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SUN and Star Office's Licence agreement.
DaveHowe writes "Interesting speculative piece in ZDnet about SUN's long term plans for StarOffice and of course it's development into StarPortal; It's a little TOO anti-SUN not to be taken with a pinch of salt, but does raise a couple of interesting points:That the licence for current downloads is non-redistributable, and requires registration, and
That there is no guarantee that Sun won't withdraw StarOffice at some point after StarPortal is active, leaving the Linux community high and dry."
If _I_ spend a lot of money developing something, I'm well right entitled to do anything I want, including:
1. Let you use it for free, but not redistributing it.
2. Not allowing you to sell or give away support patches.
3. Accept your contributions with your implicit acknowledgement that you decline to sue me in relation to it.
4. Establishing in the license how I'll be allowed to reuse your stuff, eg: non-exclusive license, copyright sharing, etc.
If you don't like the license, don't take the offer. Or pay for a different license. Or write your own stuff.
Note that I'm not condoning 'Net hijacking by greedy and/or technology-impaired corporations, though.
Sun will want to supply the servers.
Sun's primarily a hardware company - tho it's hard to tell now days.
Microsoft is a software company - despite it's huge size - they've pretty much stuck with software (disregarding small devices like mice and keyboards). They design specs for devices like Palm-Sized-PC, Handheld PC etc, make the software and let the hardware companies take care of the rest. It's this kind of thing which has lowered the price of devices - not increased them like people think (look at the trend of PC hardware prices).
However, IMHO, the point of the story was that SUN might not be good for the product StarOffice. And thus not good for the users. End user applications is really not Sun's core business.
With standardized file formats, this whole [MS|Star|K]Office{95|97|2000} thing would not really bother anyone. So, it's good that there are more and more end users, who "just want to get the job done". And are not religious about any OS or application.
Anyone know how XML is getting along in this area?
Yes. We should keep going until we have Java office softwares - work on ALL machine!
Am I confusing you?
Star Office Portal does not run your laptop. Am I still confusing you?
Jilles
We know this, but we're talking about publicity and FUD. Sun is fighting a publicity war as much as it's fighting a server/OS war. Release free software, open up it's code to Open Source development. Even if they can knock down M$ a few pegs, don't you think they'd want to step around the issue carefully. The average consumer and occassional headline browser is going to remember that M$ was sued for anti-trust and monopoly issues, and that part of that was a result of the spotlight on the browser wars?
Yes, the more correct statement is as you placed it above. M$ used their market power to push out competition by giving away software for free (embedding/integrating it into their OS as a feature enhancement). Could Sun not do the same from the desktop application arena? Sun wants a piece of the action. They want to sell their thick server/thin client solutions. Why not give away a desktop application for free to muscle their way into server/OS market. Gain recognition, give the consumer a good feeling, and persuade them to move over to an NC environment running on their hardware and software over a PC environment running on M$ software.
Why jeapordize a possible influx into a larger market by drawing the public's attention as Micro$oft did? By using Micro$oft's own tactics, which are well publicized and recognized by the majority of dedicated computer consumers, Sun would most likely get more than a few fingers pointing their way. "The DOJ nailed M$ for it! Precidence! Sun should be hit too!" Slow down distribution and fewer fingers would be doing the pointing...
Publicity, FUD, and market share. Who said capatilism was boring?
assert(expired(knowledge));
$100K is cheap when you could consolidate tons of little boxes and run them all in a protected environment. Administrating 100 Enterprise 6000 vs 3000 Linux boxes is the difference between hiring a couple of SA vs an army of them(plus networks uprade, serious datacenter upgrade.) At $200k each SA, your company would be out business by then. Don't get sucked into that low cost bait & switch that the peecee hardware vendor has pioneered. Nobody cares if the compiler is $49 or $5000 because if 500 developers has to spend an extra 5 minutes each using the cheapie one, in one day that difference in cost is made up. It all comes down which one will get the job done, big guys spending billions of dollars on IT budget don't go to computershopper or pcjunkyard.com to try to save that $3 in motherboards.
Man, screw Koffice also, who even needs those GUI crap, just give me dc,bc,emacs, perl and leave the mouse-pointing to the clueless. dc/bc will never change, and shit if they take it out of any unix, I just compile the System II version and go on with my life.
Forget Java office, I want Java bc and Java dc. Who needs all that point & click crap when I could just type it in.
First off, Sun is a for profit company. Can you image a for profit company NOT pulling MS style tactics? Of course nto, its how they make profit.
Second, any one touting SUN as the great liberator from MS is about as washed up silly as the standard MSheeple saying that they have no problems.
Third, have you used star office and compared it to MS Office? Most folks have not, and after doing so need to resort to name calling and rhetoric waving as thier only resort to looking like an idiot for endorsing Star OFfice.
Fourth, When this all gets out to teh consumer public, do you really want to be a supporter for that level of hype? Do you really want your name attached with either side of the media mess?
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
what is the shit difference about free software when you have to pay an arm and a leg for the hardware, and upgrade it every 3 month when Intel introduces the 610Mhz CPU which makes the 600Mhz model obsolete. We got to have free hardware too. Don't forget the "tel" in Wintel stands for the other half of the Evil Devil.
Nobody is bad mouthing Darth Maul(Intel) because they have no real alternative. If we just slash-dot Intel and release all their gustapo secrets, we would be free of their tyranny.
This was from Jesse Burst's Anchordesk? You'll be a lot better off when you stop reading that article...I know I feel better since I quit 6 months ago. Kinda like beating a horrible disease. I believe the hype, he's on the MS payroll. I've always liked Sun. I can see the points posted here, but like someone else posted, we (the Linux community) don't NEED StarOffice. If they start to charge someone will develop a GPL'd "office" program just like SO. That's the beauty of Open Source!
They discontinued Wabi pretty abruptly though. What about the customers who bought into it? Wabi 3 was supposed to emulate Win32, like WINE. If they really wanted to help they could release all the source for Wabi 2.2 and 3beta to WINE.
He just noted that they have shown a habit of discontinuing products whenver it suits them, without warning.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
You don't have to run KDE. You just need the QT libraries. Ofcourse, there maybe KDE specific features (like system tray icons and clipboard etc) which you don't get - stuff like that happens (and when it happens on windows for same reasons - people yell microsoft is trying to corner the market - DLL conflicts - fragmentation etc etc FUD FUD FUD).
:P.
It's kindda fragmented development...but i don't care - it's their time
Personally, I think KDE will succeed. They have better and more complete applications. Gnome is rather buggy - and I don't like GTK+ over QT.
Wait a minute! A *compiler* company sued because vendors bundled software with the hardware that the company sold? As in the compiler company couldn't sell their compilers because the OS had compilers pre-installed, and you didn't need another one? And they Won?
