Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> Now there is one. It's called OpenOffice, and it has a killer feature: it's
> free.
>
a word of caution: open source (or shareware or freeware etc)
equivalents of the ms office suite are not something new. sun
bought a company called stardivision that made a product
called staroffice which sun gives away for free. the kde group
offers something called koffice. gnome folks have something
similar. many of these are built out of the same codebase as
the openoffice code. additionally, quite a few open source
equivalents of individual ms office programs (excel, word, etc)
are also available.
they all face the same problems: the ability to continue to
read microsoft format files (excel spreadsheets, word docs,
etc), and the ability to keep up with microsoft's bells and
whistles: ranging from the silly (which i would not
underempahsize: in the place i worked at last, the business
types spent half their time deciding on gradient colouring
effects for boxes on their presentation slides) to the more
complex (integration of various elements to provide features
such as embedding, scripting capabilities, things like that).
perhaps openoffice will convince large interacting groups to
drop ms office and start using openoffice. my experience with
sun's previous attempts, the linux community (including the
internal bickering between GNU and the younger crowd, kde and
gnome, etc), etc., makes me rather pessimistic.
--ravi
