LWN: Comments on "Star Office, Ready For the Big Time? (IT-Director)"

OT: Macs, OSX, and Unix

Duncan — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 11:02:23 +0000

> He told me Macs were the best for layout and he wouldn't
> think of using any unix related software. I asked him if
> he had Mac OS X and he said he did. I told him it was
> unix and he looked very worried.

That's just about sig material, there. It fits in the recommended four
lines, too. Anyone using fortunecookie sig lines agree?

Duncan

Open Office vs Sun + Microsoft

ordonnateur — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 22:41:45 +0000

Perhaps the best part of open source is that other projects can simply take the code and run with it. OO is over complex bloatware, just like that other office suite. If abiword, LyX etc can learn from it, where there is something worth borrowing then that seems to me to be the best outcome.

Open Office vs Sun + Microsoft

iabervon — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 21:10:20 +0000

I think what is actually needed is not for more people to get involved with OOo, but for developers on other projects (the KDE office suite, for example) to work with OOo to share parts. SO/OOo has a number of fundmantal problems: as you said, it's overly complex and unapproachable; it has its own widget set, which is neither nice nor separately available. People are generally impressed by the PDF output; wouldn't it be nice if that were made a separate library, such that a variety of programs got good PDF rendering. It does a good job of importing Microsoft-format files; that would be generally useful (think how nice it would be if your open source web browser of choice had native support for .doc and .xls).

The best thing about open source is that even officially failed projects can advance the state of the art by driving improvements in code that will be used elsewhere, provided that people take the time to extract the beneficial code.

Open Office vs Sun + Microsoft

giosetti — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 20:57:08 +0000

the ratio of paid to non-paid developers on the OOo project is like 100:1 ...which has always made me think about OOo in terms of "freedom" of a project in the way Stallman would define the term. Is it a free project? Yes, as far as the (opened sourced) code is concerned. And still I would never say OOo is as free a project as Debian or even KDE. With the above ratio the community cannot influence the project substantially. A little bit (well measured by the efforts of the volunteers I'd say a huge bit) of contributions to localization, some OOo handouts for fairs, a FAQ here and a HowTo there - that's it. The interesting part is getting increasingly what is maturing in the shadow of OOo: the abiwords and gnumerics of the free developer community. Or conceived even more freely: Won't a tool like LyX for instances become a killer application, making layout-WYSIWIGS obsolete because people can concentrate more on the contents instead of fumbling with idents, the usage of which in 95% of the cases is a result of coincidence? Seen from this perspective OOo is yet another dinosaur dying from hypertrophy.

Open Office vs Sun + Microsoft

mdekkers — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 19:53:35 +0000

Dream on.

Not to be nasty, and I hate to rain on your parade, but the ratio of paid to non-paid developers on the OOo project is like 100:1 or something like that - I am talking about core coders here. Part of this is the sheer complexity of the beast - people are simply not going to jump into this and say "hey cool, lets have a go at this". This is C++, with full use of templates just about everywhere, and a very complex and intricate overall applications architecture. For most developers, hacking at OOo is too much like real work.

This feeling is further excacerbated with the iron grip that Sun still excercises over the project. Even though that has lessened somewhat over the past year or so, for a lot of developers it still very much like "working for free" as opposed to "volunteering for an Open Source project"

If Sun were to drop support for OpenOffice.org, or simply reduce the developer count for OOo, or just put more effort into StarOffice as opposed to OOo, the project would be royally screwed.

In order to remain free and available, OOo _needs_ more volunteer developers, *now* - not when it is too late - when the commercial developers go, so will the tremendous amount of knowledge around the application dissapear.

I think that there are a bit over 100 devs working fulltime one the OOo / SO project - as a paying day job. I also hope that we can carry on with OOo, regardless......

It's not Microsoft Office - but that is no complaint.

Penguin_Dreams — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 17:58:23 +0000

I'm presently using OO and GIMP to create the yearbook for my son's school. The publisher (a Mac person) was worried about "IBM PC incompatibility" and didn't know what Linux was. He calmed down when I started sending him pdf files and things went OK.

He told me Macs were the best for layout and he wouldn't think of using any unix related software. I asked him if he had Mac OS X and he said he did. I told him it was unix and he looked very worried.

Open Office vs Sun + Microsoft

garym — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 17:43:08 +0000

I'm curious: Microsoft and Sun are now good buddies, Sun has stopped testifying against Microsoft in the world's courts, and, well, Microsoft has this massive cash-cow that kinda dwells as lord and master of this space where their little new best-bud Sun's Star Office was _headed_ ... only what now? Will Sun progressively abandon OOo because of their $1B alliance with the arch rival of OOo?

More to the point, let's just hope OOo is mature enough that we all _can_ carry it on regardless what Sun may do with the commercial branch.

It's not Microsoft Office - but that is no complaint.

freeio — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:02:11 +0000

I recently decided to do our state photographers assocaition newsletter using OOo 1.1 just to try it out on truly complicated documents, and was thoroughly pleased with the functionality and stability. The ability to directly output pdf files is what makes this work, as the printer (you know, the guy downtown with the offset press) expected to see those pdf files for his rip system. The quality is as good as it gets.

Just to see if everything plays nicely with others, I then imported the pdf files generated by OOo on Linux into an available W98 system with Adobe Acrobat 5.03 and Pagemaker 7.01. and was able to extract the content as eps and place it in Pagemaker with not the slightest hitch. This is compatilibity with the expensive toys, which is something we have needed for a long time. There were no reported errors, and every last thing came across correctly.

My point is this: It is not Microsoft Office, but so what? For 90+% of the users, the only (ONLY!) thing which made Microsoft Office so necessary was the ability to read and write .doc and .xls files, and the fact that the user interface was at least somewhat standardized. To talk to the Adobe applications would be a benefit also. OOo and Star Office have achieved those goals, and are pretty slick in most other ways as well.

Life is good!