Something comes to mind... Netscape. IE. Microsoft. Netscape. Windows. Netscape. Bundled. Trial. Precedent. Netscape. And the *accusation* that Netscape couldn't sell their browser because *they* failed as a company? It's all clear now.
-Brent--
That said, I am scratching my head over the way Sun has licensed this.
What is the real goal here? I presume, like many others, that the goal is to "cut off Microsoft's air supply," by going after their big cash cow, Office.
If that is true, the current license (as well as the SCSL, under which the source, when released, will be licensed) doesn't accomplish the goal, due to its limitations on redistribtion.
Why not, at the very least, allow unlimited redistribution of binaries? That would get StarOffice into more hands, which gets Sun closer to the goal of damaging Microsoft's revenue stream.
Presumably, Sun isn't going to make a lot of cash selling StarOffice, since they are giving it away. So, why not let others distribute? I really don't understand the reasoning behind that.
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I attempted to load a demo copy of pre-Sun StarOffice and was shocked to find that I could not complete the installation process without a registration key - which I was unable to obtain even after I registered at Sun.com. My next solution (as I have no modem on my Linux box)was to purchase StarOffice 5.1 media from Sun for $9.99 plus $9.00 shipping and handling. Although Sun bashes Microsoft it appears as if they have passed Bill Gates 101 with flying colors.
Might I point out that the corprate world & academia are where Sun is now? I don't think you could walk into CompUSA or the like and find much for Sun products now. Network Computers may not be a bad place for Sun to go, if they can pull it off in suitland...
So if you're a user, don't be satisified with something that "works for Linux", demand GPLed software.
If you're in a company, demand that the software they claim is free is GPLed as a gurantee against stuff like this.
Daniel Mikkelsen, on.xif@noxin
You need to check out the Gnome Workshop. KOffice is nice, but there's nothing from with having multiple applications that do the same thing in different ways. It causes innovation.
-Brent--
Are you sure? :-)
it is slow compared to MS Office. On Linux it takes about a minute to load
I just started it. It took 8 seconds, on a Celeron 300(450). That's not really fast, but it's not that bad.
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You don't need to install the entire KDE package to run KOffice.
You don't have to use KDE to use KOffice. It will run in GNOME as well.
I only use soffice to read the MS-Word docs that everyone e-mails me. It's big and slow and reminds me of windows. Linux community left high and dry? The GNU/Linux guys are smarter than that. Stop wasting time with /. and get coding ;-).
Having administered such machines, I am quite sure that the old compiler was also included in versions of Solaris prior to 2.5 which was released in 1996.
I have hated Sun for a very long time now.
Is the source still available?
Maybe we could re-write SO under GPL and give it better features.
Sun has been the MS of Unix for a long time now.
They make very slow machines but they make you think you need it.
K Office is coming along quite nicely and actually looks better than Star Office anyway. There already KLyx for those that really need something like that. KOffice will force Corel and Sun, maybe even Microsoft (by then who knows) into at least keeping their suites "free beer".
support gun control: take guns from cops
When you consider that 32 processor Alpha machines outperform 64 processor Suns, they don't sound so fast anymore. Anyway, I believe what the poster meant was that Sun hardware is slow compared to PC hardware in the same price range.
from the doh! dept.
do {
I think this was already posted ( Is Sun Truly A Friend of Linux?) a week or so ago.
while (1);
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Yes, but the 3000 ~$800 PC boxes with Windows only costs around $2.5M. Add another $200k or so for 10 x86 based servers. A Sun server that can handle the load of serving 30 people's applications costs what, $100k? If so, that's $10M in server hardware alone, figuring each thin client at $300 adds another million. Where I work (an NT based shop) we have about one senior SA ($100k), one help desk tech ($20k), and 2-3 technicians ($40k) per 300 clients. That's $240k x 10 = $2.4M per year per cluster of 300 people. Add another couple senior SAs and a couple network technicians at the top level and you are at about $3M/yr. in staff costs. Even if you completely ignore all staff costs for the thin client solution, it is still much, much more expensive.
It is nice to see Microsoft get hit with one of its own tricks. I've been stuck with Word for years b/c my the equations and graphs in my existing documents never came out right in other on other word processors and spreadsheets....until StarOffice, which seems to work pretty well. I also noticed that Sun installs it's java virtual machine with SO, which might be half the motivation as well.
Where I work (NT based), we spend just under $100k per 100 people on staff. You'll probably spend 2-3 times that number or more just on Sun *server* hardware alone per 100 people in a thin client solution. I just don't see how NCs are feasible unless the HW cost of servers comes down.
When Sun put their logo on StarOffice and moved it over to their sites for download, it was no longer necessary to register or have any form of key for installation. Gotta check the facts, dewd. As for KOffice...ehhh....no thanks.
No alternatives? What about Motorola/IBM/Apple, Compaq/Alpha, AMD, etc? Also, PC hardware is dirt cheap compared to Sun hardware.
I am not a morning person I guess :)
Sorry
That doesn't change the main point though. Based on my personal dealings with Sun over the past 7-8 years, I've come to the following conclusion: Given the chance to dominate the market, Sun will make MS business practices look benevolent.
Having adminned Solaris 2.3 and 2.4 machines, I am pretty sure they did not.
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
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No they're not migrating anything, they're now beyond license wars thanks to the way this has been approached by the community. Stop saying that they are without proof or knowledge of the real situation.
There were a few parts of the article that I did agree with:
I'd have to agree with this. I'd be willing to bet that Sun will eventually discontinue support for Star Office for Linux. They did so with wabi.
Just ask yourself this what exactly has Sun ever done to help the Linux community? If your answer is lxrun, then your are wrong that was just to help Sun.
Just my 2 cents...........
Only 'flamers' flame!
Obviously you've never had your code stolen by MS. (Check into the Stac case)
KOffice is irrelevant at this moment. It's a promising product but a finished version that can compete with MS/Star/Wordperfect is a long time away for us.
I don't think SUN has bought Star Office to make money on it. At least not directly. What they are hoping to do is boost server sales (hardware that is). For that reason it wouldn't surprise me if they will be giving start office portal away for free or for a relatively low fee. Once they finished it their main concern will be to get as much copies in the market as possible (running on sun servers). Asking a lot of money for it won't help so they won't.
I think one month or so ago when sun bought Star there was this guy (forgot the name) who claimed that if Sun would not get their suit onto 5 of the most important internet portals, it would have failed. Seen in that light it is very likely they will give the software away for free.
Jilles
My company came across some old Sparcs (SPARCclassic and SPARCstationLX) that had Solaris on them. REALLY slow, so we installed RH 5.2 on 'em. Not perfect, but they were finally usable. Linux did for these Sparcs what's it has done for old x86 machines: save 'em from the round file...
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
"Microsoft is the epitome of innovation and product quality."
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
KDE kicks ass, GNOME should integrate it.
IE5 kicks ass, Netscape should integrate it.
