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StarOffice Source Released 219

mprudhom writes: "According to Yahoo!, Sun has today released the source to StarOffice, as promised. Go to www.openoffice.org and download it, or just grab it with:
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs login
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs co OpenOffice "
. Okay, people can stop submitting this now.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

StarOffice Source Released

Comments Filter:
  • thats a bit norrow minded
    Its the 14th here in Darwin Australia

  • Brother Stallman will lead us in song.

    All together now:

    "GPL, GPL, uber alles . . ."

    hawk, not trolling, but not entirely facetious, either
  • is that you can change it to do that: You're quite free to take a horrible idea, and turn it into a worse one :)

    For heven's sake, someone tell me that the first thing people are doing is creating a version with no desktop and separate *programs* rather than modules . . .

    hawk
  • Or just change the folder name. Check out http://www.panug.org/articles/paperclip.htm for how to remove him from either O97 or O2K
  • Has anyone figured out how you could even print from "OpenOffice" 6.0? I downloaded the binary since I can't wait for 20+ hours for this sucker to build, and went to do printer setup, and it gave me some strange error message. If anyone knows how to get it to print, let me know, since an office suite that can't print isn't worth the bandwidth that it took to download it. (Even if it is free.)

    What's new here that wasn't in 5.2? XML file formats, woo-hoo, it's not even the default way to save (yeah, I suppose they want to wait for the rest of the world to catch up, but then it will never catch on)!

    At least the "Desktop" is gone, but that seems to be about the only big change I noticed. Oh yeah, and Help doesn't work...definitely not a step in the right direction.

  • > As a side note, anyone that thinks Open Office currently is feature comparable with MS Office is either kidding themselves or has never used Star Office for non-trivial documents. The same goes for Office compatibility. That said, I do have hope that Open Office will get there, someday.

    No offense but, why is that so important? I think there's a lot more to be said for being stable, fast, and cheap. I'm still using a version of Office 95, but I'm not even using half of its functionality. I can't believe Joe Consumer can figure out most of these features anyway. He probably just wants to turn them off (Die, paperclip!)

    Sure, there will be power users who desparately need every whiz-bang Office feature crammed in there in the last two versions.

    But does Mom really need "improved table drawing","intelligent multilingual support", "collaborative sharing", or any of the other buzzwords on the MS Word site? Does she really need to expend the time wading through all these features?

    Getting a free version of Star Office bundled with consumer PCs could be a big boon if it could reliably read and write Office formats. It sure might bring Office prices down...
  • . .

    It's short, but here's a review of Star Office 5.2 on Computerworld [computerworld.com]

    Now I'm not knocking anything here, because I use Star Office 5.2 myself and got our office switched to it, but will the current efforts translate into e.g. a review in Business Week print edition (like MacOs-X got one time ages ago) and the kind of coverage which actually pursuades executives without recourse to code analysis or monopolies debates?

    Surely given the adspend Sun places these days, a few more mainstream reviewers could be perusuaded / invited to load a copy and write it up?

    Anyone seen a good print or online review out there in the mainstream business press?

    == Idle Random Thoughts. Usual Disclaimers Apply ==

  • It's also a bit strange that collab.net is hosting it and not Sun, after all it's still their baby, right?
  • by luge ( 4808 ) <slashdot&tieguy,org> on Friday October 13, 2000 @06:58AM (#708924) Homepage
    The binaries that are on akamai (look up in this thread) don't depend on anything. They do ask if you have a jre installed, but they seem to work fine with or without the jre (it doesn't recognize my IBM jre- no real surprise there ;) Other than that, the binaries run fine.
    As far as building it goes... well, there is a /lot/ of ugliness there, at least from what little bit I saw before the site died. Lots of stuff that isn't open source (like some java tools.) I suppose that will be fixed eventually.
    Oh well- at least they have binaries out, which is something that mozilla was unable to do for quite some time.
    ~luge
  • Ahem...

    Try Tools/Options, then select View.

    Look what's in the "Look and Feel" listbox!

    Standard
    OS/2
    XWindows
    Macintosh

    ALthough, this _is_ 5.1 I'm using since I'm on NetBSD, so OS/2 is probably gone, but still, you _can_ change the look. It's far from perfect though, as maximized windows still have the Windows buttons (why?!), but hey, now you can fix it!
  • Hmmm, story was posted 7:43am, and the server felt the effect at 5:45am PST.

    If Slashdot is running on Central time, that's two minutes latency for the slashdot effect.

    I wish Slashdot posted their logs somewhere. I'd like to see how many hits the main page took during the same time period.

  • OS/2 was a joint project. Win NT came out of that but not using the same code. If win NT was based on OS/2 then IBM would be entitled to a chunk of it by law. Microsoft abandoned this for NT to get rid of IBM cause they no longer needed them
  • Good, good, good! Now I hope the GoBe Productive won't be the only Office Suite on BeOS.

    Still, Star Office 5 left something to be desired in the area of contact management.

  • by poet ( 8021 )
    Uses XML I believe
  • > Win2K=32bitDOS

    You make gross generalizations like this and you expect people to take you seriously?

    > Developing OSS sucks much less than developing MS junk.

