Don't Count on Oracle to Keep OpenOffice.org Alive

[MES5464]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100823/tc_pcworld/dontcountonoracletokeepopenofficeorgalive

[earthpigg]

I just want to drop in, before this thread really gets started, and make sure that everyone here is aware that openoffice.org is not what you get when you 'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org'.

http://go-oo.org/


Ubuntu
Ubuntu provides Go-OO in their repositories. To install it just type as root


# apt-get install openoffice.org

differentiating between the two is usually splitting hairs, but i think it is relevant here.

some more nitpicky distributions make this clear, such as arch linux: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OpenOffice


OpenOffice in Arch Linux

Arch offers 4 trees of binary packages for OpenOffice with different package names:

openoffice-base

This will always be the last released stable version of OpenOffice.

...

go-openoffice

In addition, there is a package for go-openoffice also called ooo-build - the "Novell fork" in the extra repository, which includes enhancements and features found in versions of openoffice.org available in Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and other distributions. For users of Arch switching from other distributions go-openoffice may be more familiar to them. It will always be the latest stable release in extra based on the source of openoffice-base pkg. Future beta/devel versions will go to the testing repo.

Right now go-openoffice cannot be installed along any other openoffice branch; consider it a replacement.

[MES5464]

I think you have point here but there are some questions that remain.

Will the drop in funding of the upstream OpenOffice.org project be picked up by someone else? (Novell?)
Will Oracle go sue happy? (Even if they don't have a case they can burn up a lot of money just attempting the lawsuits.)

[slackthumbz]

Unfortunately I can't think of any words to describe Oracle that wouldn't get censored and possibly get me a warning/ban.

To say that I really hate them would be an instant qualifier for understatement of the year. Those profiteering soulless !£"$!"£$!"£$%"$%"%"£$%"£%$"£%£"%"$%£"%$"£%$£"%£"$%"%$s make my blood boil.
](*,)

[Ric_NYC]

Getting ready for an "Oracle Free" world:

VirtualBox;
OpenOffice;
Java;

Bye... Bye...

[Ozor Mox]

I just want to drop in, before this thread really gets started, and make sure that everyone here is aware that openoffice.org is not what you get when you 'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org'.

Although I did already know this, I saw this mentioned on another thread and someone asked why the OpenOffice that comes with Ubuntu still has Oracle branding on the splash screen. I thought it was a good question, and I don't think it was answered. Is it because the Go-OO people (Novell?) decided to keep that branding?

[bunburya]

Although I did already know this, I saw this mentioned on another thread and someone asked why the OpenOffice that comes with Ubuntu still has Oracle branding on the splash screen. I thought it was a good question, and I don't think it was answered. Is it because the Go-OO people (Novell?) decided to keep that branding?
I believe that was my question, and yes, quite curious! Anyone have any idea?

[Sporkman]

Unfortunately I can't think of any words to describe Oracle that wouldn't get censored and possibly get me a warning/ban.


Dear slackthumbz,

You have received a pre-emptive infraction from a non-moderator at Ubuntu Forums.

Reason: Considering making an inappropriate post

This infraction is worth 0e-5 point(s) and may result in full access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.

[Ric_NYC]

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/6496/oraclesopenoffice.png

[Ozor Mox]

Dear slackthumbz,

You have received a pre-emptive infraction from a non-moderator at Ubuntu Forums.

Reason: Considering making an inappropriate post

This infraction is worth 0e-5 point(s) and may result in full access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.

Haha, it's like pre-crime in The Minority Report! :D

[slackthumbz]

Dear slackthumbz,

You have received a pre-emptive infraction from a non-moderator at Ubuntu Forums.

Reason: Considering making an inappropriate post

This infraction is worth 0e-5 point(s) and may result in full access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.


War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery,
Ignorance is Strength

Have I paid my dues yet? ;)

[Dragonbite]

Novell (Go-OO) and IBM (Lotus Symphony, based on OpenOffice) will likely pick it up, but only *IF* Oracle doesn't have some dirty string attached that trips them up (like, oh,.. say Java?!)

One would hope that they would leave it alone, as it is one of the few areas open source is directly taking on Microsoft (Office).

On the other hand, Ubuntu has included (whatever it's called) which connects to ZoHo online office suite but in a way that as far as the system goes, it treats it like an installed application (Open With..., etc.). I still hope they set it up so you can save the documents in UbuntuOne or your local drive (at least with UbuntuOne, when you sync up it will then be on your local drive).

Be even better if they set up something similarly, but with Google Docs or even *gasp* Microsoft Office Online! THAT would be funny... running MS Office on Ubuntu and not through Wine.

The only problem with these solutions are they require network access.

[slooksterpsv]

What about KOffice, that's where I'd be headed next if OpenOffice.org was dropped from Oracle (unless IBM Lotus or Go-oo continued development and wasn't "licensely restricted" by Oracle).

They are making me mad and sad. I miss Sun :( :-({|= - sorry gotta play a violin for the sad story.

[Dragonbite]

The only good thing is that if Oracle kills everything, then once the initial shock & awe is passed, whatever comes out will be wiser and (hopefully) freer.

[slooksterpsv]

The only good thing is that if Oracle kills everything, then once the initial shock & awe is passed, whatever comes out will be wiser and (hopefully) freer.

Yeah, you're right, so instead of java, we program in Espresso. Then we get the: Starbucks IDE
And then the packages are: Tall Vente Grande

I can just see it now. Starbucks sponsors a language that's java like and is cross platform.

Wait what... ok I'm back now. Mmmm coffee [-o<](*,)

[earthpigg]

Although I did already know this, I saw this mentioned on another thread and someone asked why the OpenOffice that comes with Ubuntu still has Oracle branding on the splash screen. I thought it was a good question, and I don't think it was answered. Is it because the Go-OO people (Novell?) decided to keep that branding?

that's always been my assumption.

Trademark laws really don't count for much, as I understand it, until the trademark holder asserts those trademarks. That's my assumption based on the fact that various companies send a cease-and-desist letter before filing the law suit (if it's still necessary). Example (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/102996-Lucas-Launches-Lawsuit-Over-Jedi-Minds-Tricks).

Perhaps Sun, back in the day, released a statement at some point saying "Hey folks, we don't mind the free advertising. Feel free to keep the Oracle logo on your modifications & redistributions of openoffice.org."


If you look at Ubuntu's OO.o/Go-OO help -> about menu, it does say "This product was created by Debian and Ubuntu, based on OpenOffice.org". That could have been part of the Sun's granting of permission to use their trademarked logos.

edit: i found two links ( 1 (http://www.oracle.com/html/3party.html) and 2 (http://www.oracle.com/html/3partylogo.html) ) at the Oracle website that outline what they consider permissible use of their brand name and logo.

[Dragonbite]

Yeah, you're right, so instead of java, we program in Espresso. Then we get the: Starbucks IDE
And then the packages are: Tall Vente Grande

I can just see it now. Starbucks sponsors a language that's java like and is cross platform.

Wait what... ok I'm back now. Mmmm coffee [-o<](*,)

Actually, Vala looks like an up-and-coming language, but I don't know if it is cross-platform. Mono/.NET (regardless of pro- or con- feelings), PHP and Python stand to gain from the fall of Java, my guess.

[lykwydchykyn]

Before we all jump to the conclusion that the article is correct, let's review the logic:

- Oracle is suing Google over java patents
- Oracle shut down OpenSolaris
- Therefore, Oracle is "declaring war" on open source.
- Consequently, they will someday soon shut down openoffice.org so they can focus on money-making StarOffice.


Sorry, there's a bit of fail here. Things are a bit more nuanced than that.

I don't think Oracle, or most other fortune 500's, look at open source as a "you're either for it or against it" the way a lot of Linux users do. They're looking at what bits of Sun can make them a profit and be used strategically in their market. They are neither "declaring war" on opensource, or positioning themselves as FOSS freedom-fighters. They're just making money on stuff.

There has been to date no indication of any action against openoffice. I can't see that they would do it either. Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest competitors, and Office is one of its major cash cows. Even if Oracle never made a dime off OpenOffice, keeping Microsoft behind the 8 ball by continuing to improve a free alternative to MS's crown jewels just seems like smart business.

What's more, StarOffice is just OpenOffice with a few proprietary addons. They can't "kill openoffice" to "focus on StarOffice" because killing OOo would essentially kill StarOffice. Sure they could close up the process but why?

Oracle may not be a poster-child FOSS-friendly company, but they have demonstrated they aren't afraid to contribute when it benefits them (BTRFS anyone?). It seems to me keeping OOo benefits Oracle a lot.

[Dragonbite]

Other than Btrfs, what has Oracle provided for open source?

[bunburya]

Oracle may not be a poster-child FOSS-friendly company, but they have demonstrated they aren't afraid to contribute when it benefits them (BTRFS anyone?). It seems to me keeping OOo benefits Oracle a lot.
Why though? I totally agree with your post for the main part but why do you think that maintaining OOo benefits Oracle?

[Sporkman]

I can just see it now. Starbucks sponsors a language that's java like and is cross platform.

...Fretalian?

[bunburya]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/24/adobe_oracle_axis_of_evil/

Oracle has replaced Microsoft as the FOSS community’s number one enemy, according to Adobe System’s open source boss.
David McAllister, the Flash and Photoshop maker’s open source and standards director, said in a blog post (http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/08/oracle-closed-minds-and-open-source.html) yesterday that the implosion (http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1141) of the OpenSolaris Governing Board highlighted how “the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so”.

