Re: Star Office

[Matthew John Palmer <nospam [at] uow.edu.au>]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Richard wrote:

> Letter arrived this morning from Sun Microsystems. 

[Letter snipped]

Oh dear.  Web applications again.  Sorry guys, but we need some ubiquitous
connectivity first...

How in blazes am I going to be able to use SO on a standalone machine?

Lunacy.

Shudder, is all I can do.

> Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision during the summer of 1999, and
> is making Sun StarOffice 5.1 available on the web for free download.

At 70MB, it's only free in the sense that Sun aren't getting a cut...

> Sun will be developing StarOffice, from its present form to a new
> web-based version called StarPortal and expect it to be available

Could be they're only going to be enhancing the web-related aspects of it,
and not turn it into a full web-app.  Not a lot of hope, though...

> Sun will be also making the StarOffice source available on-line via a
> community source licence, and will be publishing the programming

Heard that before.  As I recall, the Sun Community Source Licence makes
Netscape's one a free-for-all.  Good on them for going this far, but a
licence that says (IIRC) 'thou mayest look, but must not touch without our
say-so' isn't quite the GPL...

> Sun Microsystems is changing the rules of computing again [perhaps an

Oh dear.  When I hear this sort of mindless propaganda I feel a need to pop
out the jackboots, stick an ink rubber under my nose and go
goose-stepping...

> This leaves Koffice Gnome office and Corel Office 2000.  None of them
> are as good as Star Office.

I think (hope, pray?) that they'll get better with time.

On the other hand, what essential features are any of them missing? As long
as they do the basic job, that's a pretty good start.  (IMHO, from a rabid
LaTeXer who thinks GUIs are for WIMPs... <g>)

> BTW, I've got nine SO CDs so if you want to get it before it vanishes
> altogether then you'd better get it from me ?

If it's got the JRE I wouldn't mind a copy - There are a few places I could
put it to good use...


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Matthew Palmer
mjp16@uow.edu.au

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