    BAH. Give me an OSS CodeInsight, give me a small portable (across apps) object model (small -- CORBA is not small), give me ERWin and Rational Rose. At the OS level, how about a kernel debugger (for device drivers), and async I/O.

    But hey vi is enough for everyone isn't it? Leading edge of innovation, that.
  • by brokeninside ( 34168 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @05:50AM (#708931)

    I remember when Caldera first decided to open up the product formerly known as DR DOS. It turned out that in order to compile, a person needed something like 7 different commercial compilers, at least 4 of which were different assemblers. You'd thinkt that they could stick to one assembler! The worse part was that the whole thing was stuck inside some sort of in-house database source code control system. ugly! It took months and months to get the code into anything resembling a publishable state.

    At 20 hours of compilation time, I wonder why they don't use a cross compiler on some insane mulit-cpu Sun box. That reminds me of when IBM used to refuse to compile OS/2 on the SMP enable version even though it cut down compile time from nine hours to forty-minutes.

    Of course hopefully, a developer only needs to compile from scratch once and once the majority of object files are created only has to compile in changes to the current module.

    have a day,

    -l

  • Yup.

    Just checked my submission time against my watch. Slashdot is either running Central time or they don't observer Daylight Savings.

    Two minutes for the slashdot effect to take down a Sun corporate webserver. That's gotta be some kind of record.

  • There was a sketch on some late-night show (Letterman or Leno, possibly O'Brien)

    It was, in fact, Conan O'Brien.

  • The ZDNet story mentions that the code is licensed under the GPL and the Sun Industry Standard Source License (SISSL). They stated that compliance to both licenses is necessary. They may be smoking crack and completely off (I haven't checked - there wasn't anything obvious at openoffice.org), but if not there are problems with this.
    I wondered about this as well, but there is something obvious at openoffice.org: the Licenses [openoffice.org] link right on the front page. The first sentence there is OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code.. So, like Perl and GhostScript, OpenOffice is dual licensed. No problems there.
  • Oh yeah, like that abi crap, oleo, GNUmeritless, or whathave you could use the bloat in staroffice. You honestly think it would fit in like a jigsaw puzzle?
  • If you don't understand the difference, then I don't think we have much of value to say to each other.

    My title is "assistant engineer", by the way.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:08AM (#708937)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I would imagine that downloading a gzipped tarball would do a better job of saving bandwidth and server CPU time than any possible CVS method. I don't know CVS, so I don't know if it's possible to use the tarball if you want to do CVS stuff in the future, but it would be dumb if you couldn't. Anyway, just my 2 cents worth :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • I'm talking about anti-aliasing - removing the jaggedness around fonts by using grey-scales. AFAIK StarOffice doesn't do this at the moment, and the results, particularly in the presentation module, are awful.
  • AppleWorks 6 is Carbonized. It was one of the first carbonized applications. I guess it was Apple's test case while developing CarbonLib.
  • Hey if IBM really means it, they could open source there speach reconition ;)
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Pathetic! - troll, my arse. It's an opinion, you whore moderator. Microsoft Office is EXACTLY what Star Office is trying hard to become, right down to file compatability. Sun wouldn't even be doing it if wasn't strategically important to shaft Microsoft! You think it's for love of Open Source?

    Is anyone going to deny that the lack of Office functionality is the first thing anyone thinks of when someone suggests Linux on the business desktop?

    This is exactly the kind of moderation that encourages the parroting of the same old opinions and is turning Slashdot into a very boring place. How about people think before trashing any post that mentions Microsoft without saying how naughty they are?
  • Same exact problem on Solaris. I installed as `setup -net' however. It seems this install procedure is broken.
  • i found this article [theregister.co.uk] over at the register rather interesting. among other things, they report that the OpenOffice 6 code Sun released "...seems to be an alpha version." i couldnt find anything that suggests this is true on openoffice.org...nor in the oo_605_src tarball. so what is this claim based on?

    --Siva

    Keyboard not found.
  • I think lots and lots and lots of people share that concern. I'd expect it to be one of the first things that some enterprising open-sourcer tackles...
    ~luge
  • I disagree.. I know you're trolling though. The trouble lately has been large CLOSED SOURCE commercial projects that have decided to be hip and open their source code. Unfortunately, once it is opened it reveals the huge stinking turd pile you talked about. The *commercial* developers are what made this into a piece of shit. Don't blame open source developers for having trouble dealing with what they've worked on. Projects that start from the ground up as open with CVS and online discussion and review of changes work well.
  • by Gendou ( 234091 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @07:20AM (#708950) Homepage
    Linux binary tarball (linux_install_605.tar.gz) [thesilicondragon.com]

    Get it. :-)

  • They're Akamai links, but when I click on them, I get bounced to the main "our server is swamped, please wait while we fix it" page at OpenOffice [openoffice.org]. Any other mirrors out there? Jay (=
  • by mirwor ( 198892 )
    I have found a bug.
  • Beware that most of the URIs have a space in them. Remove the space and it works.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13, 2000 @03:51AM (#708964)
    I was in the middle of downloading the source code, when things went to hell and the download stopped cold. I couldn't get a response from the server, so I figured I'd take a minute to see what's up at /., and what do I find, but this article.