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I would be very excited if Oracle killed OpenOffice and everyone replaced it with nice to use software (of the sort that doesn't clone Microsoft Office's worst parts) like KOffice, Lyx, Abiword, Gnumeric and Glom. Those projects deserve a lot more positive attention than they get.

With that in mind, an actively malicious corporation would continue to support OpenOffice for as long as possible.
…We'll see :)

(Don't worry, I'm exaggerating slightly).

[Glenn nl]

I would be very excited if Oracle killed OpenOffice and everyone replaced it with nice to use software (of the sort that doesn't clone Microsoft Office's worst parts) like KOffice, Lyx, Abiword, Gnumeric and Glom. Those projects deserve a lot more positive attention than they get.

With that in mind, an actively malicious corporation would continue to support OpenOffice for as long as possible.
…We'll see :)


That would be horrible!
Many Ubuntu users use OpenOffice because it is the best alternative to MS Office.

[Rahbee Kannuhn]

I'd like it very much if Oracle pumped a lot of money into OOo, fixed the bugs, expand its abilities and let me buy a solid product.
I don't mind Oracle trying to make a few bucks, just hope they don't dump my apps in the process. I'd pay for OOo if it were polished.
Till then, I'll keep wining MS Office, works great, and I have no problems.

[qamelian]

I would be very excited if Oracle killed OpenOffice and everyone replaced it with nice to use software (of the sort that doesn't clone Microsoft Office's worst parts) like KOffice, Lyx, Abiword, Gnumeric and Glom. Those projects deserve a lot more positive attention than they get.

With that in mind, an actively malicious corporation would continue to support OpenOffice for as long as possible.
…We'll see :)
Well, considering what I need from an office suite, and that none of the apps you mention come even close to meeting those needs like OOo does, losing OOo would also mean the disappearance of Linux off any of my business related computers and would also drive pretty much all of the customers I have migrated to Linux back into the Microsoft fold. Not exactly a scenario I like, but it is accurate. OOo is the only realistic alternative for me, short of returning to MS Office.

[juancarlospaco]

good bye java

[KiwiNZ]

Loss of Open Office would be a serious setback.

[koenn]

Other than Btrfs, what has Oracle provided for open source?


this : http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/026042.htm
+ a some middleware/frontend applications to work with their databases : http://oss.oracle.com/

They also lend credibility to Linux / open source software by attaching their name to it (Unbreakable Linux, Xen -> Oracle Vm, ...) and using it in-house. That may be less of an issue today, but it was a big deal in 1998 when linux made the transition from dotcom startups to 'real' enterprise IT.

[Zlatan]

Loss of Open Office would be a serious setback.

yeah, and another reason to take a look at gnome office and koffice with open document format (ISO standard) instead ms office format (non-ISO standard)

[ssam]

remember the xfree86 community rebellion when the licensing changed. it resulted in x.org fork. x.org very quickly leapt ahead, and linux was better off for it.

it happens sometimes. the clever thing about opensource is that no matter what the original parents do, the community can pick it up and make a new project.

OOo already has the go-oo fork. there are people working on a fork of opensolaris. its all going to be ok.

[lykwydchykyn]

Why though? I totally agree with your post for the main part but why do you think that maintaining OOo benefits Oracle?

Just speculating, but here are my thoughts:

- It's a necessary if they want to continue the StarOffice (I think they rebranded it "OracleOffice") business. StarOffice as I understand it is just OpenOffice + a few proprietary bits + paid support. I don't know this, but I'm willing to bet a lot of StarOffice subscribers are organizations that deployed OpenOffice and found they needed some of those proprietary features or commercial support. Never mind the fact that they get free development from the community.

- It hurts one of their competitors. No matter how many will swear up and down that MSO is better than OOo, it doesn't matter; every happy (or at least content) openoffice user is a user who will never pay Microsoft for an office license. That's bad for Microsoft. It would be especially bad if ODF became more than just a paper standard and actually displaced MS formats as a way to exchange documents.

But that won't happen if there's no OpenOffice. It may never happen if there IS an OpenOffice, but it's certainly in the realm of possibility.

- Shutting down OpenOffice would be EXTREMELY bad PR. Look, nobody cared about OpenSolaris but a handful of old UNIX hackers. OpenOffice is end-user, man-on-the-street software. More people probably know what OpenOffice is than know what Oracle, Java, MySQL, and certainly Solaris is. They would forever be living down the reputation as "the company that killed OpenOffice".

Now, they may prove me wrong on all this, but I just can't see that it makes sense to kill off OpenOffice; after all, they surely bought Sun for more than just the Java patents.

[koenn]

Now, they may prove me wrong on all this, but I just can't see that it makes sense to kill off OpenOffice; after all, they surely bought Sun for more than just the Java patents.
Oracle has always been looking to provide a complete stack around their dbms, from hardware to applications. Their acquisition of SUN gave them quite a lot in that respect (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/index.html) - Java fits into this picture as well, Oracle has a lot of java-based software, and now they own that technology too. The patents and the opportunity to sue Google are just an extra.

OpenOffice/StarOfice doesn't fit into this picture, at all. It might be the first thing they want to dispose of -- although you do have a point about reputation, competition for MS, etc.
That doesn't necessarily means they'll want to kill it, they might just sell it or let it go to whoever wants it ...

[Ric_NYC]

Lotus Symphony to the rescue... (?)

From IBM, a supporter of the Open Source.

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/5260/symphonybeta.png

[Ric_NYC]

Lotus Symphony in action!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkXH5CdKeC8&feature=related

[apmcd47]

I just want to drop in, before this thread really gets started, and make sure that everyone here is aware that openoffice.org is not what you get when you 'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org'.

http://go-oo.org/



differentiating between the two is usually splitting hairs, but i think it is relevant here.


So we get OOo from Mono-toting Novell?

That doesn't make me feel particularly reassured!

[forrestcupp]

Will Oracle go sue happy? (Even if they don't have a case they can burn up a lot of money just attempting the lawsuits.)The only hint of Oracle suing anyone was based on software that isn't open source. They're not going to sue anyone over an open source software.



- It's a necessary if they want to continue the StarOffice (I think they rebranded it "OracleOffice") business.
They actually rebranded it "OpenOffice" minus the ".org", which is confusing and adds to the speculation that they might be phasing out OO.o. OpenOffice.org isn't necessary for StarOffice. They can just divert all their efforts to the proprietary suite instead of the open source one.

If Novell ends up having to redevelop Go-oo to use Python, I'd be alright with that. It would be a pain in the butt for all of those developers of plugins that are already created, though. We'd have to start from scratch on all of that, or just keep using old versions.

[phrostbyte]

Oracle dropping OOo is incredibly unlikely. You are talking about THE business software company dropping the most competitive business productivity suite to MS Office (which by all means is Microsoft's major cash cow).

Besides, Oracle is an actual supporter of FOSS and sponsors an entire team of Linux kernel hackers. There is no "war against FOSS", it's a war against Google.

[beew]

Even if Oracle drops OOO there are other forks such as Go-OO (the version in the Ubuntu repo), How would those be affected? I don't know much about copyright law but I thing OO is open source, so even if Oracle may own the brand, it doesn't own the codes. I always thought that a strength of open source is that it is not inherently tied to a single owner or corporate entity. It seems a bit pessimistic to talk about the demise of OOO at this point as if it is inevitable. Am I missing something here?

P.S. I don't think koffice or goffice is even close in terms of viability, first off, probably only a fraction of OO users use gnome or kde. gnumeric is interesting though.

[neu5eeCh]

Well, considering what I need from an office suite, and that none of the apps you mention come even close to meeting those needs like OOo does, losing OOo would also mean the disappearance of Linux off any of my business related computers and would also drive pretty much all of the customers I have migrated to Linux back into the Microsoft fold. Not exactly a scenario I like, but it is accurate. OOo is the only realistic alternative for me, short of returning to MS Office.

Really?

What about Softmaker 2010? It's still a whole heck of a lot cheaper than MS Office and, unlike OO, they claim that their spreadsheet application is 100% Excel compatible.

http://lin-app.com/category/utilities/softmaker_office_2010

In truth, I'm glad that OO is free, but I use Linux because it's a great OS. If paid software makes it even better, than I'm all for it.

[neu5eeCh]

Loss of Open Office would be a serious setback.

There's always SoftMaker (and no I don't have stock in the company). Would users really go back to Windows rather than pay $34 dollars for an Office Suite??? Methinks thou does protest too much.

[LiquidMeson]

The dictionary requires online, just use gdoc's. Nice to be able to access your doc's everywhere without thinking. Could merge something like nocs into gedit to give base text editing. Writing is about the only thing I would personally do offline.

Just so you know alot of dem youngin's use gdocs cus it just works. everywhere.

