Posted on 09/28/2010 7:59:21 AM PDT by ShadowAce
After Firefox, OpenOffice may be open-source software's greatest desktop success story. For years though OpenOffice has stagnated. While under Sun's management, OpenOffice got off to a great start, the program hasn't been doing much of anywhere lately. That may be about to change under an independent non-profit group called The Document Foundation.
On the morning of September 28th, a community of developers and other volunteers announced that they were forming The Document Foundation to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original OpenOffice charter. According to the group, "The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as 'The Document Foundation.'"
And, what does Oracle, which acquired OpenOffice.org assets when its bought Sun have to do with The Document Foundation? At this point: Nothing.
In an interview, Michael Meeks, a Novell developer who works on OpenOffice said that Oracle has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years." In the meantime, The Document Foundation is using the "LibreOffice" for its OpenOffice code.
This is not to say that LibreOffice is an OpenOffice fork. Italo Vignoli, who is working with The Document Foundation, said, "We would be delighted if Oracle was a member of the consortium provided they respected the idea of an open environment to develop OpenOffice. We're not looking to fork the program. We're looking for continuity."
The beta code, which will also be available on September 28th,...
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.computerworld.com ...
Used Open Office before and I’ve never really liked it. It’s always seemed like a knockoff of word 95. Much as I hate Microsoft Word 2007 it has a cleaner interface.
I was hoping to use Open Office on a netbook that didn’t have MS Office installed, but I needed to work on documents that would eventually end up as Word docs. It ended up being too much work cleaning up the Open Office doc once I copied it into Word. (I hope all that makes sense!)
I tried an online course and it did not take OO documents at all, I had to buy MS Office.
otherwise Wordpad was good enough for me. lol.
My advice is to use what works for you in your situation. For most home users, I think that is OOo. The price point can't be beat, and it looks as good as MS Office does--providing you do not have to convert docs back and forth.
About the best I can say would be "Could be worse".
"Could be raining."
OpenOffice definitely lacks some basic functionality that Office has had for years. They’re close, but they’re not close enough.
However, if you’re not even in the neighborhood of being a power user, then OpenOffice is more than sufficient.
Open Office is probably fine for 80% of Word users, who only use the most basic functionality.
Open Office does allow saving as .doc extensions. I use it all the time and people I send docs to with windows don’t know the difference.
I tried it and really wanted to like it. I'd say it's at about 95% of Office overall. 97% on fit and finish and a couple more percent of missing features. Unfortunately, the missing features are all ones I use frequently. Those features are kind of obscure, though, so I think a lot of people could use OO and be perfectly happy.
One really stupid, ah, feature...is that the whole suite shares one Recently Used File list. Why the hell would you want recent spreadsheets cluttering up your recent file list in your word processor, especially when you can only get the list up to 9 entries or whatever.
.....nohhhhmal
Frankensteeeeen, it’s Frankensteeeeeen!
There were interactive documents that did not work at all with OO
Can't remember the name, but somebody's working on an OS clone of XP. I think they add like twelve lines of code a month or something. By the time they're done, they'll be cloning a museum artifact.
lol.
Kind of reminds me of those people who are writing codes and stuff to get Commodore 64’s online and stuff.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.