StarOffice Dropped From Google Pack 135
Barence writes "Sun's StarOffice suite has been mysteriously dropped from the Google Pack of free software. The office suite has been axed without any warning or explanation on the Google site. Is Google trying to drive more people towards its own online suite of office applications? Or has it been stung into action by Steve Ballmer's recent comment that Microsoft Office faces stronger competition from StarOffice than it does Google Docs and Spreadsheet?"
If there's one thing I wouldn't do... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If there's one thing I wouldn't do... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think it makes more sense, to keep it, and dropping only after we started negotiations to show willingness to cooperate and earn negotiation points.
Re:If there's one thing I wouldn't do... (Score:4, Funny)
In which case, you're obviously not an office furniture supplier.
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Or a wall repairman.
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Chair to the face > Microsoft embracing, extending and extinguishing to the rectum
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When Ballmer talks... people *duck*.
Why not OpenOffice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Support (Score:4, Insightful)
When an enterprise deploys office software they want at least some kind of support from the vendor.
Re:Support (Score:5, Insightful)
What support?
Really, what support from the vendor? Have you /read/ your EULA for any software you've used? Ever?
YOYO.
You're On Your Own.
Every EULA should have "YOYO" printed at the top of the first page (typically of dozens) or just say "You're On Your Own" in 28 point type in the middle of a blank page. It would greatly simplify things.
That support myth is so old. I don't know which myth is older, that one or the "someone to sue" myth.
Seriously, stop repeating this bullshit.
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I didn't say I agreed with it, but like it or not that's the mentality of most CIO's. Hopefully as the crusty old bastards retire and die off the mentality will change.
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Sun will provide paid support for both staroffice and openoffice, other third parties will also provide paid support for openoffice, often as part of a larger bundle of software such as a linux distribution...
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Agreed. Most EULAs are pretty much this: a notice that states whether or not redistribution is allowed (usually it is not), a notice that states how many computers you can install it on, a notice that says not to reverse engineer it, and a complete disclaimer of all warranty and sometimes even a covenant not to sue.
You can, of course, usually purchase additional support, sometimes even warranty coverage.
How does this differ from free/open source software? Not at all. One can purchase support for any majo
Re:Support (Score:4, Informative)
Really, what support from the vendor? Have you /read/ your EULA for any software you've used? Ever?
I know it's popular on Slashdot to claim that vendor support doesn't exist, but if you work for a large customer of a particular vendor and ask intelligent questions of the right person working for that vendor, you will generally get good support.
In most situations, it doesn't make economic sense for everyone to have someone on staff who knows the ins and outs of every product they work with as well as a dedicated support person at the vendor does. I tend to get into the nuts and bolts of what I support a lot more than most people would, but there's only so much time in the day, and I support a *lot* of different software for my employer.
My experience has been that - while there are some vendors who have terrible support overall - generally it's just the first tier that's like that, to act as a buffer because most people who call their vendor's support line are not highly technical and only need basic support (IE something they could have learned from the manual). If you are willing to do the necessary investigation beforehand and put together a package of information (network captures, etc.) you will usually get good results.
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Is this very different from open source though? You can generally get good support from a mailing list if you ask the right questions. You could also buy some support at the developer's company or another OSS support firm.
The major difference is that for all the companies without enough clout to get something done at their software suppliers, support is generally nil, where anyone can ask questions on a mailing list or buy decent support.
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Is this very different from open source though? You can generally get good support from a mailing list if you ask the right questions. You could also buy some support at the developer's company or another OSS support firm.
The major difference is that for all the companies without enough clout to get something done at their software suppliers, support is generally nil, where anyone can ask questions on a mailing list or buy decent support.
On a mailing list you might not get a response back, or the response might not work and then they say sorry, can't help you. With a support contract, there's a method of escalation.
I'm not saying that it works all the time, but it can sometimes help.
In addition to the escalation process, there is frequently an NDA in place so that you can send support confidential information.
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On a mailing list you might not get a response back, or the response might not work and then they say sorry, can't help you. With a support contract, there's a method of escalation.
I'm not saying that it works all the time, but it can sometimes help.
Sounds to me like you're saying that they're both as uncertain as each other - but I can pay for one? Wow, I'm sold.
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On a mailing list you might not get a response back, or the response might not work and then they say sorry, can't help you. With a support contract, there's a method of escalation. I'm not saying that it works all the time, but it can sometimes help.
Sounds to me like you're saying that they're both as uncertain as each other - but I can pay for one? Wow, I'm sold.
I guess issue escalation processes and NDAs aren't worth anything to you.
