Background

On this page the project OpenOffice.org is further introduced.

History

OpenOffice.org has its roots in StarOffice, an office suite that since the middle of the eighties was developed in Germany, and the rights to which were purchased in 1999 by Sun Microsystems. Version 5.2 of StarOffice was released in june 2000, and version 6.0 is expected in may 2002. The extraordinary thing in the development of StarOffice 6.0 is that it is mainly taking place in the context of the open-source project OpenOffice.org. To make this possible, Sun opened up the sources of StarOffice openbaar gemaakt (except for a number of modules that had been developed by third parties, so these have remained outside of the project), and set up the project OpenOffice.org. This however does not mean that Sun just leaves the further development to volunteers: most of the work is still done by developers employed with Sun. ALso, Sun takes care of the operational costs of the project OpenOffice.org.

StarOffice and OpenOffice.org

Now we see that from the sources of OpenOffice.org there will be made two products: StarOffice 6.0, in which the non-open source parts have again been added, and its free brother OpenOffice.org, in which these already have been for the most part replaced by quite acceptabele open-source alternatives. Therefore, in many cases, OpenOffice.org can can hold it's own compared to StarOffice 6.x.

In practice there would be the following differences:

• StarOffice 6.0 is not free, although a licence will probably cost less than 100 €. OpenOffice.org is free.
• StarOffice 6.0 is more "complete" (certain fonts, a different (better?) spell checking for English, German, French and Spanish, thesaurus for same languages, Adabas D database, templates adn clipart, certain file filters). For spell checking OpenOffice.org has an alternative function, a thesaurus only for English.
• Sun offers for StarOffice official suppor aan (this is probably especially interesting to companies). With OpenOffice.org the users have to arrange this among eachother (see mailinglists elsewhere on these pages).
• There are no plans to release StarOffice 6.0 in Dutch {check this for your own language}. OpenOffice.org has localizations available for many languages, and spell check is also supported for many languages.

S.B.