    *Sigh*

  • As I remmeber, slashdot does run on standard time, and I think it's somewhere in Michigan, which means they might not run on daylight savings time ;)
  • by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:12AM (#708967) Homepage
    I'm happy w/ SO on my PPro200, 96Mb. It's the major reason I rarely have to start Windows anymore, but >64Mb is recommended.
  • I've also been hearing that along with the source being opened, Sun was going to do some major improvements to the suite just before hand. Are we seeing any radical improvement before the community gets their fingers into the development or is it entirely up to us to make an MSOffice killer?
  • by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero AT redhat DOT com> on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:17AM (#708969) Homepage
    You're forgetting it's all open source.
    If it's worth it (haven't looked at the code yet, cvs -z4 co OpenOffice is still running, curse my 64 kBit/s connection!!), you can be sure some of the code will be included in KOffice.

    Also, their code is probably pretty much UI independent (because it works on so many different OSes), so it's probably not a lot of work to create a patch to make it KOpenOffice. ;)
  • Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?

    No.

    Consider Sun's position. They see everyone moving to Wintel boxes because of Office compatibility and the other slew of productivity software available for the Wintel platform. More and more, they see their own cash cow slipping away as MS takes hold of the network effect once again.

    In this case McNealy can do one of two things. He can sit idly by as his company is slowly pushed into irrelevance. Or he can fight with all his might to stop the network effect. The only way to do this is to create your own network that is just as big as the other. The people at Sun realize this, and they also realize that the viral nature of the GPL added to the cost advantage will create a network effect that will dwarf MS.

    I for one am ready to help them. Whenever you receive a MS doc that won't display in SO, send a reply tactfully:
    1) asking for the document in a standard format
    2) explaining that it's not the sender's fault that MS makes gratuitious changes to their file formats in order to foil competitors (not to help them)
    3) explaining that you use a Office Suite that doens't cost an arm-n-leg or burden IT with licenscing issues (doing audits is expensive and time consuming)

    I've done this and have gotten very positive results from my coworkers.

  • Maybe an explanation :

    Look closeley at the displayed message :

    "(...) hits.
    We ask your patience while our best people are reconfiguring the server and bringing her back up
    (...)"

    Yes, look closely : nothing strikes you ?!?!
    Zoom->in : "bringing _HER_ back"

    Sun just leaked yet another ground-breaking technology news : sexed servers. They choosed a female one, because they are so much caring for their users request.

    But maybe it's PMS time now. Just imagine a bunch of sysadmin trying to convince the managment that boxes of tampaxes are _mandatory_ to run their web server.

    Next dowtime : headaches and baby blues.

    (I'still hesitating between flamebait/funny myself)
  • by MenTaLguY ( 5483 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:00AM (#708987) Homepage

    Hilarious! Open Source produces another gigantic, stinking turd of a project.

    Not really. This turd was formed in the bowels of proprietary software. It's only now that it's out in the open.

    My personal experience with proprietary software vendors (and I've worked closely with their software engineers in some cases, trying to debug problems with their software that were creating major problems for my employer) has been that most proprietary software is complete shit, from an engineering perspective.

    I mean that. There is an amazing lack of accountability for the quality of code in proprietary software.

    Before I went to work in the "real world", I would never have imagined that large, well-funded companies would produce software with such egregious bugs and flawed engineering methedologies, much worse than any I have personally ever seen in any serious Open Source project (read: one with at least three active members).

    Real world example (Windows), with a major EDA vendor (who will remain nameless):

    • Network performance is almost unusably bad
    • Vendor offers no helpful solutions
    • We start looking at network traces
    • It becomes plain that the software is polling all of the configured network printers in a tight loop whenever the app is active
    • We go to the vendor -- it turns out to be an "architectural issue"
    • We want a fix
    • They suggest we don't configure any network printers

    Another fun (Unix+Windows) example:

    • 2d application is complaining about GLX issues
    • We ask the vendor... they decided to use OpenGL instead of the 2d line-drawing primitives in Xlib (just for drawing un-transformed(!) 2d straight lines!!!)
    • Inquiring further, it turns out that they don't use Xlib at all; they wrote a custom (and very slow and badly implemented) X client library instead. Which uses interrupt-driven (SIGALRM) polling for mouse events.
    • Now we know why the app is so hideous to use, and why they never used any standard X widget toolkits.

    I've also seen some other absolutely hair-raising things in network/system call traces, like:

    seek(), ftell(), seek(), ftell(), ftell(), read(), seek()[back to same block], read()[same amount this time, but in 512k increments], seek(), ftell(), seek(), seek(), ftell(), read()

    There was also the wonderful discovery that an app was using the NT equivalent of access() (GetSecurityInfo() + GetEffectiveRightsFromAcl(), which means about 40 lines of support code each time) instead of checking for failure on various operations (open file, etc) ... why?

    ...because the lack of error handling in the application was so pervasive, they decided to cut their losses and just anticipate all possible errors by explicitly checking for the conditions that might cause them beforehand (never mind race conditions or incomplete coverage, or the fact that it broke some things...). Things were so bad that that was actually less work and less code.