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Don't forget that most of the people here are kids and computer hobby people, and have never worked in any sort of an enterprise situation. Therefore, they have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about.
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This sounds like a good plan! Have it implemented ASAP!
Some people actually do this thing called "work." They don't have time to waste on a low level idiot who doesn't know anything.
Nor do they have time to waste on NDAs when they are not needed. It pays to be paranoid, but being too paranoid wastes time and money.
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"Is this very different from open source though? You can generally get good support from a mailing list if you ask the right questions. You could also buy some support at the developer's company or another OSS support firm."
Besides help with using the software, usually enterprise support would include rapid patches for bugs, and custom feature requests. Those are not available on mailing lists.
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Yes, that's brilliant. Just tell the company president that your plan to ensure support for the company's office suite software is to fire off emails to the internet whenever there is a problem.
Regardless of how well forums or mail lists work, its not very sellable to senior management.
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1) There's an email address or telephone number where you make your request for support.
2) Someone will answer that within 3, or sometimes 7, working days to indicate they've received your request for support.
What more do you want?
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The EULA is the legal responsibility to not support the product. Then you have the real reason to support the product. The fact that you paid for the current version and if they do not properly support the software chances are they will not purchase the next version. Hence future money in their pocket. Even the Mighty Microsoft needs to keep good relations with their customers. Even though they may have a monopoly on Office tools and OS's it is not a strong one. OpenOffice google docs, etc... May be go
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i dunno, was sun offering support for staroffice as part of the google pack?
is it impossible to get support for openoffice.org?
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"When an enterprise deploys office software they want at least some kind of support from the vendor."
But... this is a package of free as in beer home-use applications never intended, at least in its most common form, for corporate use. The real answer is that the added clip-art and other miscellaneous minor differences between StarOffice and its OpenOffice base are well worth including if you're getting them for free. If not, it makes more sense to stick with OpenOffice. This is more likely to be an interim
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Re:Why not OpenOffice? (Score:5, Informative)
StarOffice has some proprietary parts that couldn't be put into OpenOffice. In particular, Sun Microsystems licensed information about the format of Office files from Microsoft, to gain better compatibility.
Re:Why not OpenOffice? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In particular, Sun Microsystems licensed information about the format of Office files from Microsoft, to gain better compatibility."
[citation needed]
Re:Why not OpenOffice? (Score:5, Funny)
[citation needed]
Anonymous Coward. "Re:Why not OpenOffice?" Weblog comment. 10 November 2008. "StarOffice Dropped From Google Pack." Timothy Lord. Slashdot. 10 November 2008 (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1023681&cid=25702165).
Hope that helps~
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I love Wikiality.
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Last I checked, MS Office support in StarOffice was just as good/bad as it is in OpenOffice 2.0. I seriously doubt Microsoft would give anyone information about the MS Office formats -- this isn't exactly the days where WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 rule the earth anymore.
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Mostly I find it's pretty good. But what really made me read this far was to find out if anyone actually still uses StarOffice, since the open form has been made available...
You're confusing Office Suites. (Score:2)
In particular, Sun Microsystems licensed information about the format of Office files from Microsoft, to gain better compatibility.
No. Both Open- and Star- Office use their own MS-Office readers. (I was under the impression that some of the work on wvWare [sourceforge.net] has helped developing OOo's but I'm not sure. I might be confusing with antiword [demon.nl]). Nothing licensed from Microsoft.
3rd party non-OSS code was used to provide a reader for WordPerfect's Office suite.
StarOffice uses a 3rd party closed source reader.
Whereas OOo has more recently incorporated the function thank to a separate opensource project (libwpd [sourceforge.net] if my memory still works).
Given the f
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Star Office is built from Open Office but because it is a paid for product you get support from Sun and small set of features that can't be done with free software do to patents or something like that.
Once again (Score:1)
Didn't Balmer just recently claim that Android is nothing to worry about? I have the feeling Balmer likes Google. I wonder what search engine he uses by the way.
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I see Balmer as a living on the edge kind of guy.
Obviously Baidu [baidu.com] is the natural choice for him.
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I have a feeling that everybody just ignores anything ballmer has to say, except of course if your work at M$. Star Office and Open Office are both ultimately competitors for google's privacy invasive cloud vision, it is hardly surprising that they would make changes to what they offer in an effort to push users to the cloud products. They are even going with the fear marketing model, oh no, the hackers will destroy your data, your hardware will fail, poorly configured, maintained and updated systems will
Is that a problem? (Score:1)
It's obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Making a profit for shareholders
Including StarOffice does nothing to that end.