[beew]

VTPoet


There's always SoftMaker (and no I don't have stock in the company). Would users really go back to Windows rather than pay $34 dollars for an Office Suite??? Come now, are you really a poet or just a philistine pretending to be one? :)

I hope we are over reacting, but in the unlikely event that OOO really dies it would be a great shame, not just because you may have to pay $34 for an Office Suit. I think OOO does represent something. It is an open source project that has grown and matured over the years and become a genuinely sophisticated product and a real player in the market as the result of the hard work of many people, many of whom believe in the concept of open source. It has come very far and it has great potential for further growth. It should be nurtured and supported. Lest I sound too dramatic, I am a pragmatist rather than a purist. But it would be a real loss if a great project like OOO would just die because of Oracle's bean counting. It is not just that you may have to fork out $34, it is DEMORALIZING.

Another thing to consider is this, if a flagship open source effort like OOO is killed so easily as a result of changing corporate ownership, it also highlights a structural vulnerability of FOSS. Actually the very fact that we are worried already shows this vulnerability. This is something that needs to be addressed.

[Brent0]

If Oracle does dump OOo, what do you think the chances of Canonical taking over are? :rolleyes:
Just a random idea.

[LiquidMeson]

What he said.
↯↯↯↯↯↯↯↯

[dtoronto]

Even if Oracle pulls funding and support for Open Office, it won't die. The open source community surrounding Open Office will pick it up, or move it to another project, but it won't die.

[neu5eeCh]

VTPoet

Come now, are you really a poet or just a philistine pretending to be one? :)

Same difference. ;)


I hope we are over reacting, but in the unlikely event that OOO really dies it would be a great shame, not just because you may have to pay $34 for an Office Suit. I think OOO does represent something.

I do think you are overreacting. Like others have said, OOO doesn't depend on Oracle and Oracle can't withdraw it. If worse came to worse, Ubuntu would probably develop it (if companies like IBM or Novell didn't step up to the plate). As you have argued, and I think you're right, a FOSS Office Suite is too important to Linux to simply be dropped. Having said that, I think that Linux will flourish not because it's FOSS but because it's a better OS. Companies will use it for that reason. A FOSS Office Suite is secondary as long as there are alternatives - and there are.

[jonathonblake]

There's always SoftMaker

I tried Softmaker, and concluded that the only difference between it and vapourware was that vapourware didn't take up disk space.



jonathon

[jroa]

If Oracle wants to make money from StarOffice, or OracleOffice, or whatever it is called now, then it would be in their best interest to keep OpenOffice alive.

Sun did not want to nickel and dime all of us so that they could make a dollar. They made their money by selling StarOffice to businesses. But, I think that StarOffice prospered because so many people had OpenOffice at home and felt comfortable with it. Many of these people probably had some amount of influence in the decision making process when it came time to decide on office software.

MS seems to look at marketing from a different point of view. They will gouge the business, then they will gouge the people because they want to use the same software at home.

AutoDesk seems to be going in a similar route than Sun did. Students can download all of the AutoDesk software (AutoCAD, Inventor, etc.) they want for free and receive a free 1 year license for the software. If they can get a lot of students to learn and use their software, then when the students become workers, they will tend to push the employer to use the software that they are used to.

As a side note, I got an email from our IT department yesterday. They said that they will be upgrading our office software from MSO 2003 to MSO 2010. They said that they will be offering classes to try to make the transition easy for us. They also said that we will be able to purchase our own licenses for home use for $10. I don't know if this was some kind of MS promo to get the company to switch or whether my company is picking up the remaining bill so that we can practice at home, but either way it is interesting and you do not see this very often, especially for an MS product. I hate MS, and I would rather use OO anytime, but this was a deal that I could not pass up and I had to put my name on the list.

I tend to think that this is a marketing ploy from MS, though. I have also seen this at my college. I can get free MS software, complete with a license, from my college. I am not talking about watered down student versions. These are full versions of popular software. I have already downloaded and received a license for XP Pro, Visio 2010, and Server 2003. Yes, with the exception of Visio, these are legacy software, but I can also get Win 7 and many other up-to-date releases. I think that MS is thinking that if we use the software at school and at home, then we will likely want to use the software at work as well.

[handy]

So far of all of the posts here I think that the ideas of lykwydchykyn make the most sense.

If SCOracle dump OOo, they are helping their arch enemy MS, a lot.

How SCOracle's future business "Cloud" plans come into it is beyond what my tiny brain can hypothesise.

[earthpigg]

If Oracle does dump OOo, what do you think the chances of Canonical taking over are? :rolleyes:
Just a random idea.

Slim. Very slim.

[handy]

Slim. Very slim.

I agree.

Canonical are trying to be profitable; the cost of the resources required to get anywhere near taking over from Sun re. OOo would rule that possibility out (I think).

[earthpigg]

I agree.

Canonical are trying to be profitable; the cost of the resources required to get anywhere near taking over from Sun re. OOo would rule that possibility out (I think).

They could do it if they adopted the Sun business model for it, with the proprietary bits.

Canonical has always promised that Ubuntu would not have a version that costs money.

Adding proprietary bits to OO.o would essentially result in a version of Ubuntu that costs money.

Furthermore, OO.o as we know it strives to be very cross platform. I don't see Canonical spending mountains of money on developing Windows software & thus adding value to Microsoft Windows. See Bug #1, for an example of why this is monumentally unlikely.

[handy]

@earthpigg: True.

I didn't think about the MS dimension.

Though, now that I think about it.

Wouldn't expanding the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) be in Canonical's & so many others in the FOSS world's interest?

In the long run OO.o is the prime source of motivation for people to use the ODF.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Okay, I just tried installing Lotus Symphony because I liked what they were doing, they kind of copied the ribbon thing from MS Office, but it works much better to use that vertical part with more of a clear menu from the videos I saw. Unfortunately I have an AMD 64 CPU and there is no AMD 64 deb. Also following peoples' guides from 8.04 didn't help. I think I have it installed I just don't know what the command would be to run it considering it's not showing up for me.

[dmizer]

Lotus Symphony in action!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkXH5CdKeC8&feature=related

That's a good looking, polished, multi-platform, and usable Office suite.

Too bad you have to jump through a lot of hoops before you can even use it the first time.
1) Must sign up to be an IBM member (Free, but annoying)
2) When you sign up to be an IBM member, a mailing address is required.
3) Before you download, you have to agree to the license.
4) After you download and start Symphony, you have to agree to the license again.
5) The license is most certainly NOT a "Free" license.

You may not 1) use, copy, modify, or distribute the Program except as provided in this Agreement; 2) reverse assemble, reverse compile, or otherwise translate the Program except as specifically permitted by law without the possibility of contractual waiver; or 3) sublicense, rent, or lease the Program.
6) No 64bit deb.

A side note, the download package indicates that it's for Hardy LTS, but it seems to work in Lucid just fine. Uses GTK though, so it looks a little antique.

[Khakilang]

Another one bite the dust - Queen. I love OpenOffice and I use it on my Window days. Hope it doesn't go away. Still better start on other alternative just in case.

[beew]

khakilang

I love OpenOffice and I use it on my Window days. Hope it doesn't go away. Still better start on other alternative just in case.C'mon now, is it a bit early to talk about abandoning ship? We have always been told about the strength in open source is in the community and users are an important part of the community too. Open Office has a big user base and it is a reason why it gets supports from developers and corporations. If the users are deserting at the first sign of uncertainty the project will fail in a self fulfilling way. Why would Oracle or anyone else for that matter expend resources on OpenOffice if it doesn't have a solid user base?

Should we have a little bit of patience if not faith?

I will continue to recommend OpenOffice to friends.

[rjbl]

A lot of us use Open Office because it is, and always has been, better than MS Office. We use it in whichever GNU/Linux we happen to be using and whichever Windows systems we use. We have done since MS DOS days, when twas just a twinklin' Star. Star Office / Open Office is, and has been for years, very widely deployed across European Corporate and Government systems. Oracle passing it up to another vendor won't make a blind bit of difference. Oracle bought it as an Open Source product, Open Source it has remained. Open Source it will remain. Because of its large installed corporate base it is likely to be around for a very long time to come.

rjbl

[handy]

A lot of us use Open Office because it is, and always has been, better than MS Office. We use it in whichever GNU/Linux we happen to be using and whichever Windows systems we use. We have do since MS DOS days, when twas just a twinklin' Star. Star Office / Open Office is, and has been for years, very widely deployed across European Corporate and Government systems. Oracle passing it up to another vendor won't make a blind bit of difference. Oracle bought it as an Open Source product, Open Source it has remained. Open Source it will remain. Because of its large installed corporate base it is likely to be around for a very long time to come.

rjbl

You are kidding aren't you? I tend to think that you are living in a fantasy land.

There is no way that OO.o is better than MS office?

The only way it is better is in its license.

If you have ever truly used OO.o to interpret complex documents from either word or excel you would know that OO.o just can't do it right.

Does OO.o do database yet?

Hmm...

Nothing personal by the way rjbl, I'm just calling it as I see it. :)

[slooksterpsv]

Does OO.o do database yet?


Absolutely, it's called Base, it's been in OpenOffice since version 2.0:
http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Base

=D

[mips]

Okay, I just tried installing Lotus Symphony because I liked what they were doing, they kind of copied the ribbon thing from MS Office, but it works much better to use that vertical part with more of a clear menu from the videos I saw. Unfortunately I have an AMD 64 CPU and there is no AMD 64 deb. Also following peoples' guides from 8.04 didn't help. I think I have it installed I just don't know what the command would be to run it considering it's not showing up for me.

