources behind it, StarOffice could rapidly become a worthy competitor to MS Office, especially in multiple-platform environments. The idea of having a major office productivity suite that looks and feels the same no matter which OS is beneath it is simply too good to be denied. But this is just a rumor report (albeit a well-sourced one), so don't get too excited yet.
Well, I think one of two major things is going to happen here if it is true.
1) Sun will not release a new version of SO for quite some time while they fix the bugs and make it faster. Then release a kick butt product, a Solaris of the Office software world.
or
2) It will die a horrible flaming death like HotJava and the JavaStation.
One of my feeling due to this news is that Sun is trying to become completely self contained, or as close as they can. The close alliance with Netscape provides a browser, and the acquisition of SO would provide an office product. This way they don't have to worry about buying licenses from Corel for WordPerfect. Hardware, OS, programing apps, productivity apps, and internet connectivity all in one bundle.
Due to the fact that I don't see any alliance with Corel coming anytime soon I think that Sun is going to put some effert into this product. One of the reasons HotJava died, other than being a crappy product, was that Sun had to support Netscape in the browser market, and couldn't do that if they were devolping and releasing their own product.
As someone else pointed out, they want something very big that is programed in Pure Java that they can showcase. Also, someone else mentioned that they thought that SO was already programed in Java, but I have heard several people mention that it is buggy and slow. If Sun does want to show off Java, and wants to use SO to do this they aren't going to be satisfied until it isn't buggy and slow. Also, in order for them to infiltrate a market dominated by Corel and MS they are going to NEED to make this product free. Especially due to the fact that Corel gives WordPerfect 8 out to Linux users for free right now.
If this is true we may have a very interesting Sun Star Office out there in a year or two. Or it may dissapear all together.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
If this is true, and Sun standardizes on StarOffice internally, it will just sink Applix completely. Sun is their biggest customer.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I'm sorry but I just don't agree with the whole RTFM and 'things should stay difficult' calling that some people constantly shout out and hold in front of peoples' noses with pride.
Software is for the user...the end user shouldn't have to worry about installing. It's for the geeks to guide the hands of users so that their life is about getting what they need (or want) to do done. I happen to like to code, and to read manuals and all that...but the average user doesn't and shouldn't be bothered by details. It's up to them if they want to learn something new. But they shouldn't be forced to. And then I've heard the response - well then they shouldn't be using Linux. Well the cry was for world domination, and that will never ever come about by creating a world full of computer geeks because believe it or not...some people just don't care about computers.
I wasn't too sure on this view until a few weeks ago my boss found me endlessly searching through a manual to do something that he knew how to do. He said, "Why didn't you just come ask? It would have been a lot quicker and you could have been getting a lot more done."
And that's when it clicked. I could keep reading the manual, but sometimes it makes more sense to get help from others without doing everything possible before you crawl in defeat to the gurus.
Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that I believe that your view though understandable (hey I used to think like you) is totally unrealistic and counterproductive: for real world situation...and the world domination of Linux.
Embrace the user...for he is our ammo in the fight against proprietary injustice!
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
Well, solaris is free(for none-commercial use), so it's unlikly they will charge for StarOffice.
(HOPE, HOPE)
Mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
You use CSS. See www.htmlhelp.com for more!
I'm pretty sure it's C++. The company I work for used to have a corp. license for their cross-platform windowing API/framework (don't recall what it's called, but it's no longer available as a seperate product). This was in the early 90's, before StarOffice.
Also, I recall around '93-'94 hearing a rumour that IBM had purchased the rights to distribute StarOffice, but the deal must have fallen through, because that's the last I ever heard of it (until Linux took off).
OpenWrite, the Lighthouse NeXT word processor, is one of my favorite apps. I have been toying with the idea of converting all of my documents into OpenWrite format and using the NeXT (or NEXTSTEP in a VMWare machine). I'm still not sure, but it would be great.
It would also be great to see the programmers from Lighhouse come up with a new word processor for today's users.
Yay, NeXT.
-awc
I have mixed feelings about traditional word processors for simple documents they work great, but then again so does gedit, what i would like to see is WP/Star attempt to model the likes of lyx/latex. I imagine people stuck writing documentation all day would quickly see the light if they were exposed to the lyx/latex way of producing documents.
just my two cents.
g
I got nearly the same experience running StarOffice (slowly) on a libc5 based system.Last weekend, I got the new RedHat 6.0 and all my problems were gone. I imagine a memory leak in SO 5.0 - they fixed it in 5.1 !
I use the german version, so I don't have english menus. But I think that Star will fix bugs as easy as the menu thing very fast if you report them to Star. Actually I had a problem with StarOffice 5.0 and my hardware and I reported the bug to the support team. In StarOffice 5.1 the bug was fixed.
I guess the support team already has a solution for your printing problem too. Why not asking them? The support in the newsgroups is pretty good - like StarOffice!
The idea of having a major office productivity suite that looks and feels the same no matter which OS is beneath it is simply too good to be denied.
Something like this already exists... when it was released on the Mac, there was a huge outcry from Mac users about how "alien" it felt - it didn't behave like a Mac App.
It's name was Microsoft Office.
Now, I hate MS products, but in all fairness, if MS were to release "MSOffice for Linux" tomorrow, would you say the same thing? Why not?
"Look & Feel" is a two-edged sword, keeping the look & feel of a product across OS's is a dangerous thing, especially when there is already an established "look & feel" for each OS.
First off, though, you uses the word incorrectly.
I use.
You use.
He uses.
We use.
You use.
They use.