Honestly why is anyone surprised when Google acts like a real company?
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Because they seldom do. Most of their services and applications are for free. Plus, if you are a heavy user of adblocker, you don't see their adds either. So its easy to forget that they aren't a non-for profit at times.
staroffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
was google PAYING sun for (the commercially licensed) staroffice? perhaps this is just the first step in replacing staroffice with (the free) openoffice to eliminate that (unnecessary) expense.
note that staroffice 8 is also over three years old (derived from openoffice 2.0), compared to openoffice 3, which was recently released... google could simply be moving to openoffice to stay more current with the software.
but i wouldn't put it past 'em to be removing it completely in order to drive users to their (less capable) web applications; as the article suggests. if they do not actually replace staroffice with another offline equivalent (e.g. openoffice), though, there may be some user backlash.
Re:staroffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Some user backlash (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya, for about 5 minutes. The attention span of a typical user today is a 30 minute sitcom.
Give it a couple of weeks and people will forget it was even an option.
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I wonder how many people downloaded it. I never bothered because Open Office is cross-platform and I want the same software under Linux and Windows. If nobody wanted it, why carry it?
Well, the important thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
is that we begin right away with the baseless speculation about which of many conspiracies is responsible for this omission. God forbid someone email someone at Google, or wait until they make a blog post or something.
Re:Well, the important thing... (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we at Google like reading your nutty conspiracy theories. Don't stop on our behalf.
-- Eric Schmidt
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Please don't use "finger" and "GNAA" in the same sentence.
At least you didn't reference goatse...
Doesn't make sense (Score:3, Insightful)
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Seems fairly obvious... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe Google are removing a competitor to their own office applications because... they are a competitor to their own office applications.
In order for Google to make any kind of inroads into Microsoft's customer base, they have to convince people that online apps are just as viable as their offline counterparts. So providing an offline office suite in the Google Pack - ostensibly to keep the doubters happy - might be considered by some to be an admission that Google Docs won't do the job.
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Does Google Documents include support for user-defines templates yet? Without them, I don't consider them to be in competition with offline office apps. I don't want to have to set up my letterhead and so on every time I type a letter.
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Is Google trying to drive more people towards its own online suite of office applications?
Or
has it been stung into action by Steve Ballmer's recent comment that Microsoft Office faces stronger competition from StarOffice than it does Google Docs and Spreadsheet?"
I'd suggest that it was an _AND_ instead. _AND_ what you said too. The overlap of the 3 is pretty complete.
What Google should do (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google should develop a really good plugin for OpenOffice.org that makes it a client for Google Docs. It should handle uploading, downloading, synchronizing, merging conflicts, etc. [...]
This is a really good idea. I'd be satisfied if it only supported upload/download (that is, Google Docs becomes another place for OpenOffice.org to save docs.) This might make it easier for people to migrate to Google Docs if we didn't have to upload everything before using Docs.
Why not axe Norton first? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Let me guess, the last time you tried Norton was when? 2004? 2005?
I'd much prefer NIS 2009 to the current corporate McAfee bloatware.
Try NIS 2008 - then 2009... 2008 was lightweight, 2009 is a featherweight as far as system resources go.
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IIRC, Norton Security Scan isnt a bloaty realtime scanner. Its like ClamAV or Microsoft's Malicious software remover tool. It has definitions of malware and can do a full scan when the user gets suspicious. Its probably a good idea to keep it in the pack, considering the infection level of your average PC. I wonder how many computers have been saved simply be running this or the MSRT.
Google also has a pretty big incentive to bundle AV scanners. A significant number of issues with its software can be trace
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I am wondering why they are having anything to do with Norton who makes the most bloated, resource wasting, performance sucking, software on the planet.
Yeah, bypass the middleman. Vista comes pre-bloated, pre-resource wasting, pre-sucking... etc.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Does anyone remember when the Norton Utilities were the most useful pieces of software you could buy? SecMod, DirSort, all those things? They were the SysInternals of their day.
Does anyone remember the last time Norton software was something
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I wonder how long Peter Norton was actually involved with writing the tools. I wonder the ending of his involvement was when it went from a suite of extremely useful utilities to a lumbering behemoth that served little purpose other than to make XP less usable than Vista.
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Google Apps (Score:1, Offtopic)
When I'm away from my own computer, I rarely, if ever, type anything in whatever's installed on the computer I'm on. It's almost always a quick log in to Google Docs.
I like online software. I like it a lot.
Phone data plan? (Score:2)
I like online software. I like it a lot.
Enough to pay $$$ for a mobile phone data plan that allows laptop tethering?
