Posted on 12/08/2001 5:32:04 PM PST by Texas_Longhorn
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:58:56 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The brouhaha surrounding Microsoft Corp.'s new volume licensing plans has apparently been good news for companies like Sun Microsystems Inc., which last week announced the beta release of its free StarOffice 6 office productivity suite.
Iyer Venkatesan, the product line manager for StarOffice, told eWEEK in an interview Tuesday that there had been more than 200,000 downloads of the software from Sun's Web site over the past week. Some two-thirds of those downloading the software had indicated on the download page that they were Windows users, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at eweek.com ...
It's not really surprising that the same class of people who support Netscape against Microsoft also support Apple against Microsoft. After all, was there really that much difference between starting a company with "liberated" code paid for by someone else, and starting a company with money "earned" by selling telephone "blueboxes" that "liberated" telephone services paid for by others?
And the flip side of that foul record is the legacy of hatred for Mr. Gates, which has its roots in his dismay at having his code "liberated", when he sold a small handful of copies of his BASIC interpreter for the IMSAI S100, and discovered punchtapes proliferating like bedbugs at a Democrat Motel. The "free code" mavens of the day laughed at his loss, ridiculed his claim of ownership of what he created, and started the "F' Bill Gates" ball rolling, and vermin of their ilk continue rolling it to this day.
Kinda sad that they'd find it good enough to steal, but utterly unworthy of purchase. I'd suggest there's a mite of hypocrisy there too, but I'm not particularly interested in having the Loyal Subjects of the One-Eyed man come waving their axes in my general direction twice in a single night.
Well, hallelujah...finally someone from the practical side of the business community is heard from. There are more people trained in using MS Office than any other business software on the market, which provides a hugh resource to business in this country and led in no small part to the increases in productivity that fueled the 90's economic growth.
If it's time for you to come home, you're lowing in the wrong direction.
That makes for a good quote. Here's a somewhat similar example of what you describe: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman..."
The Corps. that make it big in the computer and high tech industries all try to recruit the stars away from other companies. Experience is a fast track to keeping up with the Jetsons. It's not stealing. It's called competition. Just ask the employees if they are stolen goods. They'll tell you that the company that they switched to had better benefits.
The government and lamestream media would like you to believe that it's stealing, but it's not. Their modus operani is, "when we want your opinion we'll give it to you." You give testament to that.
The case against MicroSoft was driven by their would-be and has been competition, and based on the Netscape vs IE browser issue.
Rather like the cops being bought off by Dennis Rodman and going after Shaq on charges of too many offensive tattoos.
Now those like me, who happened to have already been convinced that Shaq was a heroin dealer on the side (I don't really think that, Shaq ...please put me down ...) thought good, he was getting his come uppance, and well deserved it was.
But those who had found that Shaq was dispensing valuable medications found it outrageous beyond calm words that he should be charged (thanks to some corrupt coppers) and found guilty of crimes (tattoos) that the other guy was clearly more guilty of.
Never mind that the judge in the case actually determined that, right fully so, in my view, that Shaq was guilty of some other crime. By the time the case got that far, no one was seeing clearly enough to render a sensible opinion on the final verdict.
Thanks, _Jim. I've found a way to turn this into another reason to be outraged against the Clinton-Reno Department of Injustice.
On that point, I think we can depart in agreement and peace.
I need no further proof of my contention of software stagnation than that someone is still having to push "Alt-F3" in 2001!
In hunting, we call that a "sound shot", and it's frowned upon by all but the knuckle-walkers.
In your haste to score a kill, you just took a shot at WPCorp instead of MS.
Oops.
Um, yeah, sure, whatever. Thus Spracht ZaraCannibHissSativaThustra. Or something like that.
Or in the vernacular, Bwhahahahahahah, my sides, my achin' sides! Yer killin' me, etc.
Doesn't it hurt your mouth to have that kind of tripe pass through it?
96 MB is a pretty hefty download in my book, especially since Sun has their servers throttled back.
I've downloaded and installed it, and am generally unimpressed. Don't get me wrong; it's darn nice for free software but its chance of displacing Office as the standard productivity suite is exactly zero.
The first thing I did was open up its word processor and open a novel I'm working on, which is a .doc file started in Office '97, then worked on in Office 2000, and currently being worked on in Office XP. The transitions from each of those packages to the next was seamless (as they should be, of course) with no formatting problems, no problems reading custom styles I've created, etc. StarOffice failed on this first .doc I opened. Had a readable title page and then 332 pages of nice empty rectangles instead of a readable font. I noticed it opened it in a font called Thorndale, even though the bulk of it was created with Arial. Selected the entire document and set it to Arial. No joy. Same 332 pages of gibberish. That's hardly what I'd call workable compatibility with Office.
All are free to like or not like Microsoft for a variety of reasons, but let's be realistic: the battle for the productivity space has been fought and won. Office XP is one heck of a nice suite, and I don't mind the activation scheme at all because I bought my software and activation on each machine took all of about 5 seconds.
I had downloaded and played with the earlier versions of StarOffice, both in Linux and Windows, and was far from being blown away. I found them clunky, awkward, and short in the area of compatibility. But I assure you I downloaded 6.0 with a totally open mind. I like the idea of a great big full-featured package for free because there are machines that I don't want to spend money on Office XP for. And as mentioned above, StarOffice is fine and dandy for a free package, but it just doesn't hold a candle to Office.
While we're on the topic of free software, let me mention a couple of handy and totally free utilities I've picked up recently:
CleverKeys -- If you're like me and regularly run across words that you're not familiar with, you'll like this one. In any application, be it a web browser or a word processing app, highlight the world and do a CTRL-L, and up pops a window with the word looked up in dictionary.com for you. If you prefer you can set it to default to thesaurus.com instead.
Atomica -- Very similar to CleverKeys, except Atomica provides more detailed searches and retrievals than simple definitions.
MM
Software doesn't kill computers. (L)users do. Like the gun thing, you know?
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