[Gllug] Office software

[Jake Jellinek]

Hi,

I agree with all of this, (and yes, I don't think they've seperated the 
packages out as much as they could or hopefully will) BUT what I'm looking 
for is a practical replacement solution to windows and office on the 
desktop. At the moment we have a single machine, single user and single 
instance of office, and to replace that with a single linux machine with a 
basically a single user and single copy of Open Office is quite (or soon 
will be) a reasonable proposition I think.

On a technical level of course I care when resources are wasted, but on a 
practical level, if I have to buy a little more hard drive space or more 
memory, then the costs of doing that are quite a bit less than the costs of 
paying for a license fee, my loss of freedom, PLUS the hard drive space and 
more memory I'd need anyway to run MS Office.

Naturally if you are not already running MS Office, and have no reason to 
provide documents in MS formats, then finding a complete alternative makes 
more sense. especially a more resource efficient one, but, if your aim is 
to (and it isn't everyones of course) try and help spread the Open Source / 
Freedom / Linux news and free your friends / company etc. from their 
dependence on massive corporations and their ever inflated impacts on your 
ethecs, freedom and wallet, then you have to fight hard and specifically at 
those applications in widespread use and find replacements for them that 
basically work.

To use RTF formats internally or even to distrubute our own information is 
fine, and we do do this already, however we still have to continue to 
receive documents from a variety of other sources, and we can't ignore the 
fact that we need to be able to import and view such files with virtually 
no fuss in order to keep our business contacts happy at the moment.

Open office is indeed at the moment probably as bloated and memory hungry 
as MS Office, and to get it to work I've had to install the entire thing 
within each users directory (not as root at all), but as I say, each 
desktop machine is not primarily expected to be a shared / multi user 
environment anyway. If necessary, since disk space is so cheap, I can bear 
installing it more than once per user if a machine did need to be shared.

I suspect MS are probably already working on a version of Office which will 
run under Linux, although whether this will ever see any light is subject 
to great speculation, perhaps a last minute act of desperation to keep some 
business at a later date, together with an MS Linux. Let's not kid 
ourselves, MS has it's finger in a lot of big organisations and if they 
decide that in order to keep market share and company alive they should 
release their own distribution together with a version of Office which must 
be licensed, they will could well stop a lot of people moving entirely away 
from them. This I guess would be in a similar vein perhaps to Apple?

The reason is, MS Office, horrible as it is, is so widely used and accepted 
that it's one of the major reasons people will be sticking to Windows 
throughout organisations. Once Open Office is actually released and is 
stable MS have a great deal to fear, particularly since it'll run under 
windows itself, and for OEM's to provide windows bundled with a free office 
package makes far greater sense to their profit margins on hardware than to 
bundle it with something that has a high license fee (perhaps higher than 
the hardware it's running on). I really look forward to the official stable 
release of Open Office, I expect it to cause quite a number of ripples and 
changes.

I'm very much into the Unix ideals of efficient programming and good 
resource use, as well as multi user environments etc, but I am also someone 
who wants to see Linux take over the desktop and help fight against "dirty 
licenses" and be used even more widely and generally than it is already. In 
my opinion the more widespread open / free software is, the better for 
everyone, bloated or otherwise, and so this is almost a mission. As with 
Linux itself, the first step should be to simply get a system that works 
and does all the bits people want, and the refinements will come ever 
thicker and faster later once the thing is in more and more wide-spread use.

So, my aim is to change those of my staff not already running Linux over to 
doing so as soon as possible and removing any and all reason to run 
Windows. At the moment there are still practical excuses for running 
windows within a company, and I need to remove them all :) Open office 
seems to begin to counter-act this nicely. I'll even pay license fees for 
particular software packages where there is currently no better 
alternative, just at least to take the first step and take the underlying 
Windows OS away.

Printing / fonts etc. are still the major nightmare so far I've found when 
getting ready to make the total migration (esp. within web browsers), but I 
understand this is changing, both at the moment (Open Office is a very good 
example of this) and in the future (kde3 and the like)

Don't get me wrong btw, I'm all for paying for my free software through 
support, contributions etc. This isn't about getting things for no money!

Cheers,

Jake.




--On Friday, November 16, 2001 10:29:23 +0000 Steve Nicholson 
<steve.nicholson at yoursolutions.com> wrote:

>> I get the feeling (having previously played with StarOffice)
>> that it has been
>> ported to *nix with little understanding of the nature of *nix systems
>> (ie multi user), it is still a big application - ie need a
>> m/c with lots of RAM to run it on.
>
> My understanding is the programs haven't been separated out with the
> move to open office.  You don't get the desktop as in Star office and it
> looks like you have individual programs but it all runs from a big
> monolithic core (same as star office) so requires the same amount of
> resources.  When you open a new program e.g. spreadsheet you are just
> opening another window, great if you have lots of memory and processor
> speed not so good on slow machines coz it takes so long to start
> initially.
>
> This understanding has only been gained from reading reports about it
> and documentation on openoffice.org so possibly wrong since I haven't
> played with it, I've only used star office which is too slow on the
> systems I have.
>
> Steve.
>
>
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