    I can go on and on with these real-world accounts if you like. I've come to believe that only with Open Source comes real software engineering accountablity.

    ...the thing about most big projects is that they are NOT fun, NOT particularly maintainable and WELL beyond the understanding of any one coder. That's why it is necessary to PAY programmers to work (with people they might not necessarily like) IN GROUPS under the direction of others (with whom they might not necessarily agree).

    Actually my experience has been that those disagrements really fuck up a software project. The Open Source projects I've been involved with, if the disagreements are really serious they usually result in a fork which often means two healthy projects rather than just one. Or the old bastard leaders are deposed and go on to other things.

    Very democratic, and usually works nicely.

    And the necessity of income to pay those programmers dictates that the product must be sold and that IP laws must be used to protect that income.

    Only as long as you try to treat a service industry like a manufacturing industry.

    And if you anyone doesn't agree with that, explain how Sun could develop an Open Source Star Office without a thriving business based on proprietary hardware.

    Pretty simple: buy the rights to a proprietary product from someone else and release the source code to that. Which is what they did, actually.

    (Well, they actually bought the company, as I recall, but same thing)

    Now, as far as your description of what you see as the "real world", I do software support for a Fortune 500 company, and have been involved with (and contributed code to) several major Open Source projects. What experience do you have?

  • Some day in elementary school kids will have to memorize the GPL. And they'll have huge picture of RMS on the walls.

    And everyone will crowd around the 14' tall bronze statue of RMS and sing the 'Free Software Song'.

    Brings a tear to my eye and a rumbling to my bowel.

    --K
    Come with me and share the software...

    ---
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Hilarious! Open Source produces another gigantic, stinking turd of a project.

    ...the thing about most big projects is that they are NOT fun, NOT particularly maintainable and WELL beyond the understanding of any one coder. That's why it is necessary to PAY programmers to work (with people they might not necessarily like) IN GROUPS under the direction of others (with whom they might not necessarily agree). And the necessity of income to pay those programmers dictates that the product must be sold and that IP laws must be used to protect that income.

    The death of Open Source is inevitable. It will be caused by complexity and simple economics. In fact in the real world, outside the insular hive mind of Slashdot, it never really lived. And if you anyone doesn't agree with that, explain how Sun could develop an Open Source Star Office without a thriving business based on proprietary hardware.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if that was a feature of the binaries that are online. Guess I'll see when the download is done. They open office pages mentioned that the integrated system was going the way of the dodo
    treke
  • It's funny to watch the yahoo guys try to find some way of saying that this must suck in some way.

    Obviously they haven't read the GPL because it really doesn't suck at all.

    In fact it's one of the greater pieces of literature of the 80's.

    Some day in elementary school kids will have to memorize the GPL. And they'll have huge picture of RMS on the walls.

    :P

  • by kritanus ( 9944 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:18AM (#708997)
    Just ask google: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:openoffice.or g/+&hl=en
  • The best way of dealing with big projects is to not let them become big in the first place.

    Mozilla should not have been a single project of tightly integrated GUI code and other bits and pieces. It really ought to have been five or six independent open source projects with a few, simple, well-defined interfaces.

    The same is true for StarOffice: word processing, spread sheet, presentation, and other bits and pieces should really be stand-alone parts.

    In addition to breaking projects up into smaller pieces, they should also use languages and tools that keep them small. If it becomes a 400kloc project in C++, rather than suffering through that, pick some better language that turns it into a 40kloc project.

  • by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @06:14AM (#709006) Homepage
    If the previous post was correct about StarOffice comprising 9,000,000 lines of code, then it seems doubtful that it will be very easy to integrate any of it with a different project, like KOffice.

    Keep in mind that StarOffice is big, slow, and buggy.

    On the other hand, StarOffice does an impressive job of importing Micro$oft Office files, and so if they wrote that importing code in any sort of portable way at all, that could be very useful!
  • Well, I downloaded the binaries.

    the ONE thing I absolutely hated about star office was the unified desktop.

    and it's now GONE!

    Each app is it's own window now, just like it should be. Now, if the just allow each to be started independantly, it will be excellent.

    I'd put star, er oops, openoffice at least equal to KDE and Gnome to the success of Linux on the desktop. This is one application we need to hang our hats on, and now that it's GPL'd, it's safe to do it.

    Whatever your feelings for sun are, buying SO, and GPL'ing it were hugely beneficial to the linux community, and I'd like to thank them for it.

    ________

  • by TA ( 14109 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @06:20AM (#709015)
    -z3 should be perfectly ok if you're on a slow link (say, over in Europe).
    The faster your link is the lower your compression setting should be. That been said, there's not much use going over -z3 though, and if you go to the highest rate you will load the server quite a bit for little or no gain. Morale: Stay at -z3 or lower, and if you're on a fast link go for -z1 or no compression.
    TA
  • Earlier this week I attended a local LUG and sat through a couple of presentations made with Star Office.

    Both used really jagged fonts and looked horrible, particularly the second one which was unreadable in places. The display that was being used definitly had the resolution, as some bitmaps were very clear. Smooth fonts would have made it a lot better. When using Windows for Work I always ensure that this option is enabled.

    May be a good time for someone to add anti-alias support. Maybe I'll give it a go once I can pull it down!

