also, isn't it a mistake to buy version 1.0 of _any_ program?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ravi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 10:00 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:27060] Re: An alternative to Micro$oft
>
>
> 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
>
