Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Mittwoch November 22, 2006

Norwegians win yet another prize
Congratulations ... again, I have to say! The Norwegian OpenOffice.org community in charge of the Norwegian localization of OpenOffice.org won yet another prize. See this! Keep up the great work!
( Nov 22 2006, 04:43:04 PM CET ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org Mac porter meeting at Google office
If you like to get involved in the Mac port of OpenOffice.org, check out this blog entry. There will be Mac porter meeting at the Google office in Hamburg in early December.
( Nov 22 2006, 04:40:53 PM CET ) Permalink

Burning the Bridges
Via this Slashdot article I became aware of this blog entry about Microsoft's new Office 2007 user interface license. It says:

"There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license."

From my point of view, users should now be even more careful about adopting Microsoft Office 2007. Not only is Office 2007 using a new file format that has not been designed for interoperability across different implementations and different platforms but for backward compatibility with Microsoft's proprietary world, now Microsoft is apparently also trying to make it even harder for other projects and vendors to compete. It looks like Microsoft is trying to "burn the bridges" in order to make it difficult for others to follow.

Sure, I can fully understand that companies try to protect their investments and their customer base. That's natural and logical. However, I think customers should be really, really careful about following Microsoft across the bridge.
( Nov 22 2006, 04:01:10 PM CET ) Permalink

Sharepoint alternative released by O3Spaces
"O3Spaces announces the immediate availability of its document collaboration and management environment that tightly integrates with the open source office suite OpenOffice.org and its commercial sibling StarOffice. “Up until now OpenOffice.org lacked a back-end solution similar to Microsoft Office SharePoint,” says O3Spaces CEO Rob Mentink."

The full announcement can be found here.
( Nov 22 2006, 03:34:26 PM CET ) Permalink

"20 percent intended to install the free OpenOffice"
"Visitors to PCAdvisor.co.uk certainly weren't convinced about the need for an office suite upgrade according to a poll we ran during October. Two-thirds of you said you'd stick to your current office suite for the foreseeable future, with another tenth of you planning to upgrade to Office 2007.

A further 20 percent intended to install the free OpenOffice, while just 3 percent had earmarked Tesco's Complete Office as a purchase. Only 13 percent of the more-than 2,000 people who voted in our poll were prepared to pay money for an office suite upgrade."

Found here.
( Nov 22 2006, 09:27:40 AM CET ) Permalink