Recommedations

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 10:46 2/18/2004, you wrote:
>StarOffice 7 is effectively OpenOffice 1.10 with a few bells on and paid
>for support. Use OpenOffice and the mailing lists, much cheaper :-)
>
>Plus you won't be giving money to a company who has bought a licence for
>something from another company currently trying to extort money with
>menaces from other companies with a claim they can't even prove!

I *like* StarOffice. And for the record, Sun forked the SO code they bought 
to give birth to OO. So regardless of which one you prefer, it is simply 
not true that SO is "OO with a few bells on". In fact I would more likely 
believe the reverse: OO is the community's progress in improving and 
growing the codebase Sun handed them.

As for the rest of your argument, it's vague enough that I'll ignore it. 
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Sun has several strong points in 
their favor AFAIAC. They are increasing their promotion of Linux. They are 
competing head-on against Microsoft in several areas, and I have seen SO 
take some contracts away from MS already. And as mentioned before, I see 
them as the only decent commercial competitor to MS in this field.

You don't like 'em, don't use 'em. But in this case, I refuse to have Sun 
made out as the big bad wolf. There wouldn't BE a OO without Sun's gift of 
the entire source code base.


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com