The only thing that has changed about StarOffice registration since Sun bought it is that now you don't get 30days to try it out before handing over your details. StarOffice always said that to continue using it after 30days without registering it was illegal so I don't really see what the difference is. The only major problem I can see with the change is the modification to the distribution model in that it becomes less easy for people to give it away free on Cover Discs and such like. As for Sun's desire to take over the world in place of Microsoft, who knows only time will tell about any of these things.
Standalone apps are dead folks. Quit trying to beat Microsoft at building 80's software. The web is your friend. Web apps will make this crap obselete.
Compaq's web page lists a 4 CPU ES40, and a 14 CPU GS 140. They also list parallel clusters of systems that add up to 32 CPUs, but these are not SMP or a NUMA machine, so there is no shared memory.
Now I admit CRAY puts up to 2048 CPUs into a MPP architecture in their T3 systems.
The last thing I would want is to replace a bloated, proprietary office suite standard with another even more bloated, proprietary office suite standard from an company that I trust even less than MS.
The last thing we need to do is to increase the market share of an MS Office clone. We should be supporting office suites that are based on standardized formats so we are never stuck with a proprietary standard again.
Um, NOT.
Firstly I don't have the office toolbar loaded (it really is a bit bloated)....secondly that wouldn't matter cause Word starts in a seperate process space from the toolbar.
Um, but I was comparing it's speed with ms office.
Even if you compare star office on a linux machine or windows machine with ms office on a windows machine - ms office wins out. it's faster and more responsive. it's generally not linux's fault - it's star office.
which makes me angry about all the complaints of microsoft's sloooooow software. in my experience (take office and internet explorer as evidence) ms make really fast software - especially when you take into account features. but then they have those extra engineers sitting there optimising code (like prolly not loading up some uneeded modules with office - although office still seems responsive when doing things).
What big corporation buys $800 peecees? Its like the same way most big corp don't buy Sparc clones. Why do you think Dell is making such a shitload of money? It ain't from selling $800 'doze boxes to big firms. Go check out their business desktops, $3-$4K each. Heck their workstation
Don't forget, their salary is not their total total compensation. $100K guy's total outlay is ~$200K(figuring for benefit, bonus, insurance, office space use...)
Go check out Sun's site for white paper on server feasability w/Sun Ray boxes
A NT shop? come on you must have a whole bunch of users w/only mail/MSword.
Hey, we got tons of NT users too, and they all run Exceed and access their critical apps on 6yr old Sparc 20 boxes. We get ~20-30 users running various things on it.
A fully loaded E450 that has 8-16X memory 50X the processing power should handle at least 30 users, even if the X server is running on it. And a fully loaded one is probably ~$35K w/std sun discount. Not includeing disk storage, but including multiple SCSI controllers for external RAID storage. This could probably support 100-300 users based on Light-Heavy usage.
So 3000 users requires 150 of these E450 servers @ $35k each would cost $5M + $1M for the Rays. Not including RAID(which in my company uses EMC SRDF mirror to another city, not your std cheap stuff (~$2M each silo to be exact)
A NT system consisting of 3000 $4K Dell basic business boxes would be $12M, plus your 50 compaq servers @ $30K each would be $1.5M. Where we are, even college graduates get $45K, so there is no such thich as $20k helpdesk techs.
Of course these systems require much more backend systems, in which we got a few hundred E4500 w/10-14 CPUs and hundreds of terabytes of disks, which are part of the picture.
Check your start menu. I bet you have the office quick start thingie (whatever the hell it's called). In any case the reason office loads faster is that most of the DLL's that it uses are loaded by windows. When you turn on your windows it pre-loads a bunch of dlls that office uses. MS has an advantage there in that they control the OS.
War is necrophilia.
Unlike Microsoft, Sun actually delivers some high-quality products.
Just this morning, some bozo's scripts drove the load on an UltraSPARC-based web server up to ~38. No problem...I went in and killed his processes. The machine was still responsive, even under that kind of a load.
Solaris is still more scalable than Linux (although I prefer Linux for most uses these days).
Java is an excellent language, even if the runtime implementation is subpar.
Sun makes a lot of good stuff. Yes, we have to make sure we don't get cornered by them or any other vendor, but to compare them with Microsoft is unfair, IMO.
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The compatiblity with MS Office is greatly exaggerated.
My anecdotal experience with interoperability highlights some significant limitations, primarily the limitation that StarOffice is more interoperable with Office2000 than previous Office95 or Office97 releases. I took a number of spreadsheets I use frequently and was unable to import any sort of chart from Excel95 into StarOffice (including pie, bar, scatter, and line charts.)
The point of spreadsheets and manipulating data is to A) understand what's going on and to B) cleanly and simply express what's going on to someone else. Thus charting constitutes about 50% of a spreadsheet program's value, a fact not reflected by Sun's 95%+ interoperability claims. (For those interested, Sun's precise interoperability claims are documented in hundreds of pages of documentation, mostly comparing to Office2000.)
The irony is that to get interoperability with StarOffice, such as ability to import Excel charts, corporations will have to first upgrade to Office2000 and save all files in that format before moving to StarOffice!
So I wouldn't spend too much time paying attention to StarOffice; it won't be giving MS problems any time soon (unfortunately for all our pocketbooks.) For offices/homes not needing such a conversion, I imagine it'll work fine, but currently poor compatibility will prevent it from harnessing network effects and getting a positive feedback loop going as an Office replacement. It's just cheap software.
Sigh.
--LP
Enquiring minds want to know.
Who's paying the Slashdot bills? Sun Micro?
"Epeeist" touches on this, and it is something that is often forgotten in debates like this. There is the corporate market and the home market and their needs (and their budgets) are different.
The user at home does not need an office suite, and, as someone else posted further down the stream, are often better off getting individual, separate packages. Don't need a spreadsheet app? Don't get a spreadsheet app./Don't get a bloated office suite. And cost is usually more important a factor to the home buyer than it is for the corporate buyer.
Corporations have to consider "total cost of ownership" which includes such things as:
- cost of maintenance,
- cost of installation (And installing the app once on a network server rather than 'nnn' times on individual workstations is a no-brainer!)
- cost of interoperability between your apps and data and outside sources.
Add into that the importance to a corporate network of having everybody use the same version of the software. ("I'm sorry, could you please redo that data you sent me? I only have [your version number - 1].")
Sun is aiming at the corporate office. That is where they expect to see their money made. I get the impression that they don't care about the home market.
This does not preclude a universe where Sun servers provide network apps to a network of, say, Linux clients.
In a word, be calm. Take a deep breath. Sun is not going to destroy Linux.
No, there is a independent version of StarOffice written in java. Nobody uses it though.
CY
Except for the splashscreen which is written in PL/1.
Sorry dude. We still have a SparcCenter 2000 at work running Solaris 2.4 Server and it does have it. I just checked this afternoon.