  • It looks like this troll used the automatic complaint letter generator [uiuc.edu]. It gives different results every time. When I put in Sun, I got this:

    This is an open letter, which you are welcome to use as you wish. I want as many people as possible to know that Sun is unable to see any issue in a broad perspective or from more than one side. Read on, gentle reader, and hear what I have to say. Sun not only lies, but it brags about its lying to its spokesmen. When the war against reason is backed by a large cadre of uneducated protestors, the results are even more loathsome. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that its prank phone calls serve only to safeguard its own power and privilege. If, after hearing facts like that, you still believe that without its superior guidance, we will go nowhere, then there is decidedly no hope for you.

    To say otherwise would be oppressive. Is it not positively the distinguishing feature of Sun's activities to descend to character assassination and name calling? There is no inconsistency here; a central fault line runs through each of Sun's statements. Specifically, the law is not just a moral stance. It is the consensus of society on our minimum standards of behavior. I find Sun's policies rather immature, don't you? Of all of Sun's exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, one in particular stands out: "Nonrepresentationalism is a noble goal." I don't know where it came up with this, but its statement is dead wrong.

    According to the laws of probability, we were put on this planet to be active, to struggle, and to justify condemnation, constructive criticism, and ridicule of Sun and its huffy reinterpretations of historic events. We were not put here to excoriate attempts to bring questions of emotionalism into the (essentially apolitical) realm of pedagogy in language and writing, as Sun might feel. Words fail me in describing my pure distaste for Sun's positions and abhorrent assertions. I put that observation into this letter just to let you see that Sun should think about how its double standards lead uncompromising vexatious provocateurs to pander to our worst fears. If Sun doesn't want to think that hard, perhaps it should just keep quiet. Sun has stated that the sky is falling. That's just pure hooliganism. Well, in Sun's case, it might be pure ignorance, seeing that Sun frequently avers its support of democracy and its love of freedom. But one need only look at what Sun is doing -- as opposed to what it is saying -- to understand its true aims. I'd like to finish with a quote from a private e-mail message sent to me by a close friend of mine: "Sun believes that everyone and everything discriminates against it -- including the writing on the bathroom stalls -- only because it has a need to believe that".

  • If they haven't jumped all over Linux at this point, what exactly would they be using as an office suite (and on which OS) that already gives them the feature of being open source? As it is, I'm not sure how a company can justify to its stockholders the fact that they spent hundreds of dollars on Windows/Office software, when free (beer) alternatives existed-- the free (speech) status of said alternatives really being tangential (not that I'm complaining, freedom of speech is important to me, and that's what the GPL is about).
  • by rimdo ( 160461 )
    It's ironic how Sun released the source code one day after I got MS word 2000 to work [indiana.edu] using the latest nightly wine. Anyway, cheers to Sun for freeing their software. :))
  • Also, their code is probably pretty much UI independent (because it works on so many different OSes), so it's probably not a lot of work to create a patch to make it KOpenOffice. ;)

    .. and GnOpenOffice, of course.. *sigh*

    (posted using Opera for Linux 4.0b1 :)
  • I've heard, but don't know for a fact, that Sun does not allow M$ Office in their operations. All of their employee's were already using StarOffice. So, they have a strong incentive to see it improve. I don't see them getting "bored", as this isn't just an academic exercise.

    I also don't know what kind of bulk discount M$ gives on Office licenses, but it is quite possible that Sun has considerably less invested in OpenOffice than they would pay to legally license Office2000 for all of their employees. I'm pretty sure that the ongoing costs of running OpenOffice, even with several dozen programmers assigned to it, would be less than paying M$ for upgrades every couple of years.

    I think this just might be a testament to how greedy M$ licensing practices are. It's quite possible that it's cheaper for Sun to write their own office suite than it is to license M$'s "mass market" office suite.
  • When Microsoft and IBM "divorced" in the early 90s, they both got full rights to jointly developed technology - DOS, Windows, OS/2, early NT work.

    So Microsoft doesn't have to pay IBM for OS/2 tech, and IBM doesn't have to pay MS for, uhh, Windows 3.0 tech.
    --
  • Have they announced any Bonobo support at all?

    Their Technical Overview document describes ruefully describes how it used YA component model, something Star developed called Universal Network Objects, and that there is no standard between Gnome/KDE/XPCOM/COM/and so on.

    Their short term solution is a bridge between component technologies. I have a feeling that that's probably also the permenant solution, baring a major rewrite, or the unlikely complete victory of one of the 10 open component models. How well a bridge works depends, but it's an ugly solution.
    --
  • It would be really nice to add some of their widgets to Gtk+ though ... they have some good toolbar and slide-out menus/widgets in general.
  • Yes, they do, as in:

    <XML>
    <OBJECT TYPE="Word Document">
    ...meaningless gibberish follows...
    </OBJECT>

    Not the most useful thing, is it?

  • Thanks for the report. I think 99% of the people here underestimate how big a deal this is.