If you are going to flame English speakers for using a German word incorrectly, at least have the decency to use English correctly.
Youse guyz are 2 sirius!
you mention that people use an app because, among other reasons, it's what they are given at work. Now, imagine a company that, like most of my customers, uses Macs, Unix, and Windows. Now look at StarOffice being the same interface, writing the same file formats, etc. on all those platforms. "Nice," says the IT Manager. Now add the fact that StarOffice can import and export MS formats, and viola! An IT Manager's dream: an office suite that's reasonably priced, multi-platform, and MS-interoperable.
And, if you want to migrate a Win user to, say, Linux... you don't have to have them re-learn the office suite. Users like that!
Me, I'd bet on great sales increases on the corporate end...
Then again, I could be completely wrong... these things happen :P
Posted by the Proteus
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
There are actually a couple of good reasons why Sun may want to purchase a non-Java office suite. The first reason, which is especially true of StarOffice, is that they want the Word importer. StarOffice, for all of its flaws, has what is probably the best Word importer I have ever seen, save Word itself. In today's M$ world, this is an essential key to success of a new suite.
Secondly, there already is a Java version of StarOffice. However, from what I understand, it isn't really the same as the native versions: it requires a "server" version to host the "client" programs. I'm not quite sure what the reasoning is behind this arangement, but it quite possibly could be rectified by Sun, providing a native Java office suite on already semi-proven ground.
Finally, there is one last reason for Sun to buy StarDivision over a Java office suite: there is no good office suite for Java. Corel had a go at it with Java 1.0.2 quite awhile ago (which took approximately as much time to boot as it takes SETI@home to process a transmision), but otherwise, I don't think anyone has made any desent office suite for Java. Sun would be forced to purchase a non-Java office suite and port it. (Which, BTW, would not be "throwing away" the non-Java code, but merely translating it from C++ to Java, a procedure at which many who work with Java extensively are becomming quite skilled performing in short order.)
With these qualifications, it's possible, if not probable, that Sun would purchase StarDivision. I just hope that this won't spell the demise of the only true, free alternative to Office.
I noticed some correct spelling in your post.
Sloppy, very sloppy! BAD AC! No Cookie!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
no one is buying sun workstations to do word processing on
Wouldn't Applix make a better fit as a Unix product. I've used SO, but it's just too huge, and it's no longer modular. They've integrated everything into a single frame which effectively functions like a wm on top of your wm. It's functional at x-platform capable, but there's just way too much overhead. OTOH, I guess this will help Sun sell higher-end hardware.
I don't think MS has the ability to support Office in Linux. An OS without DLL's, what ever shall we do?! (I know that Macs don't have DLL's either but I'm trying to be funny so laugh).
Anyway, MS wouldn't be able to sell, or frankly give away, their Office product to Linux users. I don't think MS is being all that stupid. They understand that we aren't going to corrupt our systems with MS Office, they know how to do market research.
Frankly it would be smarter of Corel to attack the pre-install market right now. Kind of piggy back on top of the Linux pre-install. Several major suppliers of computers, like Dell, sell their products with Linux pre-installed now. If Corel could get their foot in the door by trying to get WordPerfect as a option to install with Linux maybe, I'm dreaming in this next part, the consumer will ask for it to be an option for Windows installations also just by seeing it as a option for Linux.
Anyway, enough dreaming.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Did you ever tried search & replace? There you can replace even font sizes and other attributes. BTW its easier to use paragraph styles when you build up such a page.
You can choose different L&F in StarOffice. It crashes extremely rarely on my system (Linux and OS/2) but I never lost any document.
However I am not going to get my hopes up!
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Yepp, it might be fast. But it looks like it is on a feature and usability diet though.
I can use loads of different databases to get my data from. And put them in a *real* spreadsheet.
And StarOffice's import filters (i.e. for MS Office 97) are just great.
And you can remote control the whole StarOffice with the integrated StarBasic.
So you never tried StarOffice?
What a shame. Go get it! It's free!
reality_bites - so do i
Think they'll keep it free for non-commercial use?
Romans 10:9-10
StarOffice is not just a mindless copy of M$ Office! When I switched from M$O 97 to StarOffice 5.0 it was very good that the user interface in some points was similar. It helped me to learn how to use StarOffice. When you have worked with StarOffice for some time you learn that it is much easier to handle than M$O. It has many useful features, M$O has not (even not in M$O 2000).
And the best thing with StarOffice is: it is for free. At least in this point M$ can't compete.
I like this a lot. More and more small products that individually could not hope to overcome the Microsoft giant are being absorbed by larger companies. These companies stand a chance of doing so, and I love it. The one thing we have to worry about, but not for a while, is that Sun and such companies don't become like Microsoft. We'll see...
I own StarOffice 5.1 and have already imported documents created with both M$O 2000 and 97. I couldn't see any difference - both types were imported just fine. Should M$ have kept their promise not to change the document format between 97 and 2000?
Guess the Staroffice for free campaign swamped them away. I made very good experience with Suns customer service. If its true that Sun buys Stardivision the customer service will reach Sun standard very soon.
... is that if Sun bought out StarOffice, we would probably be subject to silly license restrictions and marketing crap (see Java) :(
I guess we can hope it doesn't happen that way.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I'm really kind of happy with my Corel WP Suite, it has the same L&F on both my linux boxes and my win98 machine.... so, does that not count, or what?
I toggled a toggle and buttoned a button, but when I got done, I was done doin' nothin'.
>> M$ has taken the liberty to make things easy... so easy that a person that uses computers might actually not learn a thing.
