Open Office

[Alan]

What is it with Open Office? Its a good program that does a lot, if
admittedly not all of what Excel and Word does and its free?
The 60 odd meg Zip file turns into a 140 Meg file once installed, this isn't
a small and easy program by anyone's standards.
I understand that Sun is the author, why would they do this? It must of
taken a lot of effort to get this together, and to what purpose? Are they
trying to compete with MicroSoft?
Any information please?

 

[Harald Staff]

This is from memory:

It started as Star Office, an office suite for Amstrad computers, made by the german
company staroffice.de , and grew to be a good and cheap multiplatform office package with
a generous trial version. AT version 4.1 it became totally free, and shortly after it was
bought by Sun, which brought it up to still free version 5 a while after. So Sun did not
write it.

At version 6 it split to two versions, StarOffice (cheap) and OpenOffice (open source and
also free as in beer). And one may ask "why pay then ?". Well, I work in a company, and
for companies it's important that someone -and preferrably "someone else"- is responsible
and has to offer offer a minimum of support. So that's what the payment is for, it makes
those in charge of not being in charge happy

I think Sun's ambition was a global, web-based office portal + workspace + storage medium
or something similar. I have not heard anything about it for a couple of years though.

 

[jaf]

8.
9.
10.
So they can whiiiinnnne about MS dominating the spreadsheet/office software
market like they did in the browser war?

"People are using MS's free browser instead of our free browser. Whhaaaaaaa.
Whhaaaaaaa. Whhaaaaaaa."

 

[Alan]

Thanks,

This is from memory:

It started as Star Office, an office suite for Amstrad computers, made by the german
company staroffice.de , and grew to be a good and cheap multiplatform office package with
a generous trial version. AT version 4.1 it became totally free, and shortly after it was
bought by Sun, which brought it up to still free version 5 a while after. So Sun did not
write it.

At version 6 it split to two versions, StarOffice (cheap) and OpenOffice (open source and
also free as in beer). And one may ask "why pay then ?". Well, I work in a company, and
for companies it's important that someone -and preferrably "someone else"- is responsible
and has to offer offer a minimum of support. So that's what the payment is for, it makes
those in charge of not being in charge happy

I think Sun's ambition was a global, web-based office portal + workspace + storage medium
or something similar. I have not heard anything about it for a couple of years though.