Sun's super-slow online store (some advert) indicates that workstations start at $2520 -- In short not much more than business PC hardware (aka not your $600 Office Depot jobs).
Don't forget that a standard Gartner Group piece of wisdom is that an enterprise PC costs something like $10-15,000 per year to support. If the promise of lower support costs with UNIX are actually true, Sun comes out looking like a bargin.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I wouldn't worry about it, if Sun did as stated it would just be a big PR mistake for them. every buisness has two faces, the concerned, friend of the community, and the "money-grabbing" back-stabbing "who cares about the customer OR the Community" face. personally, I would just stick with one of those High quality Open Source programs like Koffice when it comes out, or just use maxwell, or klyx, or just get wordperfect 8 if you want a commercial product.
Remember the guts of the matter...
:)
If you like it, use it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
If you don't like it, and you don't use it, use something else or write something you _do_ like.
If you end up writing something else, GPL it _only_ if you want to.
Problem?
If I had two cents to rub together, this would be them.
15
Is the above XML fragment part of an alternative to /etc/groups that tells you the members of group 100? Does it mean that item #15 in the warehouse weighs 100 kilograms? Or maybe when you put an O on the board in the Scrabble variant that uses this configuration file, it's worth 100 points.
Say what good you will about XML (and there's a lot of it), it won't suddenly enforce openness. It just means that instead of many different ways of building unreadable binary files, now there's one way to build unreadable ASCII files.
We don't quite have a bunch of users who only do email and word, but that's close. Our most common uses are (in order): email, Powerpoint, Word/Excel, Photoshop, browsers, and then a whole bunch of special purpose applications run by subsets of our users.
This spring we bought several hundred 300 MHz PII machines with 64MB, 4GB disks, and 17" monitors for $800 from Micron. Our last big purchase before that was P166s from AOpen in 1997 for $1100 each. Any IT manager who is paying $4K per seat for their PCs should be fired, IMHO.
Also, our helpdesk people make $8 per hour. They don't do any troubleshooting - they answer the phone, change permissions & passwords, do paperwork & inventory, route service requests to the techs, etc. The techs we have earn $30-40K/yr and don't have college degrees. Since SMS and VNC became available, the techs spend little time admin-ing individual boxes. They spend most of their time rolling out new machines and retiring old ones. Most of our senior system and network admins have degrees and make anywhere from $40-100k/yr. I did forget about overhead costs on top of the salaries.
We currently have about one dual PII file server and one email server per 300-500 people, plus a few single boxes for a web server, a firewall/proxy, a ppp server and email relay, etc. I believe that 30 servers in a 3000 head organization run like mine would be more than enough. We have some Solaris and OpenVMS machines for special purposes, but that's irrelevant in this comparison.
Also, I really doubt that a quad-Sparc box can run office productivity software for 200 people. 20-30 users on a Sparc 20 running mostly shells and text based stuff and some people running remote X sessions should be no sweat. Running spreadsheets, word processors, presentation graphics, and image manipulation software is a different load entirely and 50 users running remote office applications on one CPU sounds unrealistic. I can't say for sure since I've never tried.
I think we are arguing from the perspective of two very different environments. Where I work, we don't do any data warehousing. We have a few people that do some engineering modeling & simulation on Sun hardware (a 20 CPU SparcCenter 2000 and a half dozen Sparc 10s) and Alpha/OpenVMS, and a few other special needs. But mostly (like 90%) of the load is email & office applications. In my current environment, I'm still skeptical that a thin client approach could be cheaper.
A) You can't run KOffice while running Gnome, UNLESS you installed KDE's libraries. That's a) cumbersome and b) novice users won't know this, let alone how to do it. ... etc.
B) I sometimes run KDE apps under gnome: a) it looks ugly, b) I can't dnd between them. c) I can't
The basic point is that I think that an application like an office suit has little reason to depend on a desktop environment. All reasons it has should in my opinion be solved by little shared libraries and not by an entire set of desktop environment libs.
Greetings,
Ivo
Who make this independent Java version of Star Office?
Why isn't it used?
The german computer magazine c't has an article on this on their newsticker (In german). There's also this News.com article on the subject... Hope this helps!
--
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
exqueeze me?
heh?
Your internet lingo confuses me.
What are you talking about?
Also, S.O. does not run on a server, but a client desktop - so WHO exactly needs to buy servers for Star Office?
I think the point is that one shouldn't bother developing for it. Don't know whether or not I agree, but it does sound accurate. If you can't distribute your changes, why bother?
This was from an admittedly biased source (they killed a product that he had been involved with [somehow]), but this doesn't mean that he's wrong when he says "Don't let this happen to you". KOffice may be a better bet, even if it isn't as done yet.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes there is. And the point is innovation. Microsoft has loadly proclaimed the superiority of having only one choice. But is that the best? Does Microsoft really innovate, or do they just care about changing the software enough to keep people forking over the dough.
Competing against yourself is a very good idea. Many companies do this, especially when there isn't other competition. It's like running. You may run fast by yourself. But you'll run faster if someone is chasing you with a knife.
It could be said, "Yes, but we will always be trying to keep ahead of Microsoft, won't that cause enough innovation?" I'd have to disagree. Sure, right now maybe Microsoft is ahead, but it won't always be. But in the future, if KDE is the standard platform, they won't be able to stagnate because there'll be Gnome right behind them forcing them to keep ahead. Likewise, Gnome will be forced to keep innovating to try to get ahead of KDE.
The best thing Microsoft could have done a few years ago was split Windows up into 2 different divisions. Each division would have been responsible for developing and marketing their OS independently. They would have had real innovation, and also would have self-restrained themselves from being able to violate anti-trust laws.
Let's learn from Microsoft and realize that having both Gnome and KDE are a good thing. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we only need one desktop environment.
--
Hey, this only seems like one more reason to suport the development of software like the gimp, gnumeric, abiword and the like. Who needs staroffice? There's a complete GPL office coming around in a short-medium time. They even have component integration (bonobo) which leads to spreadsheets being integrated into abiword and vice versa, as well as gimp images, and stuff like that. Let'em block linux, as if it would be good for them.
Now... Sun ain't stupid... they know that... so they won't be doing that a moronic move. So I don't worry.
And so this is my 2c of insightfullness.
> This isn't troll talk - it is slow compared to
> MS Office. On Linux it takes about a minute to
> load, on windows, around about the same. ewww.
> MS Office takes like 2 seconds (per app).
Windows generally preloads the libraries
for Office into RAM so that bloated pigs
like Word will start faster. Try closing the
Office toolbar and then opening Word and
look at the difference in load time.
Click here for the September 9th Cringley article
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
I would guess because JAVA is very slow for this kind of applications. Staroffice , as it is - writtent in C or C++ is slow, imagine how slow must be the Java version.