    Bruce

  • Well, I think (in bringing in collab.net) Sun was basically saying "we don't know jackshit about handling a project like this" and sub-contracting the management stuff to someone who does (like collab.net). I think, personally, that they should have gone out and re-hired jwz to manage it, and learn from the mozilla experience. That's the only thing comparable to this, and so I don't really think that collab.net has the same level of relevant experience that mozilla does. Oh well...
    ~luge
  • There was a sketch on some late-night show (Letterman or Leno, possibly O'Brien) that was consoling Gates when his business was being chewed out by the government, that he didn't get it as bad as 'Clippy.'

    Then it cut to a word processing screen, with the cartoon paperclip in the corner. A hand holding a revolver came in on the other side of the screen, and blew Clippy to bloody gibs.

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • Anyway, the code doesn't contain the browser, mail and news. Sun's waiting for the community's opinions on including them as Mozilla is available.

    Actually, StarOffice's browser really isn't anything in and of itself. On *NIX, it uses the Netscape 4.x engine; on Win*, it uses IE.
    So you're really not missing anything. :P

    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
  • by robinjo ( 15698 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:30AM (#709052)

    I checked the site thanks to a link from LinuxToday. It looked nice and it did have a source download plus you could log on to mailing lists.

    Anyway, the code doesn't contain the browser, mail and news. Sun's waiting for the community's opinions on including them as Mozilla is available. I also remember reading how all the commits will go through the project leaders aka Sun's employees. Unless Sun'll do as good a job as Netscape, I doubt that OpenOffice will remain the center of StarOffice development.

  • Usually yes, but the point is that the site was updated today with the new information as to building it and other documentation, and that is not in googles cache yet.

    C.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:55AM (#709055)
    Use these URLs as they are cached all around the world.

    oo_605_src.tar.gz [akamai.net]

    linux_install_605.tar.gz [akamai.net]

    winnt_install_605.zip [akamai.net]

    solaris_install_605.tar.gz [akamai.net]

    solver605_linuxintel.tar.gz [akamai.net] ;

    solver605_solarissparc.tar.gz [akamai.net]

    solver605_win32intel.tar.gz [akamai.net] ;

  • by luge ( 4808 ) <slashdot&tieguy,org> on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:58AM (#709056) Homepage
    I've heard that Sun has about 40-60 folks working full time on the OpenOffic codebase, working on the GTK and Bonobo ports. So, it isn't just up to "us". Now if they would only get someone to work on a "how do I build this thing" doc...
    ~tieguy
  • by riggwelter ( 84180 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @05:08AM (#709059) Homepage Journal
    Its great that we can now take the code and add features that are sadly lacking in StarOffice, such as the MS Office Assistant...

    We could have a little popup Tux penguin.

    "It looks like you're writing a letter slagging off Microsoft. Would you like me to make it anonymous for you?"


    --
  • It's not like it's -z9.

    --

  • Performance does seem to have improved significantly with this newer release.
    treke
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13, 2000 @03:54AM (#709064)
    now we can all get started on out PowerPC, Alpha, and Itsy ports. Open Source. Ahhh.
  • by MortimerK ( 22530 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @03:55AM (#709069)

    Of course, source kept for so long in captivity is quite unable to fend for itself once released. It may appear domesticated and timid, but do not treat it lightly! It needs to learn to survive in the real world. It is entering a harsh, peer-reviewed environment that it is not familiar with. Approach it fearlessly and improve it.

    BTW, Sun, StarOffice - a coincidence?!?!

    Well...yes, probably.

  • by kalifa ( 143176 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @09:03AM (#709073)
    > OpenOffice 6.05 takes a good 18 hours to compile
    > on a 500Mhz win32 box, according to
    > openoffice.org. Yikes :)

    Yup. Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs officially entered the category of lightweight utilities.
  • It used to take five days to compile X11R5 on our old Sun SLC workstation. So what, we just did something else in the meantime :-)
    TA
  • okay sure. i don't think sun/stardivision invested any
    efforts for increasing speed in this code
    i'll go over those 9 million lines of
    code for ya. expect a speed increase of
    about 40% in 2 or 3 weeks. ;))

    This whole project will take at least as long as
    Mozilla needed to get running. Don't expect any
    results in the near future and don't expect
    BIG results in the not-so-near future as well.

    Bibos

  • > Gimmie, Gimmmie, Gimmie. It's all take and no give, huh?

    *shrug*. I don't have a pressing need to spend years writing these tools myself when I'm otherwise perfectly willing to drop a few thousand to have them now. Only free if your time is worthless and all that.

    My point was, these products make development less painful than a pure-OSS solution which can offer me nothing but mediocrity, if that.
  • When Mozilla got released, way back when, it was ridiculously useless on day 1 due to it depending on a whole bunch of development tools that weren't available as free software ( e.g. - stuff from RSA, Motif, Orbix, I think some Rogue Wave libs).

    I expect that "Open Office" isn't quite so challenging, but I sure it does depend on some stuff. Does it need Lesstif? How about other such stuff?

  • I believe MS Office was the first Office suite to use XML for file formats. This is especially true if you count the alpha/beta period.. Remember KOffice isn't even officially released yet.
    --
  • by luge ( 4808 ) <slashdot&tieguy,org> on Friday October 13, 2000 @05:15AM (#709088) Homepage
    I got in before the site died :) They are already working on OS 9 and OS X ports. No data on how far along they were, but they did say that the Mac ports weren't "fully supported" yet. I'd post a link, but as you know the site it toast.
  • by brokeninside ( 34168 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @05:16AM (#709090)
    On Friday the 13th -- a target fatalistically selected by Sun

    Is Sun trying to say that this is something that they do not really believe in or do they just have one or more project managers with a black sense of humor?

