Subject: Re: was: Distributing OpenOffice to schools
From: Greg Madden (pabi@gci.net)
Date: Wed Aug 13 2003 - 20:39:05 AKDT
On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 15:17, Peter Q. Olsson wrote:
>
> Bryan-
>
> I agree with you in theory, but employers are more and more looking at ed.
> institutions to provide "off-the-shelf" employees that are good to go straight
> out of the box. Putting experience with OpenOffice on your resume just doesn't
> sell like hands-on experience with M$ office suite.
>
> On another tangent, why is the open-source community so happy w/ OpenOffice
> anyway? Disclaimer: I use StarOffice 6.0 (which is more or less OpenOffice
> functionally but with less warts and at a small price) routinely on both Solaris
> and Linux environments. Have to, cant get away from .doc files anymore. But...
> whenever possible I use FrameMaker on Solaris. In fact I would retire my Ultra-2
> in an instant if I could get Frame on any other platform than Winblows. My point
> is that being a more-or-less M$ Word clone is NOT a very high bar for a work
> processor.
I don't know that OO.org is so well loved as tolerated as a drop in
replacement for MS Office, in most cases. It uses the same amount of
resources (lots) reads/writes the same file formats, except for MS's
Macros, the switch wouldn't be noticed by many. I would use Abiword if
the table support was more advanced. Office apps are not that
interesting though :), just necessary.
>
> Seems to me that what the open-source community really needs is a piece of
> software that kicks butt over M$ Office, at least for word processing. Frankly,
> I would even be willing to PAY (perish the thought) for a really good word
> processor that worked in Linux. (And lets be realistic, when possible we should
> be willing to pay for software that increases productivity in the
> business/research/educational arena, though free/GNU is always welcome...)
>
> One of the darkest days in Linux history was when Adobe had a port of FrameMaker
> (high-class software) all but ready to go for Linux (the free beta worked great)
> but then pulled the plug on the project (pressure from M$???). Linux users
> deserve a new innovative paradigm in office productivity.
Framemaker may make a comeback. Adobe claims they dropped it due to lack
of user interest. With Suse & Redhat moving towards 'Enterprise'
editions this may make it more attractive to commercial vendors, longer
lifetimes for their apps.
-- Greg Madden Precision Air Balance, Inc. Phone: 907-276-0461 email: pabi@gci.net--------- To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
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