Actually, I'd include the positive points too! Is the story interesting, or simply a rehash of what everyone else is saying? Is it funny? Is it mindless drivel (i.e., flamebait)? I think it could be a valuable piece of information.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
So why did Sun ship Solaris with an old (BSD derived I think) piece of shit C compiler for a few years after removing their standard compilers?
Will SO stay freely available? Well, in the long term, who can say? But in the short term, probably at least a couple of years, it MUST be free, since this is Sun's marketing strategy to combat Microsoft. The whole idea is that they give away what Microsoft makes you pay for, thereby stealing market share from Microsoft and hopefully making them a weaker company. Our reasons may be different, but I think we in the OSS community all want this.
As for comments about "What has Sun done for Linux?" Sun DOES NOT exist to help linux. They exist to make money. Despite this they have done things in the past that have benefited the Linux community.
Remember people, Sun can't give away EVERYTHING, or they will not be able to continue as a company. Wether anyone likes it or not, we still live in a capitalist economic structure, and for-profit companies are necessary. Stop being so selfish and small-minded.
dmartin@lancity.com
Linux
-----
You didn't listen to what i said. Ever heard of a process space? The only thing i can think of is cacheing of DLLs so that office loads faster (off memory) - that is possible - but the DLLs cached by windows are standard windows libraries - libraries which ALL applications will benefit from. Windows doesn't go and secretly make a process space for office and load up some office specific DLLs whenever windows starts up - trust me. :P) - smart start is to do with relocating clusters in the order which DLLs and other files are loaded.
The smart star technology stuff isn't to do with preloading either (what the hell is it with these people talking about preload - and besides - nothing's stopping sun from doing the same with star - it's no special 'need windows code' trick - in fact it's a trick that doesn't exist anyway
BTW, I don't have OSA etc etc loaded - MS Office loads in 2 seconds despite not having all these programs you keep insisting i have open open.
You must be in the midwest or something, since burger flippers here make that kind of money. I can't blame you for buying el-cheapo peecees, I was in a job that did that too, with the then wildly popular garage shop specials. I mean with a IT budget of > $1 billion, $2 or $5 million for desktop is not even a issue. The big picture is the IT staff's budget, and with at least 200 NT SA's whose total outlay is ~$200K/yr, you got yourself a $40M yearly expense already.
When you come to Wall St, nothing is cheap. Reliability is 100%(That is why we still got tons of Sun Desktops running solaris, because a down'd desktop could mean money lost, and a server that goes down in the wrong time is frequently a $20 million loss. All that in a less than 5min.)
Even the users knows that the NT enviroment is clueless, not being able to fix things w/o intervention. We have 5 levels of fixing things. It is in the order of
w/o user knowing
w/o user intervention
w/o need to restart apps
w/o having to relogin and
w/o having to reboot
reboot.
And in all cases, it is fix w/o having to go
to their desktop.
We mostly do the the 2nd or 3rd. One is considered a moron if they have to relogin or reboot, unless it is absolutely 100% necessary. Even then, the user might not want to logout since he frequently cannot suffer a split second of downtime. Sadly with the NT env, it happens frequently enough where machines just freezes.
With solaris box, we check kernel stack, process stack, process libraries, socket usage, network I/O of app, app/window mgr socket interface, thread deadlock, kernel conention, system calls made.....
You talk from perspective of only knowing environment. Everywhere I go, people talk of NT, CIO says NT this and NT that, but nobody really wants to deploy it on anything serious. That is why even after 3-4 yrs M$ squeezed into our company by giving our CIO the bait & switch, it is still the talk "when NT gets more stable, we will...." Talk about getting fired. If it was any other OS/platform, whatever manager that recommended it would be gone. But only when you are pushing $M, can you do the "Lets do this on NT, lets do that on NT, and just wait for NT to have the capabilities"
Yep, you pegged it. I'm in Ohio.
We run NT mainly for one reason: office software. We really only have one system that is truly mission critical, and it runs OpenVMS.
I agree with everything you say regarding NT. It works out OK where I work, but it isn't dependable enough to run mission critical applications and host big databases. I have a few friends in the financial services industry in Boston and they just use NT machines for Office and email - most of their business is run on Sun systems and 370 mainframes. I also have a friend who runs a hospital's IT shop which is now all NT, and according to him it has been a constant struggle.
I think CIO utopia is to buy one solution from one company that does everything. That way they don't have to think or make any real decisions.
It's not just CIO, but top level mgrs who wants someone who is ultimately responsible. M$ comes in to our company and say they will bend over backward and do anything for us so that we will deploy NT enterprise wide. Now we have NT everywhere on desktops, with users expectation lowered and expecting unexplained hangs as a fact of life.
It ain't even just M$, EMC pushes their wonderful technolgy and Sun pushes theirs too(Although they don't shoot a torpedo in like M$.) It is just the higher up people buys into it as is, expecting them to provide the whole solution, but in reality they just provide the baseline foundation, and we add 5% to that. Then they turn around and sell it to the business unit and reiterate all the wonderful things the sales rep spewed on them.
In here, you go hear middle/higher management do their vapor talk of deploying everything in NT, but then you go deal with the actual people who develop/supports the environment and NT is just a curse.
this followup column.
- Evan
I don't agree that this is a realistic comparison. A test of the default installation of both products is the realistic option. I fail to see how crippling one product makes the test fairer.
If Sun made it so that some of the libraries for Star Office loaded at boot time, then Star Office would load faster. At the moment they don't.
Most of the other Office Suites on Windows pull the same trick. Would you cripple MS, Lotus and Corel to make the test fair if those programs were included in the comparison?
my blog: good times, man, good times
There should be an open format around which applications can be built. This way developers don't have to bother to make everyting compatible with everything else.
It would simply be a case of the best software wins.
Is XML this format perhaps? (I don't know anything about it).
Afterall, do linux users really want to store their docs in MS-word format? Right.
Bungee-Ware: Free Software with elasticated strings attached.
My StarOffice on Windows NT starts in 2 seconds too. BTW: in even 1 second on a Linux machine with an UltraWideSCSI disk.
And MS-Office does not start at all under my Linux.
Do you see what you have done? In German we call that "comparing apples with pears". The slow start on non-SCSI Linux system is a Linux problem, not a StarOffice problem.
"Yes there is. And the point is innovation. Microsoft has loadly proclaimed the superiority of having only one choice. But is that the best?"
But one of the benefits of Open Source is that you don't end up with just one. Sure, right now, while things are developing rapidly, only a few branches can focus enough energy to keep up (possibly this is like the radiation of the phyla), but later on when things stabilize (2-3 years?) then people with diverging needs will implement diverging features, that may not seem important enough to be integrated back in, or may even conflict with the interpretation of other diverging branches. So over some longer period one would see different species of product evolve. At a guess the word processor used by mathematicians may not merge with the one used by chemists, although the basic document format would be the same. One can hope that sufficient effort will be put forth that each will be able to read/print the others files, but even that much isn't guaranteed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You just don't get it do you? It's been repeated several times already in this thread: You can run KOffice while running GNOME! Gasp. Is that really so hard to grasp? I run GIMP and X11AMP all the time under KDE.