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/help.nsf/GeneralFAQ#15
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lswiki.nsf/dx/09292009024859AMWEB9ZQ.htm

[handy]

Absolutely, it's called Base, it's been in OpenOffice since version 2.0:
http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Base

=D

Cool! :)

Is it 100% compatible with all & particularly the latest version of Access?

I hope it is of course. But from my past experience with OO.o, I know that if I was in business I would be treading as carefully as if I was on egg shells, because the last thing I would want to be doing is crawling on my hands & knees over broken glass.

[Dragonbite]

Lotus Symphony to the rescue... (?)

From IBM, a supporter of the Open Source.

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/5260/symphonybeta.png

I'll have to look at the video when I'm home, but hte last time I tried Symphony it was a nice idea that had a lot of work to improve (sloooow, buggy, etc.)

KOffice is actually a pretty good office program, it's problem is it's tight relationship with KDE (I use Gnome). If it were more desktop environment agnostic I think it would be adopted further.

Office 2010 opens ODTs, I don't think they can save in that format.

[afroman10496]

The're going to kill it off and base Star Office on it... just like they did with OpenSolaris and Solaris :-({|= RIP OPENSOLARIS

[dmizer]

Cool! :)

Is it 100% compatible with all & particularly the latest version of Access?

I hope it is of course. But from my past experience with OO.o, I know that if I was in business I would be treading as carefully as if I was on egg shells, because the last thing I would want to be doing is crawling on my hands & knees over broken glass.

MS Office isn't even 100% compatible with itself, let alone other office formats. If it's compatibility you need, then you'll never find a perfect office suite. Open Office works perfectly well (and yes, sometimes better than MS) as a stand alone office suite.

Also, most of the compatibility problems with OOo are related to fonts, not the office suite itself.

[t0p]

I don't like OpenOffice. Well, I didn't like it last time I tried it (6 months ago?) and I wouldn't have thought it'd change enough that quickly to woo me. When I reinstall Ubuntu, getting rid of all the OOo stuff is part of the procedure. The only office software I use with any kind of regularity is word processing, and I think AbiWord is just fine. I occasionally need to do spreadsheet stuff, and Gnumeric has always sufficed. So the lost of OOo would be no biggie, personally.

However, if Oracle did away with OOo, I think there would be a knock-on effect that could harm Free software in the long run. OOo is one of the flag-wavers: Windows users try it, find it's good, and that may encourage them to try more Free stuff. If OOo no longer existed as an entry-point to the wondrous world of Free and open source software, we might have a bit of a problem.

[jonathonblake]

There is no way that OO.o is better than MS office?

For multilingual documents, OOo blows MSO away.

For editing large (500+ pages) documents, or documents that contain a plethora of images (500+), OOo blows MSO away.

On second thoughts, MSO is better than OOo in one respect --- showing how pathetic microsoft is at programming. I'd expect a so called professional software house to write programs that don't crash, or cause the blue screen of death within ten minutes of being started.


If you have ever truly used OO.o to interpret complex documents from either word or excel you would know that OO.o just can't do it right.

If you've ever had to battle with docx, xlsx, doc, or xls documents that are more than one page long, you'll know that MSO can't render them correctly, if it can even render them at all.

There is a reason why smart offices have at least one copy of OOo. They need it so that documents created with MSO can be distributed to users that only have MSO on their system.

Call me when MSO is compatible with MSO. Thus far, OOo is more compatible with MSO (any version) than MSO (any version) is with MSO (same version on a different machine)



Does OO.o do database yet?

OOo 1.0.3 included a dBase 3 clone. (It might have been included in earlier versions, but that is the earliest version I have.)
OOo 2.0 added a second database engine.

Of course, if you don't like either of those choices, you can use Base as a front end for your favorite database engine --- MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Jet database engine, Oracle, etc, etc, etc. I _think_ it can even be hooked up to a MUMPS database, but I haven't tried that one, yet.

jonathon

[jonathonblake]

but either way it is interesting and you do not see this very often, especially for an MS product.

Similar offers are not uncommon. It literally depends upon:
* How large the company is;
* How good at negotiating the people who manage your IT licenses are;

Joe's Barber Shop, which only has one copy of Windows and uses one copy of MSO won't get that deal.

Multinational Conglomerate, which has 100 000 000 employees worldwide, and has at least one desktop for each of them, will get a much better deal --- possibly as low as US$1.00 per copy for employees home system.

jonathon

[beew]

handy


If you have ever truly used OO.o to interpret complex documents from either word or excel you would know that OO.o just can't do it right.
But why should this be a criterion to judge OO.o on? How about trying to use MS word or Excel to interpret a simple document in open format? It can't do it at all, period. If you use compatibility with MS as a standard to judge how good office suites are not surprisingly MS should win, but as others have pointed out even then it doesn't.

[forrestcupp]

What about Softmaker 2010? It's still a whole heck of a lot cheaper than MS Office and, unlike OO, they claim that their spreadsheet application is 100% Excel compatible.Interesting. Do you have a lot of real experience with Softmaker, or are you just going by what the web site says?


You are kidding aren't you? I tend to think that you are living in a fantasy land.

There is no way that OO.o is better than MS office?People who say that are deceiving themselves because either they are mad that they can't afford Office or they are stubborn FOSS people. MS Office is definitely better quality software than OOo. But I will admit that OOo is a much better value, and very capable for people who can't afford MS O. Just don't say it's better.


Absolutely, it's called Base, it's been in OpenOffice since version 2.0:
If you've done any work with Access, Base totally blows chunks. It definitely isn't capable of working with db's that were created with Access.

[beew]

dragonbite


KOffice is actually a pretty good office program, it's problem is it's tight relationship with KDE (I use Gnome). If it were more desktop environment agnostic I think it would be adopted further.
It may be, but it would be very premature to talk about replacement. I don't question that there are various niche open source office softwares that are as good or better than OOo for specialized functions but OOo is the only comprehensive open source office suite which has a significant user base and the potential to go enterprise(some may say it already did)

But more importantly, if a flagship open source program like OOo dies for such a stupid reason (get axed by Oracle) it will do massive damage to the whole open source concept. How do you expect people to have confidence in open source products if the survival a successful program like OOo is completely at the mercy of the corporate agenda of one company? What happens to all the talk of robust support from the community? I think this is an important lesson even if Oracle turns out to be more benevolent than we speculate. Ooo should find a way to go independent and hopefully spawn more forks that are viable on their own so that its existence will not be so vulnerable to corporate merger and take over.

[scouser73]

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/6496/oraclesopenoffice.png

I prefer this version, which is from Oracle.

[rjbl]

@jonathonblake

Multinational Conglomerate, which has 100 000 000 employees worldwide, and has at least one desktop for each of them, will get a much better deal --- possibly as low as US$1.00 per copy for employees home system.

Not a lot of Companies in the world with 100 Million Employees, are there? No, MS do not discount their products down to $1 a throw.

rjbl

[uRock]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/24/adobe_oracle_axis_of_evil/

Oracle has replaced Microsoft as the FOSS community’s number one enemy, according to Adobe System’s open source boss.
David McAllister, the Flash and Photoshop maker’s open source and standards director, said in a blog post (http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/08/oracle-closed-minds-and-open-source.html) yesterday that the implosion (http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1141) of the OpenSolaris Governing Board highlighted how “the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so”.

That is funny, Adobe calling anyone else an enemy to FOSS.


Well, considering what I need from an office suite, and that none of the apps you mention come even close to meeting those needs like OOo does, losing OOo would also mean the disappearance of Linux off any of my business related computers and would also drive pretty much all of the customers I have migrated to Linux back into the Microsoft fold. Not exactly a scenario I like, but it is accurate. OOo is the only realistic alternative for me, short of returning to MS Office.
+1

As a full time student I would have no choice but to buy and install MS Office should OpenOffice.org be killed. I have tried Abiword for creating .doc files and they never open up correctly in MS Office.

[kevin11951]

I will say there is one thing that makes OO.o better than MSO...

The integration of the applications. What I mean is that, for example, the invoices for my business were originally done in Calc, but I didn't like the spreadsheet for anything other than the calculations.

What I ended up doing was placing all the addresses and client info in a text document, and having a spreadsheet inside the text document for calculations.

You can't do that with MSO, to the best of my knowledge. Or at least the one at my high school can't (office 2003).

Edit: And then there's always the export to PDF function thats sways everybody I show OO.o.

I attached an example of what I mean... Minus any personal info ;)

Double click on the spreadsheet in the middle, and watch OO.o change into Calc for the duration of the edit.

[rjbl]

@Handy

G'day Bruce!

Well, mate, its a bloody sight better at reading the various MS Office file formats than is MS Office. They change them every other version - didn't you know that? The other thing that StarDivision / Star Office / Open Office doesn't do is fill up yer bloody HD with unpurged temp files, it never has so done, MS Office, and its it various components, always has done that. This is because Star Office / Open Office is a single OA product, not a badly engineered lash-up of 4 separate bits.

Does OO.o do database yet? Jesus wept! You've never bloody used OO, or Star Office, have you?

Strine enough for You?

rjbl

[rjbl]

@Handy

Ever been around when the latest MS insecurity feature in MS Office causes yer corporate IT system to get a hammering from the world's idley curious and malevolent? I have, makes yer bloody eyes water.
rjbl

[Ric_NYC]

I'll have to look at the video when I'm home, but hte last time I tried Symphony it was a nice idea that had a lot of work to improve (sloooow, buggy, etc.)