Computers are not for learning how to use a computer, any more than the purpose of a car is to learn how to drive and repair cars. Computers are tools.
I'm thankful that the developers of KDE and GNOME don't share your views -- instead of telling users who don't share the average slashdotter's love of the CLI to Read The Fine Manual, they're actually making linux easier to use.
If Sun buys SO and AOL wants non-MS software, does that mean AOL could somehow take advantage of Sun's new office suite? If it gets rewritten in pure Java, could AOL use this to integrate a non-MS office suite into AOL. I'm not sure if this would make sense, but it might help AOL move average users away from Microsoft dependence and toward AOL / Netscape / Sun dependence.
It's possible they'd kill it off, but it's more likely they'd backburner it and try and rewrite it in 100% Pure Java and/or use the JNI. I'd expect a speed reduction if they did the former, and I honestly can't remember if IBM implemented JNI on OS/2 or not...and if they did, whether or not they did a good JOB of doing it...and of course, finally, whether or not Sun would maintain a JNI port to OS/2 -- the answer, sadly, is probably no. :(
Cheers, Joan
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
I have been toying with it and so far, my impressions are very mixed. It manages to convert the most complex Word and Excel documents with nary a sputter. For someone trying to migrate away from MS, this is a Very Good Thing. OTOH, its S L O W on every machine I test it on. VERY SLOW. These are PII's with lots of RAM and both 2.0.36 and 2.2.10 kernels, good video. Its got enough features to make me happy. OTOH, I can't resolve printing issues (it seems to be trying to use lpstat for something) to my network printers. It installs quicker and easier than MS Office, once you get the quirks of the installer worked out (permissions strangeness in my case). It uses Java - hence Sun's interest, but I am not sure that I am completely thrilled with that. Internet integration is tight - not too sure about that, either. Call me crazy but I like Netscape, I don't want my office suite surfing.
At any rate, I see a great product, if StarDivision will take an effort to fix some of the strangeness and really make it a top-notch competitor to Office. I hope Sun will buy them and work to make a great product.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I used to hate PC clones and revere Genuine IBM(tm) systems. To me, a company that makes a copy of something and sell it is just, well, less than human, an entity without a soul.
... well, imitations aren't my cup of tea. Maybe that's why I still prefer Irix to Linux? More likely, it's those godawful fonts. If Microsoft Office for Linux put half-decent fonts into the OS without the current incomprehensible hassle, I might even get it.
I feel that way about StarOffice. I respect their competence and wonder about the effort they put into making every aspect of their software look and feel like Office. But I feel they don't have a soul, their software is but a mindless copy of the market leader.
Now, it doesn't have much to do with the user interface. I don't mind KDE because there are a lot of nice improvements, a lot of cool touches that make the interface theirs. But StarOffice is a mindless copy of Microsoft Office. It's like letting the Borg into your Linux Box.
There's just something about it that gives me the creeps.
So I run GoBe Productive on the BeOS, which I love because it isn't a copy of anything. Now if I could just use it to read Office(tm) documents, I'd be happy.
Incidentally, I still don't think much of clones. Not a popular sentiment around here, but
Except for one problem: Microsoft's fonts aren't so hot either.
Forget it.
D
----
The idea of having a major office productivity suite that looks and feels the same no matter which OS is beneath it is simply too good to be denied.
Why again, is that a good thing?
I would rather someone standardize file formats. That way I can use some doze tool at work and still go home and run a free tool to work with that format. I certainly don't need Sun telling me how my computer at work should look and feel, *and* how my computers at home should look and feel. (And if you try to tell me *any* of the office suites out there look and feel good [Office, WP, SO, etc] I will laugh).
This sig is false.
... especially compared to the other offerings. Hopefully, if Sun does buy it, they won't kill the OS/2 version.
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
Most of the mass in the Unix version of star office is some honking-huge windows porting library sitting on top of motif. You could get rid of all that stuff if you rewrote it in Java, and you could do it in Swing - hence no evil GUI porting problems.
The problem we-all-know-who-they-are had writing a Java office suite was primarily the AWT, which, like the system SO is based on, has a honking huge amount of wrapper code to make the GUI portable. Now Swing exists, it might be worth a second look.
I have seen office-suite-size applications written in Java using Swing, and they look a lot more acceptable than -office did.
Maybe because (I would hope) there are a LOT of people using slashdot's code? ie. They'd have to make a "slashbox up/down" section to hold 'em all.
BTW: I suggest you take a pill, man. You must seriously be angry if you need to SWEAR!
The truth is that Slashdot is run by a couple of guys who don't care what you think if you don't think like they do. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but anyone who thinks that the Slashdot editors are true representatives of the geek community is naive. Unfortunately, that includes the mainstream computer press.
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
I too had problems with WordPerfect running it on a glibc system, but found that if you run WordPerfect on a libc vice glibc system it is solid as a rock. Guess Corel hasn't updated it for the new libs.
Why do you compare a product A running on an opearting system Y with a product B running on an operating system Z AND put the "guilt" on A, not on Y? Certainly both are, but the major difference in that certains case comes from Y. Have you ever seen StarOffice running on Windows NT? In many cases it is even faster than latestest versions of MS Office.
... on my system was that StarOffice and another app (here a Netscape without any window anymore) were waiting for the same IP port or something like that. Killing Netscape always lessend the CPU time of StarOffice dramatically.
It is still a bug, but it seems the origin is not as easy as you think. Maybe the problem on your system is different, but yet possibly similar.
And on my system StarOffice never consumed that much CPU time again.
