OpenOffice Wayne S. Rossi Mike Toresco for Open Source Development

Overview ● OpenOffice's purpose ● The Details – Creation – Licensing – Projects ● Advantages and Disadvantages ● Conclusions

Why OpenOffice? ● The OpenOffice mission statement: – To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. ● In other words, make an open source project into the leading office suite program.

The Great Showdown?

–FIGHT!

Where OpenOffice Came From ● StarOffice was developed by StarDivision in Germany during the 1980s ● In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision. StarOffice 5.2 was released in June 2000 – StarOffice was distributed in a pay version and a (proprietary) free version.

Going Open Source ● In 2000, Sun open sourced the StarOffice code under dual licenses: – GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) – Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) ● In 2002, OpenOffice.org goes online.

What they're doing now ● Accepted Projects – Includes API, DBA, GSL, XML, various applications, underlying framework, and documentation. ● Native/Lang Projects – Includes Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai language support for OpenOffice. ● Incubator/Whiteboard Projects – Community-sponsored or experimental projects.

So Why Use It, Anyway? ● This presentation was made using Impress in OpenOffice v ● OpenOffice can generate fully Microsoft Office compatible files. – Word Documents (Writer) – Excel Spreadsheets (Calc) – PowerPoint presentations (Impress)

Slices, dices, and makes julienne fries! ● OpenOffice is designed to look and feel similar to Microsoft Office. ● It's probably out for your operating system. – If you're running Windows, Linux, Solaris, LinuxPPC, FreeBSD, or Mac OS X (still in beta), you can download OpenOffice v

And, since it's open source... ● OpenOffice can be downloaded completely free. – StarOffice v. 6.0 can be bought for $79 and comes with CDs and documentation. – Microsoft Office XP Professional costs $579 and can only be installed on one computer.

Is there anything it can't do? ● No parallel for Microsoft Access – But open source solutions for databases still exist. ● Cannot use some templates and macros. – The overwhelming majority of users are completely unaffected by this.

So, who needs it? ● Most people who use MS Office don't take advantage of enough features to justify its costs. – It's like driving your M1-A1 Abrams tank to work.

Who should consider the switch? ● Individuals who don't need the database, macros, and templates that MS Office has. – (Or just don't need them worth $479) ● Businesses who can't afford or don't need MS Office Professional. – (At $579 per computer, that is fairly substantial.)

Conclusions ● 720,000 people have downloaded OpenOffice. ● It has the desired compatibility with MS Office. ● For most users, OpenOffice is a better choice.

Got Questions? –?–?

We do. ● What company open-sourced the office suite for OpenOffice? ● Name three popular MS Office programs whose function OpenOffice duplicates.