KOffice is actually a pretty good office program, it's problem is it's tight relationship with KDE (I use Gnome). If it were more desktop environment agnostic I think it would be adopted further.

Office 2010 opens ODTs, I don't think they can save in that format.


This version is fast (3 Beta 3). I tried the older versions and they were too slow. Now it starts fast and looks good.

Comparing the interfaces:

Abiword
http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/4639/abiword.png

OpenOffice
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9500/openoffice.png

IBM Lotus Symphony
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/7478/symphonybetal.png

I really liked it.

I hope IBM changes its licence... That's the only problem I see.

[Ric_NYC]

I noticed something: Lotus Symphony works better on Ubuntu. Yesterday I tried on Kubuntu and I didn't like its perfomance.
Consider that when you try it.

[Ric_NYC]

I prefer this version, which is from Oracle.

I see "Oracle" on both... What's the difference?

[Dragonbite]

I noticed something: Lotus Symphony works better on Ubuntu. Yesterday I tried on Kubuntu and I didn't like its perfomance.
Consider that when you try it.

I will. Good thing I'm primarily Gnome all-around.

One of the things I did like it when I tried it out before was the interface. It was pretty darn sweet compared to OpenOffice and etc.

I think I'm going to download the latest one and give it a whirl when I'm home. Thanks!

[beew]

Ric_NYC

Am I missing something? Last I check OO.o is not dead yet, not by a long shot and all you do here is trying get people to switch to a closed IBM version. Well it will die if many people actually abandon ship. I almost think you work for IBM. :)

P.S. Sorry if this comes out the wrong way, but your post sounds to me like a man hearing that someone worries that he may have cancer, but the doctor hasn't said anything and the chances that he may have it is very slim, moreover even if he does there is a good chance that he would recover, but here you are already talking about the funeral arrangement and setting up dates for his wife in case she will be widowed. It just sound very strange to me.

[Ric_NYC]

Ric_NYC

Am I missing something? Last I check OO.o is not dead yet, not by a long shot and all you do here is trying get people to switch to a closed IBM version. Well it will die if many people actually abandon ship. I almost think you work for IBM. :)

I'm not standing still waiting for Oracle to kill OO.o... Just in case.

[Ric_NYC]

Ric_NYC

Am I missing something? Last I check OO.o is not dead yet, not by a long shot and all you do here is trying get people to switch to a closed IBM version. Well it will die if many people actually abandon ship. I almost think you work for IBM. :)


I don't work for IBM. :p

[uRock]

I'm not standing still waiting for Oracle to kill OO.o... Just in case.
I was going to install the IBMware, but they want way to much personal data, which I am sure will get my mailbox filled with more recyclable junk.

BTW, did you know that you can edit posts?

[beew]

Ric_NYC


I'm not standing still waiting for Oracle to kill OO.o... Just in case.Well if there is enough user and developmental supports Oracle wouldn't be able to kill OO.o even if it wants to,-remember no one owns the codes,--and for all we know Oracle may not even have the intention.

In case you missed my edit for my last post Here it is


P.S. Sorry if this comes out the wrong way, but your post sounds to me like a man hearing that someone worries that he may have cancer, but the doctor hasn't said anything and the chances that he may have it is very slim, moreover even if he does there is a good chance that he would recover, but here you are already talking about the funeral arrangement and setting up dates for his wife in case she will be widowed. It just sound very strange to me.

[Ric_NYC]

I was going to install the IBMware, but they want way to much personal data, which I am sure will get my mailbox filled with more recyclable junk.

BTW, did you know that you can edit posts?

Not so fast... You don't have to... :p

http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/9127/screenshotxc.png

[Dragonbite]

Not so fast... You don't have to... :p

http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/9127/screenshotxc.png

Great to hear. I know I filled that information out before, but I'd be darned to remember what I filled out!

[slooksterpsv]

Great to hear. I know I filled that information out before, but I'd be darned to remember what I filled out!

So me and my friend are watching this intently, we're not too happy with Oracle at the moment; so he's at work and I IM'ed him. Guess what Oracle sold OpenOffice to Microsoft. He flipped and started googling it to check the source. I finally told him I was just kidding.

Still though, yeah IBM I've signed up like 2-3 times don't remember my info so I just skip that. BTW I tried to install the Lotus Symphony on 64-bit, didn't work. Tried KDE on Windows and tried KOffice, too slow.

[rjbl]

Hmm ..... I wonder how many of the k3wl d3wds actually realise that OO.o has been around, adding to the gaiety of worlds, since the Zilog Z80 chip was the Big Thing on the Bleedin' Edge of Technology? Well, it has. It ain't going away any day soon. MS Office? Been around since about 1995. Is it much longer for this world? Who knows?

rjbl

[jonathonblake]

People who say that are deceiving themselves because either they are mad that they can't afford Office or they are stubborn FOSS people.

My mean time between starting MSO on Win7, and seeing the Blue Screen Of Death was under ten minutes.

Anybody that considers a mean time of under ten minutes, from starting a program to seeing BSOD is acceptable quality for a product that is currently being shipped simply does not know what the word "quality" means.

That isn't even acceptable quality in the alpha stage of development.

jonathon

[Legendary_Bibo]

My mean time between starting MSO on Win7, and seeing the Blue Screen Of Death was under ten minutes.

Anybody that considers a mean time of under ten minutes, from starting a program to seeing BSOD is acceptable quality for a product that is currently being shipped simply does not know what the word "quality" means.

That isn't even acceptable quality in the alpha stage of development.

jonathon

I can top that, the last time I ever used MS Office and Vista was at the exact same time. MS Office gave me a BSOD after the hundredth failed update and startup, and it also gave me a Black Screen of Death on reboot, and every boot afterwards, which was a complete OS failure. Awsum gaiz! You make teh awsumest 0ff1ce progr4m eva! So I needed an OS quick, was told to use Linux as a "replacement" by my programming teacher, and just stuck with it. I was in the middle of writing an 8 page lab report.

[forrestcupp]

What I ended up doing was placing all the addresses and client info in a text document, and having a spreadsheet inside the text document for calculations.

You can't do that with MSO, to the best of my knowledge. Or at least the one at my high school can't (office 2003).

Edit: And then there's always the export to PDF function thats sways everybody I show OO.o.You can drop an Excel file into a Word document. Also, I have Office 2007 and it can export pdf's, too.


My mean time between starting MSO on Win7, and seeing the Blue Screen Of Death was under ten minutes.
What are you using? Are you using an old version that isn't even supported in Win7? I've never had any problem at all with 2007.

But if you're having problems, I can see how you would think negatively.

[kevin11951]

You can drop an Excel file into a Word document. Also, I have Office 2007 and it can export pdf's, too.


What are you using? Are you using an old version that isn't even supported in Win7? I've never had any problem at all with 2007.

But if you're having problems, I can see how you would think negatively.

Did you see my attachment? Does it look like that in MSO? In other words, does it blend in with the text document?

Actually, if you would please do me a favor and attach a screen shot?

[handy]

MS Office isn't even 100% compatible with itself, let alone other office formats. If it's compatibility you need, then you'll never find a perfect office suite. Open Office works perfectly well (and yes, sometimes better than MS) as a stand alone office suite.

Also, most of the compatibility problems with OOo are related to fonts, not the office suite itself.

I agree that it OO.o is a great stand alone suite, & I also agree that MS Office isn't perfectly compatible with itself.

One of the prime problems that business people have with OO.o is that it doesn't handle Word documents that use sophisticated formats. Meaning it misinterprets & therefore messes up the layout. It also has trouble with some Excel spreadsheets.

I don't know how well it handles sophisticated Access databases.

The two problems listed above are enough to keep OO.o out of many businesses. You can imagine how happy a legal firm would be with such problems.

[handy]

For multilingual documents, OOo blows MSO away.

For editing large (500+ pages) documents, or documents that contain a plethora of images (500+), OOo blows MSO away.

On second thoughts, MSO is better than OOo in one respect --- showing how pathetic microsoft is at programming. I'd expect a so called professional software house to write programs that don't crash, or cause the blue screen of death within ten minutes of being started.



If you've ever had to battle with docx, xlsx, doc, or xls documents that are more than one page long, you'll know that MSO can't render them correctly, if it can even render them at all.

There is a reason why smart offices have at least one copy of OOo. They need it so that documents created with MSO can be distributed to users that only have MSO on their system.

Call me when MSO is compatible with MSO. Thus far, OOo is more compatible with MSO (any version) than MSO (any version) is with MSO (same version on a different machine)



OOo 1.0.3 included a dBase 3 clone. (It might have been included in earlier versions, but that is the earliest version I have.)
OOo 2.0 added a second database engine.

Of course, if you don't like either of those choices, you can use Base as a front end for your favorite database engine --- MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Jet database engine, Oracle, etc, etc, etc. I _think_ it can even be hooked up to a MUMPS database, but I haven't tried that one, yet.

jonathon

As mentioned in my previous post, the major problem is OO.o misinterpreting complex Office files.

By the way, I have no need for any kind of office suite these days. I'm speaking with regard to other people's problems.

I'm really glad that OO.o exists & I also of course hope that it isn't set back in any way shape or form by SCOracle's devious agenda, I look forward to the day when OO.o is the office suite of choice for the world at large. :)

[handy]

@Handy

G'day Bruce!