Finally light dawns of Haiku as tech critique the world has much need
actually we bought iplanet not too long ago...
http://notanumber.net/
HTML tags
lazy fingers lose knowlege
you must provide breaks
Perhaps those of us using regular 101-key US style keyboards (MOST English speaking people are NOT American, TYVM) don't have an umlaut (man, is that what that u with the two dots above it is called.... Ah well, I'm not sure.). We don't have "dead" keys either.
You really expect everyone to push "Alt+????" when they want an unusual key? And don't forget, if they are viewing this in DOS, or in "unifont", or ISO-Latin-Pig-English, then you're sunk...
Of course, if you feel you're cause is so important, why not try to lobby companies to make 102-key (or 105-key) keyboards with your umlaut on 'em. And we'll just ask for the "other" keyboard manufacturers to stop making AZERTY keyboards or whatever the hell you use.
Why are you so intolerant?
I feel uberbetter. So there. And this IS optional, because I said so.
Just because its used to widely and nearly EVERY document I come across is created with it.
A lot of you are missing the point here. Sun needs Staroffice.
Here's why: The PC card for Sun servers never worked well, and Sun wants to sell their Ultra5 and 10 workstations into the Windows NT developer workstation market. In order to compete here, they need to read/write MSOffice doc formats.
Software emulation of Windows really sucks. Sorry, but soft-PC isn't a good solution.
Bundling a PC-on-card sucks, too because
1) Windows sucks
2) Who wants to flip back and forth between unix and a windows box
3) user still needs to buy Windows and MS Office
4) hardware compatibility issues
so, the only obvious solution is for them to bundle an Office suite with their servers (sure would be nice to get StarOffice with Solaris...)
Staroffice isn't perfect. IMNSHO, it tries too hard to be Windows95, and it was obviously ported from win32 with a porting kit, but it's high on usability and ability to convert document formats to standard html
It's grown on me, and I now find that a staroffice desktop can keep me from having to vnc to a windows machine.
I'd say it's a good move for Sun, and Microsoft should be scared of the spectre of SUN OFFICE!
slashdotters should be worried about future cross-platform support of Staroffice, licensing terms, and a staroffice re-written in Java.
I think that kind of move makes sense. Unfortunately, even though their system software is quite good, Sun doesn't seem to be very good at end-user applications. Even their development environments were only so-so. But, of course, a purchase like this could change that.
First of all, Stardivision always seemed to be on the verge of dissapearing from the face of the earth. They must get extreme hell from Microsoft if they're charging $200 for their Win32 offerings when Microsoft bundles Office 2000 into everything. When Office 97 came out, Staroffice 3 barely booted without crashing and if it did, it most certainly crashed 10 seconds later and they charged $200 for this. In 1998, after what must have been the bank loan of the century, they got Staroffice 5 out and it was finally something equivalent to Office98.
Finally last month Stardivision started spamming email addresses. The shit hit the fan at that point. For Stardivision to resort to spam must mean they're on their last quarter. If Sun doesn't buy them, Linux is going to be without an office suite. None of the other Motif/GTK projects are even close to being an office suite.
I hated that too, but I think I have found a solution. If you open some vertical bar on the left, it has an icon list. I don't remember how I did it and I don't have a copy with me now to see. Anyway, if you open that, you can drag the icons out to the desktop and then launch each app individually as it should be.
Romans 10:9-10
And how, praytell, are DLLs different from .so's?
One thing that UNIX office suites all seem to have in common is that they include additional fonts and often fontserver due to the crummy lowest common denominator of fonts on UNIX boxes.
;)
This is really sad, and yes, X has some limitations. I'd love to see anti-aliasing be part of xfs, and I'm happy to see standard font servers starting to support ttf, but it's got a ways to go. (ever try printing Chinese or Japanese web pages in unix?)
But... I must defend Micros~1 when it comes to Fonts. They have done an excellent job of bringing high quality, well designed fonts to browsers everywhere - even under unix
We can never win if we play catch-up. And we can never ourselves be happy. Surely there is a better approach than copying MS on everything? What is out there for things that are intuitive and comfortable for Unix users? The stuff from MS always makes me want to shoot myself, it's so annoying.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/db-26.07.99-00 0/
It's in german, so I couldn't read it. But my incredible "pronounce it like it's english" universal translater seems to have worked for at least the title.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
...Micro$oft has not bought StarDivision. I've even wondered at times whether Micro$oft already has some controling interest since they haven't put up a fight against StarOffice.
In a couple of years when M$ is forced to give Windows away for free due to competition from Linux, their primary revenue stream will be from MS Office and other applications.
I'm surprised they haven't bought StarDivision to try to dominate the cross-platform Office Suite market.
I've seen Sun buy up successful companies before, with the intent of supporting them. Then, after a while, slowly, and if possible, quietly, using the personnel for other uses. They did this with a big OpenStep developer (I can't remember their name right now). They did this with Island.
Let's hope that they don't screw this one up, too. However, I suggest you don't hold your breath. Blue looks odd on humans.
Cheers,
Peter
----------------------------- Work Sucks - Let's Go Flying!
StarOffice is a pretty good product. I'm using it on my Sparc 2, and while it's slow, everything else is on this box as well. StarOffice support and documentation have been well below par, however, and I would hope that Sun could greatly improve that if this indeed turns out to be true. Only then can it even get close to making a dent in Office.
One person makes a critical comment about Sun buying Star Division, and guess what happens???
It gets punted down to "flamebait"...even though it has a ton of replies.
SLASHDOT MODERATORS ARE BIASED ASSHOLES. Moderate that.
I have aged 30 years by using Swing.
Just say no to Swing.
Stop drop and roll.
I personally use and love StarOffice. The only problem is that it's written natively in German..so some of the menus are still not converted (I hate that) Plust the 5.1's printing thing is broken, worked before, but not now. I don't care...as long as it's free! If I'd have to pay I'd go Corel
Well, I disagree. I think it would be great if SUN had a 100% Pure Java office suite. This would make development work easier, since the developers would not need to concern themselves with the nasty porting issues that C/C++ developers need to. I do development work in Java and in my opinion, Java 2 is mature enough to be used as the basis for very large applications (like office suites). I don't see any reason why a well written Java office suite should run intolerably slow on a Pentium II class system. I suspect that Microsoft may be one of the culprits in spreading FUD about Java being too slow/ not good enough for large scale development work. It is definitely not in Microsoft's interest to see Java succeed. If all the big software developers (other than Microsoft, anyway) switched to Java and released 100% Java implementations of their products, nobody would have any reason to use Windows! If users can run their software on any operation system, why not run it on a good/free OS like UNIX/Solaris/Linux. In a couple of years, computers are going to be so fast that nobody is going be complaining about programs running too slow on Java.
Applixware Advantages (YMMV)
1. Fast. Fast enough for us to run on a
couple o 486/66/16MB machines at home.
2. Database Integration. Suck stuff out of
many [1] databases into spreadsheets or
reports.
3. GUI App builder. Applix comes with a drag-
and-drop gui builder, called Builder.
4. C/C++/Network extensability. The underlying
macro language talks sockets. You can write
C extensions, and C++ classes can (with a
bit of glue code) show up in Builder as
native classes.
5. They have open-sourced their underlying
extension language, ELF.
6. You can (I think) trick things up with real-
time data feeds.
(I don't work for applix, but I did help them
get the PostgreSQL database interface to work)
-- cary
[0] I've never used star office. It may do
all this and more.
[1] MySql, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Solid,
Adabase. Basically anything with an ODBC
library.
Way back when our Sun sysadmin installed
this office package called Island. I remember
the drawing app seemed especially nice. This
must have been 5 years ago.
About a year ago I heard a rumor that the Island
folks had a Linux port ready to go, they were
just waiting for marketing to say OK.
Does anyone know what is up with Island?
-- cary
I really and truly hate to say this. I am not kidding, I hate to, but feel I have to. Microsoft claims on their web page that the file formats are all completely open, and available. I just looked, and the links on the search page for "excel file format" were gone, but pointed to a generic msdn page... but I have seen them there before...
I think you can buy the book at any book store. it is not exactly open (or free) but it is available
What I need, really, is not a word processor; we have a few documents that won't convert well, but we are gaining some momentum on this issue and in 3 months, it'll be a non-issue. Any remaining Windows machines will use WordPerfect Office 2k or whatever the hell its called. The thing that is *really* lacking is a spreadsheet that will happily and quickly convert Excel. Applix choked bad on some of our complex spreadsheets. Gnumeric won't even come close. I haven't tried the KDE offering, mostly since there is already some investment in RH/GNOME - it works, its happy and stable, I don't want to mess with it after taking the time to get it running. At any rate, what I need is a spreadsheet, and I am dying for Quattro to get ported, whenever the hell that will be. If it can get the same 75% or better results that Wordperfect is getting doing conversion, that will be enough for us to ditch MS altogether.
And no, I won't be running WINE.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
The goal would be to work to disrupt the MicroSoft cash flow by creating a consortium of Lotus, Novell, Corel, StarOffice, Adobe, Oracle, and others to make a standardized, testable, and brandable file format that would allow new add on products and to cut of the monopoly profits from Office.
That kind of exclusionary collusion is illegal, because it amounts to forming a software cartel. And Microsoft would implement an import filter for the new format as quickly as it became public.
Even though I'm a Sun bigot (and came by it honestly), this could well be the death knell for StarOffice, and if StarOffice falls, Linux chances become much slimmer.
Doesn't anyone remember that Sun already bought a world-class OO office suite about two years ago, and then proceeded to completely bury it? (They bought Lighthouse Design, which had some very nice office apps for NeXT.) In principle, it should not have been that difficult to port the Objective C code to Java, producing the first real Java office suite, but for whatever reasons, the opportunity was bobbled and all Sun has to show for the LD purchase is an OO modeling tool.
Lighthouse Design's excellent code is now but a footnote in history, and there's little reason to hope the same fate won't befall StarOffice if they can't find a way to remain independent.
I like Sun, but I do NOT trust them to follow through on this, or devote anywhere near the level of resources required to make StarOffice a real competitor. Never forget that Sun has lots of really bright people, but they are a poor software development house - their business model insists that business units be instantly profitable, leading to bone-headed business decisions in an attempt to generate unreasonable amounts of cash. Java is an abberation. Look at the fate of Sun's other software products (SunNet Manager, the NFS client, etc.) to see how software really fares at Sun. The company starved those products, and the same is likely to happen to StarOffice, which will require even more money to support.
On annother note, StarOffice is not written in Java, but there is a Java version (port) of it, which can be run from JavStations or other network computers. (Sun is finally realizing that a local disk is a really good thing, even if only for cache - networks will never be fast/good enough to make no local storage a good architectural choice, especially with the increasing importance of mobility.)
If I were at Microsoft, I would throw a party if Sun completes this purchase...
