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 ...
Yeah, its Word functions are pretty decent, but my wife was using its Excel program to keep track of our finances and even something as basic as inserting rows was kind of PITA. She mentioned the needed functionality in one of OpenOffice’s development boards and was completely blown off by some developers. We went and installed Office 2010 a few days later...
Compared to the price of MS-Office, the word processor and spreadsheet in Open Office are more than good enough for most people. I have not tried the OO “PowerPoint” so I can’t comment on that.
Yeah, there’s some annoying stupidity with drag-and-drop as well. If you bring it up in the forums even very politely, just asking how to do it, they’re REALLY rude.
ReactOS
Sounds like it might take a few lifetimes
When they get it done it’ll be like “Ahperrating Sissstem? What is this ‘Ahperrating Sissstem’ you speak of?”
I have used the powerpoint for oo. I liked it fine and oo even has one feature that powerpoint doesn’t, or did not at the time, the ability to crop a photo. When the file was saved as a powerpoint file, the cropping went away. I agree with the other posters, for most basic needs, it works fine, but a little QC is needed when saving to different formats. M$ would not have any competition from oo if they had made works more compatible with office. I never understood that decision.
Dev schedule reminds me of:
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive they may find
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes
You won’t find a thing to chew
Nobody’s gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine’s doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube, whoa-oh
In the year 7510
If God’s a-comin’ He oughta make it by then
Maybe He’ll look around Himself and say
Guess it’s time for the judgment day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He’ll either say I’m pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again, whoa-oh
In the year 9595
I’m kinda wonderin’ if man is gonna be alive
He’s taken everything this old Earth can give
And he ain’t put back nothin’, whoa-oh
Now it’s been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man’s reign is through
But through eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it’s only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535
Yeah, you’re right. The commenting features aren’t compatible.
“Just shows what the Open Source Community can do it they try.”
Ssimilarly, I bet you could do your occupation for free too, if you really try.
It’s called linux, I commited to linux mint ‘ubuntu 10’ several months ago for my personal computer, I don’t play games on a PC, but I do some graphics work, with gimp and blender.
I use win 7 MCE for my media server, but that’s all. Linux has a media server edition but I haven’t spent any time to learn how to use it, maybe in the future.
lol
exactly right.
I doubt the Enterprise, if we ever get there, is going to have to worry about the old blue screen of death.
The worst thing about Vista is that Scorched 3D isn’t compatible
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Right click on the row where you want to insert, and select "insert row". I use openoffice for word processing and spreadsheets mostly. It works well for everything I need, and the help is pretty good. Zeugma's wife has used it for creating HTML docs, and it's output is amazingly clean, especially compared to MS-Word. Personally, I prefer other tools for that (quanta rocks).
OpenOffice is great if I have to exchange stuff back and forth with windows users, but it’s worthless for writing in LaTeX.
LOL! Yeah--I don't think that was it's objective. LEd is probably a better option.
[Scottish brogue]Captain! Ah gawt a GPF in the dilithium remodulator! Weeee’re gunna hav tuh reboooot!”
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