Perhaps that's the reason for the slowness.
I'm posting this now from an Ultra-2 machine, running Caldera's Open Linux 2.3 (sparc64 version). Very impressive installation (boot cdrom, click a few buttons, play tetris, reboot). Though I haven't done any benchmarks, it seems a fair bit more peppy than the Solaris 2.6 installation it was running previously. If I could only get a decent (native linux sparc64 compile) web browser, I'd be much happier. KDE's kfm does okay (at least /. reads well), but I'd be much happier with Netscape or Opera (hint-hint!).
Ever heard of automating software distribution, licensing, upgrades, etc?
TummyX makes a good point about Sun being anti-Microsoft. However, I think that somebody has to stand up to that juggernaut.
If KOffice works well, then who cares about StarOffice, which appears to be well on the way to proprietary anyway? Besides, even though I love OpenSource stuff and the cohesion of this group, money does make the world go 'round, and paid developers and their software have always been preferred because of their support backing.
Just my thoughts...
-katana666@yahoo.com
Ever heard of automating software distribution, licensing, upgrades, etc?
NCs will never catch on. The hardware cost of deploying a large scale NC system is staggering. And the software maintenance costs of a traditional PC based system aren't that high when your staff knows how to automate and remotely administer.
An Enterprise 10000 server with 64 cpu's is slow? If I'm paying something like $1 million for a server, I'm not going to run linux on it. What other OS besides IRIX and Solaris can scale to 64 cpus's? The last I heard UltraLinux was booting on a 16 cpu system. Booting and being a stable operating system are two different things. Maybe that 25mhz sparc 1 you are trying to load solaris 7 on is slow (duh), but not anything recent.
That's because your Sparc 2 has the processing power equivalent of a 486/100 or P60. The performance of PC hardware has increased dramatically since then and is now on par with Sparc hardware. While Sun does make high quality hardware, it is also extremely expensive. Most companies can't afford to buy a Sparc box for each employee.
You must have a fast HD. On my Celeron 300(450) system, with older HD and 128MB, it takes about 15 seconds to load. The MS Office apps take a second or two. I'll agree with the first poster - Star Office sucks. It's too bloated, too slow, too buggy, has a clunky interface, tries to take over the desktop, etc. The only think I like about Star Office is the MS Office filters work pretty well.
The only way of selling starportal is to have a broad userbase among different platforms, so it would be totally counterproductive NOT to keep on developing the Linux, Solaris whatever version.. Remeber sun is plannnig to push staroffice to all major PC-makers, like Dell, etc...
I would be very surprised if not more ports will appear rather than less..
/kisses from Sweden.
I couldn't find anywhere in the license which claims no mirroring or distributing the same package allowed. Perhaps a little backgrond work was necessary before such an article was published...
Our users are very happy using StarOffice on their Win32 systems. It would really kick ass if KOffice is also released in a Win32 version for those cyber-lightweights not yet ready to change operating systems.
I have a whole department full of "marginal" computer users who don't have either time or incliniation to learn an OS. Just want to sit down and type a report. Another office suite that is not built around Word or WordPerfect but reads and writes compatible files would be welcome by them.
D. Keith Higgs
CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
The registration is Sun's standard registration for any of their products, not specifically for StarOffice. Once you register for one of their products you can download any of them with the same registration. This is no different than for any other software you download from commercial organizations (for example, Acrobat reader, Real Player, etc).
A famous economist once observed that if you could find a way to clean up all the air pollution in the entire US at a total cost of $2 per state, someone would still object. That quote comes to mind when I see people bitching about corporations not doing enough for or giving enough to the Linux "community". Honestly, some people sound like spoiled little brats who want the world handed to them on a platter, and when they get it, they complain about the shape of the platter. Let me make this clear: Linux is already a juggernaut. It will take over a significant chunk of the desktop market. We'll have more good software available, both free and commercial, than we can shake a mouse pad at. What Sun does with StarOffice won't matter one bit a year from now. Take a deep breath. Step back from the keyboard. Repeat after me, "The war is over. We won."
Whether this is true or not is neither here nor there. But the only way to play safe and avoid being 'shafted' by a commercial offering is to stick with Open Source where possible. Me, I'm waiting for KOffice. Star Office doesn't even appear on my radar.
Macka
Who cares if they pull it back.. This gets us buy until KOffice is finished.
For crying out loud.. Sun is a business trying VERY HARD to survive.. it would not be smart at all if there was NO catches
Star Office should be viewed as an 'intermediate' step - a usable, temporary solution until a more suitable true, GPL'ed Office suite is available.
There are some good starting points AbiWord and Gnumeric spring to mind. Thing is, it doesn't seem that most folk need all that software anyway - it seems they've been 'convinced' that they need it.
Yes, it is too early to speculate what (if any) changes Sun will make to Star's availability/terms of use, so we should wait and see. However, at a minimum (for me to use it on my home linux box anyway), the licensing must be compliant with the Open Source Definition. Sun doesn't like Linux - their membership in Linux International seems to be just to sell hardware. They want you to use Solaris, and pay them for their compilers and development licenses.
This is a very interesting precedent on software bundling. Can someone find any ref to the original case and publish it somewhere?
On a site that can survive a slashdot assault if possible...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I am wondering if anybody was able to use ttf fonts with Staroffice ( both , on the screen and on the printout.)
I constantly hear people bitching about MS office file formats being proprietary and generally incompatible with anything on the market. I wonder if abiword and ,say, KWord will be able to exchange data _without_ loosing any formating information.
I'd take one of those network computers over some dirt cheap peecee hardware any day. Sun makes some of the highest quality servers and parts around. My sparc2 is running the latest version of OpenBSD and netscape. I doubt your 386 could even load X.
Going to them to download it. I mean, they own it.
Even if you don't start Office (and the toolbar) at bootup, MS Office loads much faster than Star Office. 3 sec vs. 15 sec on my machine. Also, MS Office is much more responsive on slower machines (like a P100) and requires a lot less memory to run well. Star Office is just a very poorly done clone of MS Office.
This leads to innovation?
:-(
Well.. sure, normally choice leads to innovation, but not in this case. This is about koffice vs. goffice. You don't choose koffice because it's better than the gnome apps, you choose it because kde happens to be your desktop.
kde vs. gnome is good. That leads to innovation for your desktop environment.
gapplication vs. kapplication is very wrong if you ask me.
Hmm.. I keep on making this argument over and over again.
Greetings,
Ivo
Although they have been working on a Java version.
SunOS 4 (the BSD-derived OS) shipped with a K&R C compiler (i.e. not ANSI. No function prototypes). It lived in /bin/cc, and was used to link new kernels. People also had the bizarre idea that they should use it to compile software from the net, which is the main reason unprotoize scripts are still included in many GNU packages.
