why.openoffice.org — It's not just people who steal software who have to worry - when you buy a Microsoft product, you're buying a lifetime of fear of audit and legal persecution. So says the new recruitment campaign by OpenOffice.org, "Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org", launched today. Will it work?
May 3, 2006 View in Crawl 4
orbitalleaderMay 3, 2006
They do. Wordpad opens Word documents. And let's face it -- most PC vendors give away Word now as well.
m00nmasterMay 3, 2006
What I'm saying is versions don't really matter anymore; it's features and compatibility and availability.
mistshadow2k4May 3, 2006
A lot of people are saying OOo sucks in comparison to MS Office. As someone who has both, I say you guys are wrong when it comes to Word vs. swriter. You like Word's cluttered interface better? I prefer swriter's interface -- a neat stack of two rows of buttons, well-organized and efficient. MS Office is just plain better? If you like your word processor getting hung on sample functions like closing a document and pasting text, as well as crashing for no reason whatsoever, then I guess it is better. Cut and polish? In what way? Word looks an awful lot like any other word processor to me -- menus are much the same, etc. The icons on swriter may not be as fancy as those on Word, but that is a *very* small price to pay for more stability.I almost never use Word anymore because I can use swriter instead. After a couple of years of Word's constant screw-ups swriter was a blessing.No more lock-ups on simple functions and no more crashing out of the blue when I'm in the middle of typing a sentence. Other features that Word has swriter doesn't? Yeah, like automatically converting your document to a .pdf. No, wait that's a feature swriter has that Word doesn't. Hmmm, all those annoying macros that you can't uninstall and if you disable them, Word prompts you about each and every one of them every single time you start Word? Oh, right, who could live without that? And then there's product activation. Why bother with software that is constantly checking to see if you're a criminal? Would you shop at Wal-Mart if they strip-searched you every time you entered the store, at random intervals while you're shopping and before you left? That's basically how MS is treating all of their customers these days, and people are putting up with it. "Oh, but people pirate their stuff so much!" So what? Whenever a murder occurs in L.A, should the police treat every single person in L.A. as a suspect? Imagine how well it would go over if they did!
digitaldudMay 4, 2006
Sure you do. If OpenOffice is sued over patent infringement for example, you have no legal protection from the creators unlike with the Microsoft product. OpenOffice probably infringes many patents especially since it's basically a clone.
mfedykMay 5, 2006
pdf doesn't cut it most times because they want to put their own headers on the document, so you have to send it in an editable format which is .doc for them. Please don't talk about RTF and OOo, the RTF filter will strip out any parts that it doesn't support like tables and images.
mfedykMay 5, 2006
And yet, MS Office is "free" to so many people. That is one of the reasons for this article and marketing for OpenOffice.org. A lot of people have friends that give them a copy of MS Office that they got one way or another.
kblsnbitsMay 6, 2006
I'll seriously think about OpenOffice when there is something equal or better to Access. So far, nothing produced by the OSS community can touch it.
dark_iceNov 26, 2006
Actually yes :P I blame... the evil powers of the universe... thingy