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mayagrafix
June 4th, 2009, 04:43 PM
Now that Oracle has taken over Sun what will happen to Open Office? Ellison is not the kinda guy who gives anything away for free (he's been overheard telling McNealy that he doesn't run a Not For Profit organization). So are there any other linux options for a Business Software suite? StarOffice here I come!

b3n87
June 4th, 2009, 04:49 PM
We shall have to wait and see - open office is used by millions of people over the world so I think it would be silly for Oracle to stop developing it.

Dragonbite
June 4th, 2009, 06:39 PM
Ha! Star Office is the paid-for version of OpenOffice, so no relief there!

Keep an eye out for
IBM Symphony (based off of OpenOffice)
Novell's Go-oo (enhanced version of Openoffice)
KOffice 2.0 (it looks to be shaping up very nicely so far)

forrestcupp
June 4th, 2009, 07:35 PM
OpenOffice.org is a free/libre software. Oracle can't just shut it down; they can just stop contributing. Like Dragonbite said, Novell already offers their version of OO.o called Go-oo. I believe that version is what's in Ubuntu's repos, so it really doesn't matter what Oracle does. Go-oo has more features anyway.

samjh
June 5th, 2009, 12:46 AM
OpenOffice.org is under GPLv3. If it gets closed up, just fork it (yes, "fork", not the rude word). I don't think it will be closed up though.

As others have said, Novell has Go-oo. I prefer it over vanilla OpenOffice.

What's with all the negative speculation about Oracle? Oracle has supported Linux for about as long as Sun has. They're one of the biggest single corporate contributors to the Linux kernel and FOSS projects.

Vostrocity
June 5th, 2009, 01:01 AM
This thread reminded me of Lotus Symphony, IBM's version of OO.o. I haven't used it for a year or so (back when I was on Windows), but I should probably try it right now. From what I remember, the interface is a lot better than OO.o, but performance wasn't great. Then again a lot can change in a year. :D

forrestcupp
June 5th, 2009, 01:54 AM
This thread reminded me of Lotus Symphony, IBM's version of OO.o. I haven't used it for a year or so (back when I was on Windows), but I should probably try it right now. From what I remember, the interface is a lot better than OO.o, but performance wasn't great. Then again a lot can change in a year. :D

That's exactly why I quit using it. The interface and features were great, but it was buggy and the performance was horrible.

I also didn't like everything being operated from one window. I really doubt that that has changed in the last year. At least with OO.o I can have the system remember separate window sizes for my word processor and spread sheet.

Dragonbite
June 5th, 2009, 02:00 AM
This thread reminded me of Lotus Symphony, IBM's version of OO.o. I haven't used it for a year or so (back when I was on Windows), but I should probably try it right now. From what I remember, the interface is a lot better than OO.o, but performance wasn't great. Then again a lot can change in a year. :D

That was my experience with it too.

Vostrocity
June 5th, 2009, 03:10 AM
I've had the time to check Symphony out, and my decision is that it's getting the boot again. The performance is much better now, but there aren't really any benefits over OO.o. The interface is slick, but there's also some rough edges and the look doesn't fit in with my system theme. And the download process was a pain too, you actually had to register with IBM and risk getting spam if you forgot to check the "no" box. :mad: