New OpenOffice.org-Based Office Suite

Voidhobo writes: "SOT, a Linux-distributor from the home-country of Linux, is offering SOT Office, a free productivity suite partly based on OpenOffice, for Linux and Windows. According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice." OpenOffice is great, so I hope their claims have merit.

Check the screenshots

[Morthaur]

The screenshots show an application that's identical to OpenOffice, save only the name, and the colours used in the instaler. Makes you wonder, what's the point?!

Why does this even merit a /. story; it's just a niche-market re-branding of a free software product. Stick to OpenOffice, it already rocks.

Re:WordPerfect

[mstyne]

It would seem that it doesn't handle .wpd. However, it looks like you can open Microsoft Word files going back as far as Office 95. It also handles Star Office's Star Writer format. I'm going to look into both this and the original Open Office, as my Star Office 6.0 Beta is slated to expire in June.

Re:Too much competition

[eugene ts wong]

What the Linux community really needs is a single office suite standard, eliminating the compatibility issues.

I agree. I think that the standards that they need to agree on are file formats, and the desire to reuse as much code as possible.

Other than that, I'd encourage them to make as many skins and interfaces as possible. I believe that it's good to have variation so that people can customize according to their needs. For example, I have a 386 with 8MB of RAM and an approx. 540MB harddrive. I'd love to install a Linux desktop on it, but it's not going to be easy! :^) If there were a trimmed down version to meet my needs, then that would be great. A featureful, non-trimmed down version would really help those with lots of hardware.

Other variations may include plugins, so that documents can be browsed on the web, and we can finally get rid of pdf files.

Any thoughts and comments?

Re:Too much competition

[Anonymous Coward]

It's impossible. I have yet to see ONE office suite that didn't produce "erroneous" Word-documents for the simplest of examples. The freeware 602 PRO PC SUITE is probably the best among them, but it too fails to capture all the quirks. However, when it comes to reproducing all the bugs MS has introduced in their formats, that is next to impossible to accomplish without either specs or sourcecode.

To say that MS is backwards compatible is hypocritical to say the least. I know you didn't say it, but the grand-parent post implied it.

If the DOJ-case is to have any merit at all, MS should be forced to open up all their specs on their formats. Down to the nitty gritty details + all the flaws that are necessary to reproduce so-called "bug-free" Word documents (there really ain't no such thang baby!). That would allow REAL competition.

Word would be great if it weren't for all those quirks and bugs though. I've seen so-called Word-experts struggle for hours to do simple things correctly in Word.

Target: Finnish Goverment

[villoks]

Well,

As far as I know, their primary target is the Finnish audience. They have added features like Finnish spelling and the package has also Finnish menus etc.

This actually makes sense, many Finnish government agencis are currently considering switching to linux and the Finnish office software is something which is really requited. The Finnish Custon uses already Open Office btw.

Ville

Every worker his own suite!

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

I disagree. We have two standards for storing office-like information: the current, MS-office doc, xls and ppt, and more importantly, the upcoming, most likely an XML-variant. As long as all these office-suites comply to both the current and the upcoming standard, the only reason not to want so much different suites is fragmentation of the sparse resource of open sources programmers, because to make a good open source office suite, you need a whole lot of voluntary programming hours.

Re:OS X Port

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to help...they've prioritized the OS X version so far down, it's a fight just to get them to respond to e-mails. When it looked like anything worth compiling was 24 months out, I figured my time was best spent elsewhere.

No UTF-8

[bertilow]

I tried out SOT and to my amazement it had no support for UTF-8, only for UTF-7 and UTF-16 (at least it claimed support for those two). This seems ridiculous. UTF-8 is the most important form of Unicode. Any app that supports Unicode really must do UTF-8 first of all.

Is this a problem in OpenOffice generally? Or is is something peculiar to SOT?

Re:Annual Maintenance

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the analysis of the source tarball on the Open Office mailing lists, you'll see that it appears that SOT Office is really OpenOffice build 641c with virtually no changes.

Interestingly, they have a first BOHF's available for download, but only apparently in binary form.

Where's the source for the updates? I thought if you distributed changes to a GPL'd program that you had to make the source of those changes available (but of course you are allowed to charge for those).

Re:Real time review...

[gnugnugnu]

Abiword, Dia, and many KDE applications use gzip compression but openoffice/staroffice use zip compression.

This document explains the

rationale [openoffice.org] behind the ZIP-based package format. The decision was made after an elaborate discussion on the XML dev mailing list, whose archive can be consulted for additional detail.

I feel strongly that files should not be compressed by default to avoid confusion.
Zip does at least allow variable/partial compresion so if they cared to there could be a text comment explaining that it is in fact zip compressed XML and still compress the rest of the document.

i can put up a mirror...

[gimpboy]

if someone can send me the files. email me if you have the binaries, and i'll put up a mirror to relieve the load on their ftp servers.