:lolflag: Your a scream. :lolflag:



Well, mate, its a bloody sight better at reading the various MS Office file formats than is MS Office. They change them every other version - didn't you know that? The other thing that StarDivision / Star Office / Open Office doesn't do is fill up yer bloody HD with unpurged temp files, it never has so done, MS Office, and its it various components, always has done that. This is because Star Office / Open Office is a single OA product, not a badly engineered lash-up of 4 separate bits.

Does OO.o do database yet? Jesus wept! You've never bloody used OO, or Star Office, have you?

Strine enough for You?

rjbl

Are you pissed? Feeling reactive? Need to kick a cat do we? :lolflag:


@Handy

Ever been around when the latest MS insecurity feature in MS Office causes yer corporate IT system to get a hammering from the world's idley curious and malevolent? I have, makes yer bloody eyes water.
rjbl

I'm a retired IT tech', there isn't too much that I haven't seen, particularly when it comes to the MS side of things.

Thanks for the entertainment. =D>):P

[MasterNetra]

I don't know what all the fuss is about, even if oracle does kill it, they only kill future development by them, nothin really they can do about what has been released. Plus by the looks of it IBM at the very least will carry the torch if need be with their version. I'd imagine others will contribute too.

[dmizer]

I agree that it OO.o is a great stand alone suite, & I also agree that MS Office isn't perfectly compatible with itself.

One of the prime problems that business people have with OO.o is that it doesn't handle Word documents that use sophisticated formats. Meaning it misinterprets & therefore messes up the layout. It also has trouble with some Excel spreadsheets.

I don't know how well it handles sophisticated Access databases.

The two problems listed above are enough to keep OO.o out of many businesses. You can imagine how happy a legal firm would be with such problems.
I've never seen OOo have a problem with any MS Office spreadsheet, and the offices here in Japan use it religiously for EVERYTHING from actual spreadsheet duty to artwork, memos, and even text documents. It's really bizarre to get a multi-page text document rendered in xls, but it's not uncommon here. Calc has almost always rendered them perfectly.

For shipping documents to other companies, the safer option (even with MS Word) is to use simple formating in the document, send them in PDF format, or in extreme cases rtf. This is mostly because you never know what version of MS Office the other company has.

A couple years ago, I worked in desktop publishing and we had several machines dedicated to testing documents on various versions of Windows and MS Office for when a customer required an MS Office format. We also had rules about not using complex formating in order to help with the compatibility. There was also an entire department dedicated to solving the problems we encountered with the many multi-lingual documents we handled daily.

This was the first company I worked with that used OOo internally. They used it because it was better than MS Office. They could render complex documents much more reliably with it, and it was even better than MS Office at xml documents, which we used for our digital presses.

Granted, MS Office is nearly ubiquitous in the corporate world and this does cause problems when using OOo, but that doesn't make it better it just makes it more prevalent.

[handy]

I shouldn't have used the better word in my earlier post. Due to the high standard that OO.o has reached, these days it is the prevalence of Office which is the primary problem.

One of my customers in the past was a legal firm, they had no end of trouble with a particular barrister that used a later version of Word than they did. The barrister for all that he was paid per hour was tight enough to also be his own secretary & no matter what I said to him, he couldn't understand that he could save his document in the format of a previous version of Word.

Fancy paying him to represent you! :shock:

[Dragonbite]

My mean time between starting MSO on Win7, and seeing the Blue Screen Of Death was under ten minutes.

Anybody that considers a mean time of under ten minutes, from starting a program to seeing BSOD is acceptable quality for a product that is currently being shipped simply does not know what the word "quality" means.

That isn't even acceptable quality in the alpha stage of development.

jonathon

Wow, and I thought I had it bad. Actually, I haven't seen a BSOD at home (Windows 7 and Windows XP) and come to think of it, I think I've only seen it once on my work computer and that XP installation is a helluva lot less clean than my home Windows 7!

Slow performance? Yeah. BSOD? Haven't seen many since I moved off of Windows 98!


I will say there is one thing that makes OO.o better than MSO...

The integration of the applications. What I mean is that, for example, the invoices for my business were originally done in Calc, but I didn't like the spreadsheet for anything other than the calculations.

What I ended up doing was placing all the addresses and client info in a text document, and having a spreadsheet inside the text document for calculations.

You can't do that with MSO, to the best of my knowledge. Or at least the one at my high school can't (office 2003).

Edit: And then there's always the export to PDF function thats sways everybody I show OO.o.

I attached an example of what I mean... Minus any personal info ;)

Double click on the spreadsheet in the middle, and watch OO.o change into Calc for the duration of the edit.

I'm pretty sure the same effect, Excel in Word, has been doable in Office for many versions.

MS Office can't open the ODT properly, but I'll have to try and take an old Office Word file and do the same thing and see if OpenOffice can open that. I've got Office 2000 lying around, so if it can do it on that version, it definitely could do it on 2003 +

[jonathonblake]

Are you using an old version that isn't even supported in Win7?


Maybe MSO2K7 is an obsolete, archaic version that was never supported on Win7. After all, MSWord on W4WG & DrDOS 7.0 only took thirty minutes to crash or roughly three times as long as MSO2K7 on Win7 takes. (MS Word on W4WG & MSDOS 6.2 crashed in about twenty five minutes.)(W4WG & DrDos 7.0 also booted up faster --- five minutes, as opposed to the thirty minutes that Win7 takes.)

I think that MSO97 on Win2K was the most stable --- It took just over thirty minutes to BSOD.

jonathon

[jonathonblake]

the major problem is OO.o misinterpreting complex Office files.

Those would be the ones that MSO also misinterprets, when it does not instantly BSOD --- which, in my experience, is its most common action.

[toupeiro]

Loss of openoffice would be devastating. However, based on how Oracle is managing Suns portfolio, you certainly can't rule it out.

On the other hand, oracle is also in a position to take OOo to the next level. Imagine a lightweight database tool with an Oracle or MySQL backend? Or a spreadsheet tool that could be pushed into database tables essentially, giving direct competition to MS Excel Server? Oh, there is LOTS of potential, but I don't count on Oracle to observe potential in FOSS. They certainly haven't proven they have that ability.

[Oxwivi]

The Oracle foretold of the day when the Sun would set forever and the world doomed. *insert dramatic music*

[handy]

Those would be the ones that MSO also misinterprets, when it does not instantly BSOD --- which, in my experience, is its most common action.

<pfff> You certainly have some steam on regarding MS. I lost that years ago & boy I feel so much better since I did.

I hope you gradually (as I did) lose your enmity for MS, they are just another corporation doing exactly what corporations are designed to do.

It is the system that is governed by corporations that I still have some steam on for. I stepped away from focussing on the individual corporations & now focus my malcontent on their collective effect on our world.

I think that is called changing arenas.

The system that our world is governed by is owned & controlled by a tiny percentage of our population, they are the super, super wealthy.

They have set up the system to protect them. They are in the business of continually moving capital from the bottom of the pyramid up to them.

For very obvious reasons this system needs to be bought down & replaced with an equitable system. That word equitable has certainly got a LOT of qualifiers behind it.

That's it, done finished.

[rjbl]

@handy

I'm a retired IT tech', there isn't too much that I haven't seen, particularly when it comes to the MS side of things.

Spooky! Me too. FYI I was in the Great PC Revolution from the very earliest days. Sticking IBM - PC's onto government desktops in the mid-eighties and leading the move away from DRS6000's 'n' SVRA to Windows in the early(ish) '90's. Yep, been there, seen the movie, wrote the book.

Getting a bit sick of the FUD campaign agin Open Office / Star Office. If its a line you are moved to peddle to us then, please, get a handle on the realities and stop blindly pushing the MS line. Their market is slipping away from them, they are frit.

rjbl

[handy]

I only go back to 1986, & my start was with a casio fx 770p programmable scientific calculator that was required for the electronics engineering course I was involved in at the time.

That thing had me working out how to use line numbered BASIC. I was hooked. Amiga next; ended up writing software reviews & AmigaDOS tutorials for the magazine on disks "MegaDisc". The editor, Tim Strachan, created a wondrous magazine from Oz that came on 2x 880k floppies. All this was of course before the internet became mainstream.

A business I had forced me to move to windows 3.11 then win95 in 1995. Which after the AmigaOS was an incredibly rude shock. :( All of a sudden I had the hard truth of what everyone else was having to put up with when it came to desktop OSs inflicted upon me.

I was internally driven to learn how windows worked & ended up in a successful sole trader business for 10 years (until I couldn't stand it anymore). I fixed both software & hardware problems & supplied people with systems, then I retired & learned Linux a tiny bit over the last 5 years.

I must admit I'm somewhat over the technical stuff these days, I much prefer people, they are far more interesting & at best lovable. ;)

[beew]

Loss of openoffice would be devastating. However, based on how Oracle is managing Suns portfolio, you certainly can't rule it out.

Loss of Oracle support != loss of openoffice. :)

[tbrminsanity]

Lotus Symphony to the rescue... (?)

From IBM, a supporter of the Open Source.