I sure wish they would chase that common file format initiative mentioned in another post, though - that's the way to really make a difference!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The technology is here. We have powerful backends as TeX/LaTeX to create high quality printing. We have key doc standars as SGML/XML too. We have the OS (Linux, for example). The next generation doc tools must be a user interface based on XML hiding the gore details.
These new tools must help the user to create, manage, organize and find information. The present software are lots of big bad programs creating lots of files without order and confusing its own creator.
Even html editors have been bad influenced by this paradigm.
Believe me: forget suites and look for management doc systems. All of us, personal and corporative users, neet it.
In a couple of years, computers are going to be so fast that nobody is going be complaining about programs running too slow on Java.
which is exactly what they said about windows and 386es... once we all have 486es and pentiums, windows will be fast!!!
Applix seems to be selling well into the Linux market. It's also
FAR faster than StarOffice on my PPro200/64Mb machine.
Applix loads up in a few seconds, and all the programs have
excellent performance. StarOffice (5.0) takes about a minute
to load, and is much, much slower than MS Office under NT
on this same machine. It also crashes every so often, while
Applix has only crashed once in dozens of hours of use.
MS Office for the most part, is very fine product.
Actually, it is probably the best things MS ever created ( IIS is another one)
With all due to respect, I have found StarOffice to be a much better integrated product!
...., Java,....
Web, Mail, Word proc, PowerPoint like stuff, Schedule, Browser, Plugins,
I think StarOffice is the most comparable Office Suite to MS Office on a Linux box! IMHO of course
Now if only they could add some Gnome integration, WOW!
Kill Microsoft? No! Just hire their GUI guys!
In a computer world dominated largely by a company that thrives on peoples ignorance, you serve as a prime example why Linux still has many years to go before it is a major player on desktops.
/net option (usually as root) to do the main install. Run the setup program as a user and you get, ready for this, a WORKSTATION OPTION. 1.3MB of files in a user's home dir, and they're off and running. Sounds pretty multi-user to me. BTW, if you would have atleast done (1) ls command you would have noticed a PDF file, guess which app is required to view it (other than xPDF)... hope you know. Download it and install it. Might have to read a man page or two from that one too.
You, like most people, want an install tha requires little or no user input and even less knowledge to perform. M$ has the InstallShield, which does basically everything, Linux has nothing quite like that yet. Though that being said, installing RPMS or using configure,make,make install is not that difficult. If you would have taken the time to RTFM (like most people don't) you would have seen that you can install it with the
My point is this: M$ has taken the liberty to make things easy... so easy that a person that uses computers might actually not learn a thing. Linux isn't that simple yet and I hope it never gets that way. If people understood it better, they'd take the time to better EDUCATE themselves, which is why M$ will stay the dominate force for a while yet.
Remember (2) things. RTFM, and research your own problems first. Try to sound a little informed and like you've made an effort to solve your own problem... that's where the Linux community will embrace any questions you may have.
Bottom line: Ignorance is everything that the Linux community is not, and that will not be comprimized
Hank
The old Lighthouse apps that ran on NeXTstep were fabulous. Sun should dust off their OPENSTEP runtime and sell the Lighthouse suite on Linux.
Did you download StarOffice 5.1, they fixed a lot of stuff in 5.1 and it runs much faster and more stable.
I am using StarOffice 5.1 on a Pentium 233 with 64MB RAM and its stable and fast. All my MSO documents convert nicely, I don't need MSO anymore.
I tested importing Office 2000 docs with StarOffice 5.1 and it works just fine.
The only fear I have is that SUN would try to re-write the app with 100% Pure Java. This has been tried by very talented development houses, and it did not work well, hell the versions I have tried of the 'Java Office Suite' (manufacture to remain nameless) ran like my PII 400 was a 386 with a meg of ram. Java is great to make light switches talk to light blubs but for an office suite? Keep it in C SUN!!!
This is exactly what Sun needs to compete with MS on the desktop.
However, they had better not botch it up like Novell did with Word Perfect.
How are they going to do with Office 2000 compatibility?
Mark
If Sun wanted a 100% Pure Java office suite, why would they buy a non-100% Pure Java office suite, throw it away, and then write a 100% Pure Java office suite?
X is designed to allow competition. An X-based
Sun desktop would be able to run apps from a
Linux server, or any other Unix.
And vice versa - just drop in a Sun box to add
Sun star office to Linux desktops...
The quote is "You know the party's good when you can't even tell which end of a blow job you're on."
The Register is known for being good at spreading rumors that may or may not come to pass. Does anyone have a link to the article in c't (even if it is in German)? Or maybe someone has read it (if it not available on their site)?
Vegetarians against spam!
It takes FOREVER to start; it's a long wait on my P3 with 200 megs of RAM.
It is absolutely not designed at all for multi-user operation - it will only run as the user who installs it; and it always tries to write
to a file in the install directory.
They also try to create an entire desktop
including a start button. It's simply too much.
I like the way Word Perfect works and WP8 is very
fast.
It does work well, however, though their HTML
output needs a LOT of work.
Mark
Is that not one of the versions they offer? That is why Sun wants it. That way they can show off the wonders of Java. I just hope they can speed that snail up! ... and fix the zillion or so bugs too ...
Corndog
All these consumerist programs are single-user oriented. It's a problem in a large shop. Just try setting up "dot files" on a per-host or per-user or per-subnet or per-YP-domain basis for these things. People just don't think.
"SUN OFFICE" that doesn't even sound right ...