    I hope its the latter, but it would not altogether surprise me if the former was the case.

    Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office? Sun spent buckets and scads and tons of money on buying StarOffice, giving it away for free and then hiring CollabNet to clean up the code and modularize the CVS tree. I don't think that Sun is making enough on its SunRay thin clients to justify the expense. OTOH, a high quality, multi-platform, free Office suite might take away Microsoft's ability to subsidize W2K development with Office revenues. The question with this strategy is whether or not ms.net will be available and functional to make the desktop office suite irrelevant before a working and spectacular Star Office 6.0 for Windows is ready and available.

    Hmm. Are any of the developers for this project are going to make Star Office into the free equivalent of .net? That would be funny. Hmm. Maybe the MS investment in Corel is an attempt to come up with an alternative to a free Star Office.

    The most encouraging thing for me is that, to a certain extent, it seems that Sun has learned from AOL/Netscape's mistakes with Mozilla:

    It has divided the massive StarOffice code base into 75 modules, grouped into 18 projects, such as printing, scripting engines, spreadsheets, and the like. Currently, all 18 projects are headed by Sun employees, but Roth said Sun is expecting "others in the community to take over some of them over time."

    They made things organized and pretty and split things up into well defined sub-projects. This will make it much easier to (1) part out the useful parts of Star Office for other projects, (2) graft in new systems to fix Star Office's deficiencies, (3) keep the ball rolling, and (4) get new people involved.

    Maybe after a few days and the CVS server comes back to life I'll download the code and look at it out of curiosity. I've always wondered how much of Star Office was written in Java. It's certainly slow enough at times for the whole thing to have been.

    One thing is for certain, this will be an adventure....

    have a day,

    -l

  • why else would anyone eat a troll?
  • Bruce-
    I think the problem is that it will not be a big deal as soon as people expect. I've been playing with it all day, and it is pretty solid, but it will still take a long, long time before it is really on par with Office. And by then Office will have voice recognition. :| We'll see, I guess, but if we have learned anything from the Mozilla example, there is still a long ways to go before this has the kind of impact we'd all like.
    ~luge
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:00AM (#709099)
    ...is not just that people can contribute to the project (which I don't mean to downplay--it's a big deal in its own right), but that other projects can freely steal code from SO. Expect to see a quick leveling of the features across the open source office landscape now that this source is available.

    I'd say something here about the irony that a long-time closed source, cathedral-style project is the one being raided for this source to help the OSS projects, but that wouldn't be politically correct, would it? I wouldn't want to start the whole "OSS just plays catch up" argument all over again...

  • Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?

    I'd rather think that they want to end the MS dominance on document standards. No one else has been able to get around all of the coppies of Office that MS dumped on every new computer that got sold with that forced MS OS. By putting this out as free they can rest assured that someone will be able to match every little twist and turn MS tries to put into their nasty specs. This way StarOffice users can follow MS faster than MS Office users! What a burn. More than that, with enough users reasonable and open document standards can be implimented to provide not just a compatible product but a better product. The hold will be broken. No commercial software has been able to compete, and none can do what this will.

    Why is this a survival move? It will keep MS's dirty hands out of the server market that Sun serves so well. You don't need that Win2k server when your workers can communicate with the rest of the world without it. Sun has learned that market forces and dumping can be more important than superior technology. If they sat back, they would have watched MS leverage their desktop hold. They've gone to the root cause and faught back better.

    MS's other cash cow, OS sales is down too. This is in part due to PC sales slow downs, but it might also have something to do with "naked PC's" getting a better OS stuck on them.

    If this product is even close to stable, I can't imagine recomending MS to any student. As the students go, so goes the future. Sun will keep it's place in it.

  • by HadronPie ( 212138 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @04:00AM (#709106)
    cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs login
    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs co OpenOffice

    Note the -z3

    This will save a little on bandwidth...

  • Yes, look closely : nothing strikes you ?!?!
    Zoom->in : "bringing _HER_ back"


    Simpler explanation:

    When something goes down, men wish it were a woman.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13, 2000 @06:40AM (#709112)
    I got ahold of the Linux binary and had to try it. The good news: the download is quite a lot smaller (52.4MB, vs. something like 80.8MB for version 5.2). Evidently the web browser and mail features were taking up a lot of space. The memory footprint is also smaller: about 40MB, 30MB shared after opening several Word docs, an Excel spreadsheet, and a PowerPoint file. That horrible desktop is GONE. Separate documents open in separate windows which you can move around like they're supposed to. Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems a bit faster. Whatever toolkit-within-a-toolkit wrapper it's using still accounts for a lot of fat though. I opened a Word document that failed with 5.2, and it looks pretty damn good. Excel also. PowerPoint rendered the presentation acceptably, though the headlines were consistently kerned all bunched up together. Conclusion: didn't play with it long enough to see how much it crashes, but this seems to be headed in the right direction. A GTK version will be a killer app.
  • by Ezz ( 243345 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @06:42AM (#709114)
    Projected events over the next two years: Oct 2000 - Source released Mar 2001 - Complete rewrite from ground up started Oct 2001 - JZW leaves project Jan 2002 - MS-Office2002ASP.net released Oct 2003 - OpenOffice reached build OO17 Oct 2003 - Sun release Staroffice v6 preview 3 Nov 2003 - KDE5 released with KOffice 3 Dec 2003 - OpenOffice version 1.0 released as a completely different product incorporating XML, SOAP, XUL, HTML, XHTML, Themes, Skins, Java, Bonobo, KParts, CORBA, OLE, GnomeBasic, PHP scripting and the kitchen sink.
  • "Please Excuse Our Technical Difficulties