/bin/cc only generated a.out format executables, not the ELF format Solaris uses, and was thus never included in Solaris. Sun included gcc on a number of demo CDs over the years.
SunOS 5 (Solaris) never included a C compiler.
The old
Sun sells their professional compilers as separate products, called "SunPro" I believe.
What the hell are you talking about?
"The war is over. We won." What???
Nobody won anything. One of RMS's key ideas is that we must be weary of "open source" companies retracting their code at some point leaving us "high and dry." This is a very real threat.
Actually, StarOffice really blows. I've used it more times than I care to admit. Each time I get a little more frustrated with it. IMHO, it is a poorly written program that needs to be hit over the head because it wants to do too much (don't copy %*$%& Office - you can't copy its feature set - they don't have the sheer number of people that MS does). And, StarOffice can't even do those things very well (or even passably well) on ANY platform (I've tried on Windows, Linux, and on Solaris).
Sun just bought StarDivision to placate some people in OSS community, then they will start charging through the nose for the software. Remember that Sun does not like giving away products. You DO know how much a Sun workstation costs? An Ultra-5 can easily run $5k. Their mid-level servers are about $100k. Their enterprise level servers are $1m and up. This is of course not including all of the software that you must buy. If you want their development studio (C++, etc with an IDE), it is about $5-6k as well. I have heard that it is very good, but it is very hard to justify the cost for it.
Sun was never going to buy StarDivision and keep it for free. They plan to make money (lots) off of it. Sun wants nothing more than to become the next MS.
Face it, we lost. You just don't know it yet.
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
I agree. The only thing worse than having the whole software industry dominated by one company is having the software AND hardware industry dominated by one company. Lets stick to promoting free software and avoid the Sun worshipping.
At the university here, the unix sysadmin group (Hi guys!) claimed that Star Office had a poor networking installation mode, and performed poorly in a client/server architecture.
Can anyone else confirm this?
Andrew
------ Nope, Not me, you can't prove I said that!
It's so easy to bash companies with a profit motive. But bashing Sun or bashing StarOffice or whatever anti-Microsoft solution (though bashing Microsoft is fine...) misses the point, IMHO. At best, the referenced piece on ZDNet is ignorant. At worst, it'll be influential FUD-fodder. To me, Linux is an important product (and way of building and distributing a product) that serves an important goal: widening the horizons of corporate IT types and regular computer users the world over to an \alternative\ way of thinking about software and computing in general. StarOffice, in it's own weird way, is similar. The Internet is a wonderful thing; the WWW could very well be *the* killer app of all time. Both of these things have proven the case, albeit in their infancy (in the case of the WWW), of the beauty and power of network computing. Think about it. We can all get to /. as long as we have a networked computing device with access to a browser. Most of us can do all of our non-device-dependent software development given appropriate access to remote computing resources. The coming wave of ASPs will be an interesting test of the viability of WWW-hosted applications. I, for one, do not consider being responsible for sysadmin duties (backup included) to be gratifying. As long as I have reasonable access to my resources, I'm happy. X-Windows is a nifty 'portal', after all, right?! So what does this all have to do with StarOffice and Sun? Even if it's not exactly what Sun has in mind, their endorsement of StarOffice -- and the relative ease and low cost of folks acquiring it for evaluation (if not deployment) -- will help open more minds to the fact that they can, in fact, exist without a traditional Microsoft/PC/desktop orientation. How's that? It's all about making them aware of \alternatives\. Of course Sun wants to sell more hardware. Actually, I think their primarily interested in selling *something* that they believe in that helps them make money. I'm hopeful that they've learned that focusing on hurting MS doesn't necessarily help them. If they can enlighten the computing world to the benefits of network computing -- and we all can continue enlightening the world about \open source\ software, then the good guys can win without looking like hypocrites. For now, let's applaud Sun for having a strategy to help users. StarOffice is a means, not an end. My preference is to always use GPL-ed stuff, but I'm even more passionate about having choice. Let the games continue!
It's so easy to bash companies with a profit motive.
/. as long as we have a networked computing device with access to a browser. Most of us can do all of our non-device-dependent software development given appropriate access to remote computing resources. The coming wave of ASPs will be an interesting test of the viability of WWW-hosted applications.
But bashing Sun or bashing StarOffice or whatever anti-Microsoft solution (though bashing Microsoft is fine...) misses the point, IMHO.
At best, the referenced piece on ZDNet is ignorant. At worst, it'll be influential FUD-fodder.
To me, Linux is an important product (and way of building and distributing a product) that serves an important goal: widening the horizons of corporate IT types and regular computer users the world over to an \alternative\ way of thinking about software and computing in general.
StarOffice, in it's own weird way, is similar.
The Internet is a wonderful thing; the WWW could very well be *the* killer app of all time. Both of these things have proven the case, albeit in their infancy (in the case of the WWW), of the beauty and power of network computing. Think about it. We can all get to
I, for one, do not consider being responsible for sysadmin duties (backup included) to be gratifying. As long as I have reasonable access to my resources, I'm happy. X-Windows is a nifty 'portal', after all, right?!
So what does this all have to do with StarOffice and Sun? Even if it's not exactly what Sun has in mind, their endorsement of StarOffice -- and the relative ease and low cost of folks acquiring it for evaluation (if not deployment) -- will help open more minds to the fact that they can, in fact, exist without a traditional Microsoft/PC/desktop orientation. How's that? It's all about making them aware of \alternatives\.
Of course Sun wants to sell more hardware. Actually, I think their primarily interested in selling *something* that they believe in that helps them make money. I'm hopeful that they've learned that focusing on hurting MS doesn't necessarily help them. If they can enlighten the computing world to the benefits of network computing -- and we all can continue enlightening the world about \open source\ software, then the good guys can win without looking like hypocrites.
For now, let's applaud Sun for having a strategy to help users. StarOffice is a means, not an end. My preference is to always use GPL-ed stuff, but I'm even more passionate about having choice.
Let the games continue!
Article is redundant. Should be moderated (-1)
Yeah, I am tired of hearing it. I have NO objection for paying someone for a solid product. If Sun wants to go to backbreaking strides to introduce a solid office suite to the masses, more power to them. If they can succesfully create a niche for Staroffice, even dominate.. that is fine. Just as we can choose to use StarOffice over MS Office, I can choose to use something else over StarOffice.
Lord, they don't open source it.. BIG DEAL!!
Get a life people, as much as everyone might bitch about Suns lame license, it's still better than any other competing product..
MOre stripped, Portal compatible ports - yes. Development on standalone app - least likely... You do not kill your tentative piece of bread...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What prevents Sun from revoking Java's "freeness"?
Nothing.