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/5260/symphonybeta.png

Damn you beat me to the punch. I much like Symphony over OpenOffice anyway. It is faster, it integrates better with itself, and it offers drag and drop editing that I love. Plus best of all it is one of the only tabbed office suites out there!

http://symphony.lotus.com

[jonathonblake]

Loss of Oracle support != loss of openoffice. :)

Oracle should not drop OOo:
* They can add code to OOo that makes it integrate better into both their database offerings, and all of the back office software that they develop;
* OOo can cut off even more of MSOs oxygen supply;

FLOSS generates revenue from support contracts and selling documentation. It does not generate revenue from licensing, or product sales.

As such, OOo won't show up as a profit center for Oracle. Oracle looks at on ROI, and the financials. That makes the decision to cut OOo appear to be financially sound.

Those financials, Oracle's history with FLOSS, and Oracle's inability to grok FLOSS, are why it is expected to drop OOo.

What organization has the resources to take over OOo support and development? Who can throw out a couple of million dollars to setup the infrastructure that OOo support and development needs? Granted, they might be able to buy the existing infrastructure from Oracle, but that will still take a significant amount of cash.

IBM: They appear to grok FLOSS. But they are a solutions vendor, not a software development company. Furthermore, how would OOo fit in with Lotus Symphony? Then there is IBM's long history of being unable to develop or market software for the desktop.

Novell: They maintain an OOo fork. (In general, it is pretty good about sending patched upstream, despite Sun consistently rejecting their patches.) In theory, they could roll out the rest of the infrastructure that OOo development and support needs. Probably the biggest issue with Novell running OOo development is a Mono infection.

RedOffice: They maintain an OOo fork. In theory, they could roll out the rest of the infrastructure that OOo development and support needs. The big issue here is "culture clash". Chinese societal norms and Western societal norms are almost polar opposites. If management there can tolerate western "rudeness", and western users understand Chinese answers, then it might work. I can see the former almost working. The latter pretty much is guaranteed not to be the case.

OxygenOffice: This fork is hosted on SourceForge. It suffers from a major, chronic lack of resources;

BrOffice: I don't know how management, or resources for this fork differ from OOo. Originally, it was a rebranding of OOo, with minor changes for localizations purposes. I don't know if it has departed from that philosophy, or not. (It has the potential of being able to snag some government funding to setup an independent foundation, devoted to OOo development and support.)

ZA-Office: This was stock OOo with localizations for the languages used in South Africa. These developers relied on grants to do the translations. They don't even have the resources to update the translations, much less take on a new project.

PortableOpenOffice: This development team relies on somebody else maintaining and developing the code. All they do is repackage software so that it can run on a USB stick.

NeoOffice: This is a Mac port of OOo. It barely has the resources to develop and provide support for the Mac.

EuroOffice: This fork of OOo focuses what companies in the EEC need from an office suite. The company behind EuroOffice is more focused on economic and financial analysis, than on software development. If they have the budget, and the human resources, they might be able to take over OOo. (They are pretty good about sending patches upstream. However, Sun was pretty bad about accepting said patches.)

AFAIK, the rest of the OOo forks are either one man bands, or closed source, commercial offerings, or appear to have died before OOo 2.0 was released.

One of the BRIC countries might be willing to sponsor/take over OOo development.


jonathon

[mamamia88]

Damn never even heard of symphony but it looks cool will have to give it a try. downloading the deb now from ibm

[Dragonbite]

Chances are if Oracle drops OpenOffice, I think Novell is the most likely to pick it up and continue developing the Go-OO. So in effect, I doubt there will be a big change (except maybe Fedora dropping OpenOffice from their repositories because it comes from Novell).

Ubuntu already uses Go-OO so Ubuntu and openSUSE probably won't notice much of a difference (except maybe Novell's logo instead of Oracle's on the splash-screen)

One of the reasons for Go-OO is better compatibility with MS Office include the VBA support. For some people this doesn't mean anything, for others it is significant. Especially in business environments.

I doubt Symphony will gain much ground against OpenOffice unless IBM opens it up significantly, as in you get Symphony from the repository, not from their website.

[beew]

Dragonbite

Agree with everything you said!

[forrestcupp]

Did you see my attachment? Does it look like that in MSO? In other words, does it blend in with the text document?

Actually, if you would please do me a favor and attach a screen shot?Sure. The first one is an Excel sheet integrated with a Word document in a printable way. If you double click it, as in the 2nd screen shot, it actually runs Excel from within Word so you can actually manipulate the sheet right there from within your Word document. The way you do this is by opening the original spreadsheet in Excel and selecting and copying what you want in Excel. Then you do a Paste Special in Word wherever you want it in your document and choose to paste it as a linked Excel object. From then on, you can either have it printable, or double click to manipulate it from within Word.

Also, I didn't save the Excel worksheet to a file, and even after closing Excel and saving the Word document, it still works. So it doesn't have to be linked to an actual file.


Maybe MSO2K7 is an obsolete, archaic version that was never supported on Win7. After all, MSWord on W4WG & DrDOS 7.0 only took thirty minutes to crash or roughly three times as long as MSO2K7 on Win7 takes. (MS Word on W4WG & MSDOS 6.2 crashed in about twenty five minutes.)(W4WG & DrDos 7.0 also booted up faster --- five minutes, as opposed to the thirty minutes that Win7 takes.)

I think that MSO97 on Win2K was the most stable --- It took just over thirty minutes to BSOD.

jonathonStrange. I've been running Windows 7 since it was in beta and now I have the full version of 64-bit Ultimate. I use Office 2007 a lot, and I've never had any BSOD's or lockups of any kind in 7 with any software I've run. It sounds like you may have some kind of hardware driver issue.

[Nick_Jinn]

Dear slackthumbz,

You have received a pre-emptive infraction from a non-moderator at Ubuntu Forums.

Reason: Considering making an inappropriate post

This infraction is worth 0e-5 point(s) and may result in full access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.


Wouldnt surprise me in the least around here.

[Nick_Jinn]

How badly do we need their continued development?

Open Office is already a resource hog. I almost think somebody should go back in time a few years, take a snap shot of a more light weight Open Office, rebrand it and start from scratch, though making it fully compatible so you can use the same add-ons.

Maybe it would be good for the fork to develop independently. Maybe somebody could sell support for the free software to fund its further development.

[slooksterpsv]

Maybe MSO2K7 is an obsolete, archaic version that was never supported on Win7. After all, MSWord on W4WG & DrDOS 7.0 only took thirty minutes to crash or roughly three times as long as MSO2K7 on Win7 takes.
...
jonathon

Close sort of. There were some issues with application compatibility with early versions of Windows 7. Make sure you've installed the latest updates otherwise you may run into issues with it crashing, hanging, etc. Is it just one application or multiple or all of them?

Some have some settings that you could try changing to troubleshoot such as DDE in Excel (Dynamic Data Exchange), Calendar's or sites that you cannot connect to that are linked in Outlook, etc.

I used to troubleshoot Office 2007 a lot, the Enterprise version. So you can ask me questions if you'd like.

[ericb2]

Why nobody never mention OOo4Kids (http://download.ooo4kids.org) ? ( Website (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org) )

This is a faster and lighter version of OpenOffice.org ( 40 % in size ), based on user levels (that you can change in the prefs) and a less child-ish version is on the way : OOoLight

OOoLight, like OOo4Kids contains no Java, nor base inside. But the rest is fully efficient, including an improved equation editor for maths (aligned equations, new symbols, select equation + text, and change the size of everything in one click .. and some other nice changes, who should be backported soon in OOo though).

For the curious, the logo is there: http://www.educoo.be (search on left)

Last, people interested to test, can contact me in private (I can provide versions for testing purpose)


I forgot : OOo4Kids 1.0 will be out in a few days (probably next week)

[gnomeuser]

I would be very excited if Oracle killed OpenOffice and everyone replaced it with nice to use software (of the sort that doesn't clone Microsoft Office's worst parts) like KOffice, Lyx, Abiword, Gnumeric and Glom. Those projects deserve a lot more positive attention than they get.

With that in mind, an actively malicious corporation would continue to support OpenOffice for as long as possible.
…We'll see :)

(Don't worry, I'm exaggerating slightly).

I actually fully agree without exaggerating the slightest. Millions have been poured into OOo over the years and it is really not paying off. It is still slow and ugly, its codebase is still cluttered and bloated. It has not managed to capture any significant amount of community contributors and generally SUN has historically been sitting hard on the project.

OOo is a sick project and it would benefit us all if it was euthanized swiftly and without mercy.

As a replacement I would suggest expanding the existing GNOME Office suite (AbiWord, GNUmeric, GNUcash and soon Ease).

Alternatively if we really wanted to compete, we would use Moonlight to build a Buzzword/Google Docs competitor, this would be a bigger effort and traditionally GNOME has been exceedingly slow in their embrace of web technologies (I mean for the love of Sagan, I still can't easily set GMail as my mail account in GNOME and have it work correctly).

http://davidnielsen.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/on-firefox-as-the-free-software-mascot/

[Dragonbite]

Why nobody never mention OOo4Kids (http://download.ooo4kids.org) ? ( Website (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org) )

This is a faster and lighter version of OpenOffice.org ( 40 % in size ), based on user levels (that you can change in the prefs) and a less child-ish version is on the way : OOoLight

OOoLight, like OOo4Kids contains no Java, nor base inside. But the rest is fully efficient, including an improved equation editor for maths (aligned equations, new symbols, select equation + text, and change the size of everything in one click .. and some other nice changes, who should be backported soon in OOo though).