    At about 5:45am PST, our web server was brought down by a veritable tsunami of hits. [translation: "we were slashdotted into oblivion"]

    We ask your patience while our best people are reconfiguring the server and bringing her back up; we are working as quickly as possible and we will keep all openoffice.org community members apprised of the situation via our general discuss and announce lists. [they are (or WERE) running the newest development version of Apache. I wonder if they will release the logs so we can see what kind of punishment this new version of Apache can take ;)]"

    Of course, this could have all been averted if people had been using that <a href="http://www.opera.com">OTHER</a> browser and disabled the loading of pictures, like I did. I found the site quite snappy and responsive up until the time they finally took it down.

    Oh, well. You live, you learn.

    -inq

  • Usually those kinds of servers have more processing power than they have transmission capability.
  • Why would people think that OSS is playing catch up? Because there is a lot of user level software on MS and other comercial platforms.

    Why is there so much software on MS platforms? Because developing for MS once sucked less than developing for Apple, or IBM etc. MS dumped OSes and tools once upon a time, and there was some gain to be had in using their tools. This made for a flood of developers. In other words there's more user level software for MS because there were move devolopers working on it.

    What's wrong with this picture? First, it ignores the stagnation at other software levels for MS. Win2K=32bitDOS. MS innovation is close to zero these days, and some people would aregue that it always has been. Second, it's a static picture. OSS does have some user level catch up to do, but that's what happens when you have to cut out all the propriatary stuff and start from scratch. This does not preclude developers from leapfrogging MS and other commercial houses. It's happened before, (sendmail, and apatche come to mind) and it's going to happen much more.

    Developing OSS sucks much less than developing MS junk. The tools are free for the most part, and you can share your work. The strength of a platform is geometric to the number of developers and the amount of code available.

  • make it look like the OS it's actually running under (on, in?).

    So what you're saying is make one dialog use Motif-look widgets, another use Windows-look, another use MacOS-look, another use Xt-look, and another use GTK flavor-of-the-day, no?

    Sounds like it'd look right at home on any Linux desktop!

    --K
    It's funny. Laugh.
    ---
  • Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?

    Have you heard the rhetoric coming out of Redmond lately? It's Sun this, Sun that, Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun. Microsoft doesn't seem to have a care in the world about Mac or Linux or any other Unix or mainframes or anything, except for Sun. They just rolled out some 32 proc boxes running Windows which is a pretty naked attempt to kill off Sun's cash cow.

    So, if you are Sun, and you've got money to spare, what do you do? They know that Others have just sat there and taken it while Microsoft came and "got the loot". No, if they are coming at your cash cow, the smart thing to do is go back at their cash cow, even if it's just a minor distraction to them.

    So what becomes of this when Sun gets bored and stops dumping resources into StarOffice? Well, at the very least the OSS guys got a fairly decent office suite just gifted to them, and when it's finally decided if people want hosted rent-a-application, that will be out there also as open source, as opposed to pay Microsoft.

    I'll be interested to see what the code looks like Star has been ported from OS/2 to Windows to Unix to Java and then back to OS/2. Apparently (like NS4.x), it has a big ugly cross-platform runtime engine. We'll see if this makes the Unix programmers out there totally sick, or if a Mozilla-like "total rewrite" is necessary, or if everyone can live with the current state of the beast.
    --
  • by chamont ( 25273 ) <monty@fullmont y . o rg> on Friday October 13, 2000 @05:41AM (#709124) Homepage
    I looked through openoffice.org yesterday and read through the build faq. They're trying to use tradidional open source build tools where possible, but many of the build tools they use are proprietary. The code base has 60,000 files, and 9,000,000 lines of mostly C++ code. A full build takes 20 hours on a p3 with 256 mb of ram.
  • This is funny. The source code comments are still in german. I would have thought that Sun changed more stuff, because it's been a while since they bought the german company star division, that originally wrote SO. Well, that's fine with me :), but not everybody speaks german.

    On the other hand, when star office came first out a couple of years ago, it was regarded as quite a software engineering feat, because they published it on all operating systems at the same time. Everything is in C++ and they went out of their way to make sure star office had a very clean and abstract design that would be easily portable to other platforms. That's also one of the reasons it's not as bloated and buggy as M$'s stuff. I'm really looking forward to have a peek at the code. This is finally an open source project where the quality of the code is not on a hobbyist's level.

If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro

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