Has the Irresistible Rise of OpenOffice.org Begun?

ComputerWorld UK ^ | 08 February 2010 | Glyn Moody

[ShadowAce]

Just like Oracle buying Sun and absorbing MySQL won't do away with MySQL. There's been quite a bit of speculation that Oracle will kill MySQL due to the competition with it's on DB.

However, the original maintainer/owner of MySQL has already stated he will take the previous version that is open source, and continue to develop it.

Open source allows that. Proprietary software does not. I see more risk of a piece of software disappearing if it's proprietary than if it's open source.

[Poser]

“Tell me. Office 07? Lets rearrange the interface to make it easier to use.”

I downloaded and am running the beta of Office 10 on some of my machines. The FILE tab is back and the menus are a bit better. It is still a switch from Office 03.

I've been teaching Excel, Access and PP since we switched from Word Perfect for DOS and early Lotus and Dbase for Windows. The ribbons are a bit challenging, but I'm slowly getting used to them.

[Poser]

“Of course it does take care of the old 256-column limitation on previous versions”

God knows we need spreadsheets with more than 256 columns and millions of rows. (/sarcasm) Some people need to learn about relational databases.

Personally, I still think the last DOS version of Lotus was the best spreadsheet ever written. The slash key interface was simple, lightening fast and effective. All we have gained with the complex GUI versions are pretty colors and fonts and charts that are even more useless and confusing than the crappy ones in Lotus.

[dfwgator]

Unfortunately we have users who have pretty sophisticated business models encapsulated in Excel spreadsheets, and they are actually considered very valuable proprietary assets. I’ve seen Excel spreadsheets with file sizes greater than a Gigabyte.