I don't think MS will be very concerned with "SUN OFFICE"
hehe
I wouldn't read it like that; if the companies involved merely proposed a standard that was open and that they stuck to, then there would be no cartel; the fact that MS would implement an import filter is irrelevant - the point is that there would be a standard through which other office apps stood half a chance.
A pitty this idea never took shape.
james
Tally-ho, yippety-dip, and zing zang spillip. Looking forward to bullying off for the final chukka?
The point is that any standard would be much easier to work with than ms-office's secret formats. Why? Standards are documented, which would mean that microsoft could indeed use it. Why exactly would this be exclusionary?
"That kind of exclusionary collusion is illegal, because it amounts to forming a software cartel. And Microsoft would implement an import filter for the new format as quickly as it became public."
you miss the point! MS could use it too; it would need to have import/export filters to avoid bad press, it would not sell upgrades to read its "improved" files, the Sun would shine...
t
>>>>truth; beauty; unix.<<<<
I have to disagree, I run it with 64 Megs and Redhat 6.0 and it is fast and runs stable.
It runs much better and is more stable.
It is not even close to StarOffice or MSO
How about SolarOffice if you think SunOffice doesn't sound right?
SUN == SOLARIS == STAR(Office)
Well lets see, the SUN is a star.
Star. Sun. Whats the difference?
Hmmm...
Granted, the only look I took at SO5 was a hacked english version back when only the german version was out -- i found a partial english ver on one of the german technical university servers (mighta been clausthal) and fixed its missing parts with the german package. My impression on the k6-200 i was using then was, kinda slow, crashy, and way too MS-like.
;). I worry that the reason Sun would want StarDivision is that SO5 had (in theory) a Java version .... yuck ... wouldn't want to try that.
I very much prefer Corel's much-superior (stability and speedwise IMHE) wordperfect suite, which already exists for Solaris (anyone else want Corel to release a free-for-personal-use ver for Sun? Would top off a 3GS nicely
Corel also has a pretty darn good record of supporting Free stuff, for a commercial-software company.
For that matter, I intend to get LyX and Gnumeric and AbiWord on my two SPARCs and live a happy life. I've had it with commercial word processing. Bleah. @#$% MS-Word files. Fight the man with your word processor!
Its slow and bloated, and Roblimo is full of crap if he thinks that StarOffice could ever be a contender for anything. Besides, i'm pretty sure Corel supports more platforms than StarDivision.
.sig before you reply Robin)
(read the
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
over the past couple of months this german ct magazine has reported a bunch of things. Of it all, and looking at the consensus of the /. threads it has spawned, I believe that this ct magazine has a tendency to exagerate to the extent of fallacy. Yes, the mac os x cgi article had some merit, but it was not the beast they made it out to be. The same sort of thing happens in all their articles that make their way to this site. I think we need to take anything they say with a grain of salt, if not mocking laughter
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Sun really need a good office suite to further compete with M$. Although you hear half as much about Sun as you do M$, Sun has almost as many employees and makes their fair share of cash. But like SGI they are looking to further compete with M$ and maybe even the desktop/NT workstation market.
Sun and SGI rule the 3D workstation and heavy super duper server market, places where Intel and M$ can't compete with near the same quality. But M$ and Intel own the desktop and low cost workstation market. Why? Because Intel has the fast yet not terribly expensive chips and M$ has the support of hundred of not thousands of companies helping them out with more applications every year. So what do these 3D and server powerhouses do? Dive into the low cost market. SGI is trying with it's NT Workstation line (and is supporting Linux along with it, woohoo!) Which means that copy of Office 2000 you just bought will work on your new SGI boxes, major plus. Sun can't abandon their UltraSPARC and microSPARC chips like SGI did with MIPS. So they buy out an already existing multiplatform office suit (Star Office), keep all the multi-platform ports, but redo the Java port which just happens to run very well on the *SPARC processors. Then get into the low-cost workstation market which is making everyone else so much money. Not only does having an office suite make Sun's boxes look more attractive, but they can read and write MS Office documents, which means with Sun's boxes you're able to remain in competition with your competition.
Sun:
1. Don't abandon your *SPARC chips.
2. Don't change your logo to a real crappy one.
3. Don't make Star Office unfree for personal users.
4. Don't force my box to run Star Office in Java, I like Java (especially when I dont have to do memory management mineself), but my box doesn't do a good job of running it quickly.
5. my toaster doesn't need to be on the internet, don't try to put Jini in it or I'll put a bottle where the Sun don't shine.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't know about you guys, but on my personal supercomputer (Celeron 400, 128M) StarOffice is really really slow. Much slower than MS products on NT. I don't really even consider them useful. Sad to say it, but it's true.
has anyone noticed that one star is buying another? ... sun starr ... celestial bodies ... all they need is to buy some Moon Inc or something and we'll ahve a set
if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
Bites them on the ass,
but StarDivision knows not
customer service.
did you first do the root install with option /net?
/usr/local/Office51 and an Office51 directory of 2MB in each users homedir. Even SO3 could do this.
and then normal install for each user?
(like it says in the instructions)
I have it installed multi-user here without problems, everything in
I'll agree with you though that it's in serious need of a diet.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
If Sun do buy StarOffice and market it there may very well be more copies of StarOffice sold than there are now. But I don't think it will be because of the cross-platform nature of the product.
