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Re: Star Office (was: opensource in Israel)
On Tuesday 31 July 2001 14:33, you wrote:
> > It's entirely up to Sun. If they want it, they'll implement it. Of
> > course, anyone can do the work themselves and ask Sun to include it,
> > now that it's open source.
>
> Personally - if someone asks me - I would recommend to them that either to
> help AbiWord (are those guys going to come up with 1.0 version some day? I
> know abiword way back since 97-98) or help Koffice (which IMHO becomes
> something really stable these days - RC1 just came outt last week and I
> think next month the 1.1 final version will be out)
Last time that I checked, AbiWord only accepted small Word files, and KOffice
not at all. That was a couple of months ago, granted. It is my impression
that Star Office is the most compatible with Word (the least lost features),
and it reads doc files directly, rather than RTF. This would make it a good
platform in which to invest Hebrew development efforts, as we are aiming at
reading/writing Word documents here (including all those features your
average high-tech decision maker loves so much, such as drawings and tables).
As for the "Open Source or not" question regarding Star Office, it depends on
your point of view. If you are writing the code for the community, not for
yourself, the assignment of copyright shouldn't bother you so much so long as
Sun is committed to leaving the code open - which they state that they are.
If it's your own fame that counts, I guess the copyright issue is important.
And the fact that they quality-check the code is not much different than what
is done with the linux kernel, is it?
To put it another way, are we evangelizing for code which is trustworthy and
which you can fix yourself etc., or are we evangelizing against code
associated with mega-companies?
Herouth
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