StarOffice: Bigger, not necessarily better
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The code -- The publicly available source code is now called Thankfully, among the parallels there's one important difference: thecode made available at the beginning of the OpenOffice project actuallyproduces a binary that runs. By comparison, Mozilla.org delivered a blobof uncompilable code that required almost a total re-write and still isn'tout of beta 18 months later. Mind you, just because you can So what we have in OpenOffice at this time is some usable software(version 6.05) that the website says is alpha-quality code, which meansthat the maintainers of OpenOffice havesome work ahead of them. It's just as well that the maintainers arecurrently allSun staff, since it's going to take the rest of the world quite sometime to get its head around all those million lines of OpenOffice sourcecode. Apparently most of the comments in the code are in German,reflecting StarOffice's roots from before it was Now, I admit, I do use StarOffice. Well, at least I try. The documentationthat came with the 5.2 download was pretty ratty. At the StarOfficewebsite, the closest thing I could find to a tutorial was a PDF-format There are also some StarOffice features that I'm not particularly fond ofand that I expect to find repeated in OpenOffice. But I'll keep usingStarOffice, and will likely move to OpenOffice once it's stable, since they'rethe only tools natively available on Linux that nicely read a whole bunchof proprietary Microsoft file formats. As most of you probably know, ifyou can't read documents produced by Microsoft software, there's a lot ofthe world whose communications you can't read. And StarOffice, for all itswarts, is capable of reading and writing these files. Unfortunately -- andthis is extremely irritating to someone trying to switch -- StarOffice(and OpenOffice) won't read WordPerfect files. Yet I don't expect I'll be using StarOffice, or even post-alpha versionsof OpenOffice, for a very long time. I see, not far away on the Linux appshorizon, other open source word processors that will have the features Ineed without the bloat -- or the heavy-handed politics. Yeah, politics. Nasty politics, and plenty of it. But you'll need to waitfor next week to hear more about about that... What do you think of OpenOffice? Let me know in the TalkBack below.
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