Sun will eventually demand dollar$ from companies who distribute all the (very difficult to re-engineer) Java APIs with their Java applications (Servlet API, EJBs, 3D API, Swing come to mind).
If Microsoft stumbles don't be surprised by what Sun might try.
Solaris is a very fast and reliable operating system. You are calling it "slowaris" based on it's poor performance on x86. Try linux vs. solaris on a sparc and watch linux struggle to even keep up.
The article claims that Sun wants people to go back to the days where all aplications and data are saved onto a server. It's not going to happen. Processing power and storage are just too cheap. If Microsoft doesn't stop Sun, Sega, Sony, and Nintendo will. When the Dreamcast costs $120 and has an add on hard drive, what will Sun's market be? The only market I see is managing a standardized corporate computer system.
Not the fault of the vendors. A compiler company (Greenhills?) sued for restraint of trade because most vendors were giving away a Pascal compiler with their UNIX release. They won their case, and vendors were only allowed to ship compilers necessary to build the operating system. Because Sun and IBM (but not HP!) have dynamic kernels that don't need compiling, they no longer are allowed to ship a C compiler.
There's no point in both the KDE and GNOME camps kicking the same old can. KSpread is inferior and should integrate with GNOME's Gnumeric spreadsheet. Gnumeric's support for Excel and soon to be Lotus spreadsheets rocks.
Yup, McNealy has always been pretty abrasive. But has anyone considered that McNealy's abrasiveness towards MS is deliberate?
5 years ago, Sun would always compare itself to other Unix workstation companies: DEC, HP, SGI. The rhetoric was probably the thickest where DEC was concerned.
Sun then had about $1 billion in sales per year.
McNealy started taking aim at M$ when the hype for NT began. Always with a twisted barb at the ready, he tended to get quoted in the trade press. And what has been the effect? In ZD publications it isn't just "Sun" it is "Microsoft's arch-nemesis, Sun".
Sun now has over $15 billion in sales per year.
Being portrayed as the only staunchly anti-Microsoft computer company has distinct advantages. It means you get invited to bid on lots of large server contracts, because you are seen as the only reasonable alternative platform. These are contracts that "Sun, workstation company" would never be invited to bid on, but "Sun, Microsoft arch-nemesis" does.
I am not a GNOME fan at all. I like KDE + Koffice a lot. But Gnome IS funded largley by redhat which we all know has a lot more of those funds to toss around. Gnome is going to have an office suite as well. Just thought Id mention that
Talking 'bout startup times: just have a look at what you are comparing.
MS Office on Windows with StarOffice on Linux.
Well I DO like Linux, but I don't like people being SO proud of having a Linux box that they are getting too blind to see that even Linux might have some aspects where it is not (yet) better than other OS'es.
In a real test scenario you should have each application on each platform and compare the startup times then. Well, I do not have access to a MS Office on Linux version. But startup on Windows is NOT slower ( assuming of course you did switched the start 60% of MS Office with the OS box of for realistic comparement, of course). But startup of Star Office on Linux IS slower than startup on Windows and that while more than 90% is really the same source code.
The technical question here is why is loading of DLL's on Windows so much slower than loading of shared libraries on Linux and is there a way to improve that.
But they would like to sell their Solaris. Same with StarOffice. This is Ok. Sun is a company and they must try to earn money.
But no the disadvantage: I think Sun is really trying to become Microsoft for *nix, and later for the whole world! IMHO they would try to kill Linux in the future. The LinuxSolaris thread isn't the same as LinuxWindows. Linux and Solaris have the same usage area. So Linux is a direct emeny to Solaris. Think about all the Internet stuff. Most those systems operate with an *nix OS. Their are Linux, BSD, ... and Solaris. So, what do you think are the plans of the management? Do you think they will say "Hey, there is no problem if more and more webserver, ISPs and so on run Linux. Just let Solaris die and give away our StarOffice we bought for a lot of money last month to those Linux users."
Somebody will say: "Hey, but Solaris is much faster/nicer/..." and so on. But think about it: Linux becomes cooler every day. Check out all the nice clustering solutions. And there will appear new ones! The new kernels are faster on SMP maschines. Linux comes with journalling filessystem in the future. Linux is increasing in quality very quickly!
Really, without beeing paranoid: IMHO in the long term, Sun will try to bring Linux down. They don't like Linux because Linux directly decreases their earnings!
Of course, currently all over the world everybody talks about OpenSource and Linux. So they must wait one or two years until the OpenSorce and Linux hipe calmed down. But then, when everybody is using StarOffice in the Linux world, then they could easily kill a large part of Linux usage with don't supporting StartOffice for Linux anymore.
Did you know OS/2? This is a great OS. But there are no latest killer application available for it. Because of the lack of application the usage of OS/2 decrease constantly!
For an OS to survive, the following condition must be meat:
So, watch out and don't trust Sun. You won't trust Micros~1. So where is the reason to trust Sun?
HotSpot Java is faster than C++ and no leak.
User: cypherpunks, Pw: cypherpunks
The trouble is that KOffice requires Qt, and Qt for Windows is not only non-Free, it is very expensive (Over $1,000/developer). In order for a KOffice port to happen, someone would have to take the QPL'ed Unix/Linux version and develop a patch to port it to Windows.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I'm confused - the newspapers often say Star Office is written in Java. Are they correct or out to lunch?
Instead of thinking about your own circumstances, think about the organisation with 10,000+ PCs. Now try and imagine the costs of distributing new software, service packs, installing new discs to replace crashed ones, resetting configurations because users have screwed their old ones, cleaning up after viruses, etc. etc.
All of this is estimated to cost in the order of thousands of dollars per year per user. For "non-power" users (for example help desk operators, or counter staff) the use of NCs look attractive, none of the problems above means a much lower maintenance cost. This doesn't mean that PCs will go away, they will still be about for those who need them.
This isn't troll talk - it is slow compared to MS Office. On Linux it takes about a minute to load, on windows, around about the same. ewww. MS Office takes like 2 seconds (per app). ...all the way. He's not 'evil', hi's company is aggressive when it comes to business (but what company wouldn't be).....Gates comes off to me as a nice guy - a geeky guy. McNealy comes off as a businessman with a disturbing anti-microsoft and a 'i want to be gates' complex (kindda like Ellison).
The article did bring up an interesting point - who would you rather have as a dictator? Gates or McNealy?
I'd rather have Gates
My prediction? Sun will capture many businesses etc with their workstations eventually - then everyone will be complaining about the monster that is AOL/SUN/ORACLE.
Would I rather have Sun or Microsoft lead the software industry? Microsoft all the way.
Everything Sun does today is to undermine Microsoft - it's so obvious. Their campaign for '100% pure' java, their network computing push, their aquisition of StarOffice, their alliance with Netscape.
Just check out scott mcnealy's website at sun.com, it's a page full of anti-microsoft garbage. you don't see anything like that on bill gates' site. he's professional about these things.