[KLUG Members] StarOffice 6.0 at a BIG DISCOUNT?

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 08:57, Adam Williams wrote:
> No, I do not believe the Star Office for Linux package includes a 
> database.  But it might.

It does.  It has a semi-generic front-end that actually supports a
number of back-ends.  But the officially supported back-end is Adabas. 
Not sure about licensing on that (probably additional if its not used
single user).

> No, Open Office certainly does not.  Open Office and Star Office both 
> support ODBC so why would they provide one?  (Subtle pitch for next weeks 
> presentation).  They also support xBase natively and JDBC connectors.

Right.

> Star Office includes (and Open Office does not):
> 1. A decent spell check,  the one in OO is quasi-busted.

Whatever Gnome Bonobo ties into (ispell?) works great for me in AbiWord
and Evolution.

> 2. Full dictionaries,  including foriegn languages.  These cannot be 
> included in OO for copyright reasons.

Right.

> 3. Additional fonts that cannot be included in OO for copyright reasons.

Right.

> 4. Document templates that cannot be included in OO for copyright 
> reasons.*
> 5. The Sun JDK/JVM for obvious reasons.

Right.

> * The document templates can be copied into the OO install directory from 
> an SO52 installation and they work just fine.  Whether or not this is 
> "kosher" is an ethical dillema.  But nothing is to stop people from making 
> their own templates and providing them to the OO project for inclusion,  
> and this will certainly happen.

I too hope to see this happen.

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com