For the curious, the logo is there: http://www.educoo.be (search on left)

Last, people interested to test, can contact me in private (I can provide versions for testing purpose)


I forgot : OOo4Kids 1.0 will be out in a few days (probably next week)

You know, I sat through about 1:45 of the video and I was no greater informed of what is different between this and OpenOffice.org or even get a chance at any screenshots.

At this point, if they are looking to release so soon, that they would have some screenshot available.

Maybe I'm just missing it.

[ericb2]

@Dragonbite

I'd suggest you to read below the video .. there are plenty of links, explaining really everything.



So, let's retry :-)

1) you can DOWNLOAD OOo4Kids (0.9.5 until monday or tuesday ) there click there (http://download.ooo4kids.org)

2) You can see what s different there :

Click me to read the OOo4Kids Wiki where everything is explained. (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org)

e.g. the changelog, changes in the code (see all specs), adding new features, are explained (e.g. change the user level in the prefs), and so on.

To read the changelog, click here (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Changelogs).

Other links:

Toolbars and users levels (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/ToolbarsAndUserLevel)

(work in progress) : New Writer wizard (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/NewWriterWizard)

Password protected preferences (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/PasswordProtectedPreferences)

the annotation mode with Impress (Eraser and Pen) ... and so on :)


>At this point, if they are looking to release so soon, that they would
>have some screenshot available.

More than screen shots : you can download and test it for Windows, Mac OS X ( 10.4 mini either PowerPC or Intel), and Linux ( 32 and 64 bits, Intel), and some other ports like XO machines, mipsel and so on.

Since 0.9.5 we provide deb, and starting 1.0, rpm will be too.

Of course, it can be installed in parallel with OpenOffice.org, and there is even a portable version (Windows)...
(http://download.ooo4kids.org/en/download-portable-ooo4kids-windows)
>Maybe I'm just missing it.

IMHO, you are : first, OOo installed is around 460 MB, OOo4Kids is only 250 MB, we work with teachers to define the features, after being hardly discussed ( e.g. teachers propose screenshot + a description of what they want, and if we can add the feature, it is scheduled) .. and so on.


Back to the topic, the most important is that OOo4Kids is not Company controled, only a group (growing) of people from several countries, who contribute in a real "free software spirit", unlike in Oracle Land ... (but the code is available a backport in OOo, if people ask it : it's made for that).

[jonathonblake]

It sounds like you may have some kind of hardware driver issue.

Considering that I have experienced the same thing on plethora of MSO & Windows versions, starting with W4WG/the predecessor of MSO, and on a plethora of different hardware platforms, that rules out any claims about it being a hardware driver issue.

Furthermore, I've created documents using OOo on Windows that don't BSOD. Opening those documents with MSO on Windows results in an instant BSOD.
I've never installed MSO under WINE, so I don't know what would happen there.

jonathon

[Johnsie]

I wish people would quit scaremongering and spreading crap about Oracle killing x,y or z. The sky is not about to fall in so please quit with the fud and sensationalism, it's really starting to bore me.

[jonathonblake]

Is it just one application or multiple or all of them?

Just MSO. System updates were irrelevant. It still BSODd.

Well, I did crash OOo once, but that was due to trying to read an 8.x GB DVD ISO image as a text document, in a system that had 4 GB physical RAM.

Anyway, the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.4 killed Win7 on my laptop.

There are two programs I "need" to use, that run only on Windows.
Both of them will run on Win2K. Both require .NET 2.0.

One of the programs is ActiveSync. ( Multisync can only see part of my WinMo PDA. It can't see the card in my PDA, nor the main "directory" in the PDA.) In theory, a python script that runs on Linux can be written to replace it.

[forrestcupp]

Considering that I have experienced the same thing on plethora of MSO & Windows versions, starting with W4WG/the predecessor of MSO, and on a plethora of different hardware platforms, that rules out any claims about it being a hardware driver issue.

Furthermore, I've created documents using OOo on Windows that don't BSOD. Opening those documents with MSO on Windows results in an instant BSOD.
I've never installed MSO under WINE, so I don't know what would happen there.

jonathon

I don't know what to say. You have pretty bad luck. I have also installed most versions of Office on most versions of Windows on a lot of different hardware platforms, and I have never once had a BSOD as a result. The only negative experience I've ever had with MS Office is when I was using Office XP and found out they don't support it anymore, so I had to upgrade. I've never had any problem with any functionality.

[BuffaloX]

Oracle is a business if they can benefit from Open Office they'll support it, if they can't they won't.
Question is how does Open Office benefit Oracle?
Sun saved money developing Open Office instead of buying office licenses.
(That's how expensive an office license really is!)
Open sourcing it was partly an attempt to to get back at MS.
Oracle may keep it for the exact same reason.

[bash]

The Mono people must really be rejoicing at the moment. Finally a new topic for nothing-is-too-strange conspiracy theories and scaremongering has come up. Sadly seems like boycottoracle.com is already taken.

[sparky64]

There is always oxygen office professional (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ooop/wiki)
It's like open office with extras. I tried it because open office just wont work on my system(several problems)
It seems to run faster as well.

[bailout]

There is always oxygen office professional (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ooop/wiki)
It's like open office with extras. I tried it because open office just wont work on my system(several problems)
It seems to run faster as well.

If this is their website http://www.oxygenofficepro.com/ why are they claiming that Open office costs $59? It seems a slick site and presentation for an oss project. The claimed additions are mostly of no interest apart from VBA support which they say is 'under development'. It looks a bit suspicious to me tbh.

[Legendary_Bibo]

If this is their website http://www.oxygenofficepro.com/ why are they claiming that Open office costs $59? It seems a slick site and presentation for an oss project. The claimed additions are mostly of no interest apart from VBA support which they say is 'under development'. It looks a bit suspicious to me tbh.

That and they're claiming a license of MS Office 2003! is $400.

[forrestcupp]

If this is their website http://www.oxygenofficepro.com/ why are they claiming that Open office costs $59?

If their site is updated, maybe they are talking about the fact that Oracle renamed StarOffice to Open Office, which is actually now $49.95.

If that's not what they're talking about, they're a scam.

[sparky64]

I didn't even see that website.
I got the link from linux.com and went straight to the add repo and key section.
Been using it for a week with no problems. I Did try symphony but don't like how it works and for some reason it's very slow to start.
Still can't get openoffice to start, crashes as soon as i try to open it(no error code in console it just gives a blinking curser. It works after a purge and reinstall but when i shutdown/restart it goes back to crashing (Traced to a permissions fault- will only start as root when computer has rebooted.)
But i am happy with oxygen office.

[jonathonblake]

If this is their website http://www.oxygenofficepro.com

I can't tell. :(

Some of the content was definitely created by Kami. OTOH, it references an old edition of OxygenOfficePro. I'm pretty sure that Kami would have updated the site to reflect the changes in OxygenOfficePro since the blurb was written.


why are they claiming that Open office costs $59?

a) That is for Open Office Suite, not OpenOffice.org, nor OxygenOfficePro;

b) Open Office Suite was one of the early vendors who simply relabeled OOo and sold it through various outlets;


they're claiming a license of MS Office 2003! is $400.

Amazon offered MSO2K3 Professional for US$499, and MSO2K3 Standard Edition for US$399.

IOW, the quoted price is a valid street price for MSO2K3 when the site was created.

jonathon

[llawwehttam]

After reading much of this thread I have had a bit of a think.

Mozilla firefox is a very popular web browser,
Thunderbird is a very popular email client,
Songbird is a good music player that is becoming increasingly popular.

Would it be possible for an office suite to be built using the Mozilla framework?

[Dragonbite]

After reading much of this thread I have had a bit of a think.

Mozilla firefox is a very popular web browser,
Thunderbird is a very popular email client,
Songbird is a good music player that is becoming increasingly popular.

Would it be possible for an office suite to be built using the Mozilla framework?

I think that would take a LOT of work, maybe even more than starting from scratch (though not necessarily).

Now there is already a project that is integrating basically a browser to Zoho office, with the desktop environment so that these online office apps can be accessed almost exactly as if it were a local, native client.

Perhaps a merge of Mozilla and this could produce some fruit?

[AllRadioisDead]

After reading much of this thread I have had a bit of a think.

Mozilla firefox is a very popular web browser,
Thunderbird is a very popular email client,
Songbird is a good music player that is becoming increasingly popular.

Would it be possible for an office suite to be built using the Mozilla framework?

Songbird is garbage.

Ontopic: I'd much prefer to have a native GTK office suite.

[lykwydchykyn]

At this point, any just-started-from-scratch office suite hasn't got much hope of keeping up with the rest.

I'm hoping Koffice will come together soon. Nokia seems to be putting some real support behind it, though it still has a few too many interface issues for me.

[jonathonblake]

Thunderbird is a very popular email client,

Popular does not mean good.



Would it be possible for an office suite to be built using the Mozilla framework?

The irony here is that a couple of years ago Mozilla and OOo came to an agreement to work on a common framework.

jonathon

[Dragonbite]

The irony here is that a couple of years ago Mozilla and OOo came to an agreement to work on a common framework.

Sounds interesting. What does that mean, and did anything come from it? 2006 was the latest article found after a short search, and it all seemed to be about mozilla add-ons.