Most people use a wp/spreadsheet/whatever because it's:
- installed on their PC (witness the popularity of MS Works or Claris Works among school projects)
- what they are given at work
- produces file formats that their customers expect
Where I work I have a choice between Word/Excel and Lotus SmartSuite. 90% of the documents on the lan are created using MS products - so that's what I use. This is the only criteria by which I choose the tool. Whether or not the apps are cross-platform (they are) doesn't make a difference to me.A very small percentage of use more than one OS in real life so a cross-platform office suite isn't a deal making must have feature, IMHO.
my blog: good times, man, good times
But StarOffice isn't exactly a speed demon as it is. It already runs like it was written in Java.
My hope is that they rewrite it some so its much faster and incorporates it into the Solaris enviroment (CDE). Many people like me work all days infront of UNIX workstations from SUN, HP, IBM, SGI, Compaq, etc. if you add Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD to that you got a even bigger marketshare. I hope they speeds it up and ships it for all the major UNIX flavors. That will make UNIX a bit stronger.
I run on a Cyrix PR200+ with 64Mb RAM, on Linux 2.2, and it isn't slow on that.
It starts up in a couple of seconds, and then flies along.
It would be interesting to find out why it is slow on other machines that should be faster than mine.
The Register is a vast joke. And you guys call that "well-sourced"! Hey, you really should take some lessons in journalism!
Anyone use them before that, when they were SunWrite, etc etc etc?
Been here, seen this.
The main reason I thought people were leaving M$ Office, apart from the cost and the forced upgrades through file-format changes (which are huge reasons in themselves of course) is that they didn't want to buy these tools from a proprietary OS manufacturer, as that tied them to the proprietary OS...
I just hope Sun are very careful about keeping this completely cross-platform, and as up-to-date on each platform, or they'll kill it =OZ
I've got an AMD K6/2-350 with 128MB ram and a Riva TNT video card, and StarOffice runs way slower than MSO on my system. I agree with you that it is pretty stable though, but the spreadsheet seems to lack features that I've gotten used to in Excel. StarOffice needs some refining to be competitive.
0. AFAIK StarOffice is in C++
1. StarDivision uses its own cross-platform toolkit for implementing StarOffice.
2. There is a version of StarOffice with a GUI written in Java and a backend running on a Server.
3. There is Andreas von Bechtholsheim (Ex-Sun Cofounder and currently holding a stake in StarDivison).
=>
1. If You want a big market, target PCs - even if those PCs run Windows - initially, then try to lure customers away.
2. Sun wants to dotcom You these days:
This means You have to buy a bunch of Starfire-boxes for the cellar and as-dumb-as-possible-desktops.
3. I guess Andy has kept MSFT out since April '92 and got SUNW in now.
Cheers
AC
Yes. It's slow.
1. I know that many of the JavaSoft division used StarOffice on the evaluation license because of Scott McNealy's directives to avoid MicroSoft Office. The file import and export routines worked well, and this allowed Sun employees to exchange Word files with the rest of the universe. It worked adequately on Solaris and various Windows platforms. The speed issues kept getting killed by Moore's law as we upgraded machines. It was unusable on the old Mr.Coffee Javastations, but so was everything.
2. One idea floating around Sun that never picked up steam was to help the industry formalize file formats. Remember that this was at the time that JavaSoft was the only group being able to pound out a working standard with reference code and conformance tests in under a year. The goal would be to work to disrupt the MicroSoft cash flow by creating a consortium of Lotus, Novell, Corel, StarOffice, Adobe, Oracle, and others to make a standardized, testable, and brandable file format that would allow new add on products and to cut of the monopoly profits from Office. There were a lot of fish frying, and this one never picked up steam.
3. Notice that the lack of standardized formats does kill innovation. Oracle has had some cool doucment summarizing technology for a long time. Other companies really understand how to manage change logs. None of these companies can afford changing file import formats everytime Microsoft has a whim.
4. The MicroSoft Office monopoloy grinds out long feature creep lists, and it works on the incredibly complex file formats. There are a couple companies doing reasonable business who spend their life reverse engineering the MicroSoft Office file format. I actually read an early draft of a paper describing the likely proprietary moves that Microsoft could make with XML and patent protection as part of the file structure. It's fairly nasty.
5. If Sun finally does buy these people out, Scott will probably make it free for individual users. The basic rule doesn't change; Sun wants you to use a Unix workstation instead of a PC.
I think that Microsoft has cornered the market on the wintel environment. However, their (current) plans not to support Linux leaves an opening. This is the market that Corel is trying to capture now and as Linux grows so will their market share.
but is it open source?
hahaha
sorry
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
This is a quote from scott mcnealy, right? Or is it Kant?
--Shoeboy
I've used StarOffice for about 6 months on my Linux workstation at work, opening and saving mostly other users Office97 documents. My system is a PII-233 with 192 meg of memory, and sometimes StarOffice is very slow. Sometimes it consumes 40% of the cpu for no reason until I shut it down.
However, it's still my program of choice for word processing. I have had very good success reading/writing MSOffice files, and the tools that it comes with work well alone and with each other.
I tried WordPerfect for awhile, but it was way too quirky to use day-to-day. My biggest complaint about StarOffice is it's size and lack of speed, but it does what I need it to do, and that's what I look for in an office suite.
I'm thinking of purchasing a license to put it on all 12 of my Linux systems in my computer lab here at the office (I teach some networking classes and soon some Linux classes) to teach people basic word processing/office type skills.
StarDivision also has a very nice package for schools called "Software in Schools". For something like $200, you can get a site license of StarOffice (any platform, I think) plus licenses for the teachers to install it on their systems at home. A school lab with Linux and StarOffice can make a very cost effective solution for a school where the budget is already stretched very thin.
I hope Sun uses it's market share to push StarOffice and continue to improve the product.