OOO 3.0?? (Score:1)
How were they giving it away in the first place? (Score:4, Insightful)
How were they giving it away in the first place? If you go to Sun's website and try to download Star Office normally, it's $70. So how was Google able to give it away for free, and why isn't "sun wanted cash" a possible explanation for Google dropping the product?
Re:How were they giving it away in the first place (Score:4, Funny)
How were they giving it away in the first place? If you go to Sun's website and try to download Star Office normally, it's $70. So how was Google able to give it away for free, and why isn't "sun wanted cash" a possible explanation for Google dropping the product?
Don't bring logic into this, that way leads only to madness.
Re:How were they giving it away in the first place (Score:1)
It's because they also included Java in the Google Pack.
See here: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/sun_toolbar.html [google.com]
"Under the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com./ [java.com.] In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org./ [www.openoffice.org]"
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To add to that, if you are a 'student or work in Education' you can also download it from free here: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/solutions/staroffice.html#StarOffice [sun.com]
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In addition, if you Google around a bit or know where to look [blogspot.com], you can find the URL to download Google StarOffice directly [google.com] without having to download the Google Pack/install Google Updater.
The setup file is still downloadable at that location, BTW, despite the fact that it is not mentioned on the Google Pack page any longer nor does Google Updater recognize it as a Google Pack app. So if you STILL want it...
-- Nathan
Duh? (Score:2)
>Google trying to drive more people towards its own online suite of office applications?
Google apps are pretty damn good now. I use them all the time. I'll take "can access it from anywhere without installing any software" over hardcore features any day of the week.
They also have built in collaboration. Star Office is kind of redundant. Then again I'm just a "normal" person with regard to Office products. As a software engineer, my requirements for an office product set the bar pretty low.
An accountant,
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I don't know, online stuff is good and all, but I've been in enough situations without access to the Internet (or any other network) to where I still see value in local applications.
But not only that. How many times have a big internet company lost logins and passwords and personal data? And while Google Docs is good, I like having my full featured suite available, whether it be Open Office or Star, or Microsoft, or whatever.
No surprise (Score:2)
Expect Google Pack to have Chrome and desktop hotlinks to launch Chromeified desktop versions of Google Apps.
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Yes, I think you are right on the money. It's no surprise at all that Google would drop a package that is a competitor to their own, getting-close-to-very-useable, online apps.
Google Docs (Score:1)
News for Nerds? (Score:2)
Could we change the title of the site to "FUD for Nerds?"
You're freaking slashdot. Pick up the freaking phone and call google and ask them. A whole bunch of nerds would like to know; get us a damn answer.
Of course Star Offie is more competition (Score:2)
Well of course MS is facing stronger competition from StarOffice. After all it is a full featured office package. Google Docs and Spreadsheet are neat, but nothing beats having all the features an office suite provides.
Microsoft Signs MSN Toolbar Deal With Sun (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft Signs MSN Toolbar Deal With Sun [pcworld.com]
Google caught wind of a Microsoft/Sun deal.
It's still downloadable from Google... (Score:3, Informative)
...as I point out here [slashdot.org].
-- Nathan
Sun's deal with MS probably prompted this (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like they accept paid inclusions (Score:2)
Conclusion: Sun stopped paying.
Other obvious paid inclusions are the Norton and Realplayer malware.
The word processors. (Score:3, Interesting)
I used Microsoft Word, 7 years ago. It was much more powerful then than Open Office is now. Google Docs is hopeless; it can't even read a sophisticated .doc file correctly.
Word can do things like a color gradient side border with rotated text that are hideously difficult or impossible with other editors.
I'm trying to make a sharp-looking resume. I am continually frustrated in my efforts by Open Office. I can't put text where I want it, I can't put horizontal lines where I want them, I can't get font sizes to print as they look on the screen (or to print or display the same size as Word prints and displays the same TrueType font.) I'm going to have to buy the Microsoft product to get the results I want, and that displeases me. Some employers require resumes in Word format, and the Open Office .doc format output doesn't always work.
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Modern industry is held together by custom scripts.
I use a text editor, sc and awk; YMMV. Most people seem to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office which discounts your theory entirely.
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Used Firefox or Thunderbird recently?
Re:It's because staroffice is slow and a resource (Score:5, Informative)
What do you think OpenOffice is written in ?? BASIC ? Perl ? Intercal ?
(Hint : it uses this esoteric language that has a name that starts with C and ends with ++)
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Java?
Not especially. You can write extensions in a number of languages. Java is used in a few peripheral tools such as the database glue layers. The core stuff is C++.