The reason we still need staroffice is because openoffice still needs backing and innovation. A weblog editor is good. I'd like to see more cloud integration. Maybe wikis?

Some commercial entities, especially large corporations, distrust open source to the extent they define formal policies favoring commercial offerings "when available". StarOffice fills that requirement at a reasonable cost while financially rewarding Sun for their generous code donation to the community.

Smaller and more enlightened businesses will take OOo in a heartbeat, and pocket the savings.

Truly enlightened businesses, of course, contribute patches. :-)

StarOffice comes with a lot of extras; clip art, templates, etc.

A lot of people don't want to be on the bleeding edge. StarOffice is always a bit older than OpenOffice, but it is also more tested and stable, and you can be sure the same version of StarOffice on different platforms are consistent.

I'll put OpenOffice on my personal linux laptop for experiments and playing with new features, but I keep StarOffice on all the work systems I have; Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

If the entire reason for staroffice's existence is corporations that don't trust opensource, or need to have a support contract, why can't Sun just support openoffice. As in download it here, but if you want to call us about it, pay a support contract fee. Basically I don't understand the reasoning why anyone thinks the re-branding is necessary.

Well, if Sun still bothers to release StarOffice, then there must be some sort of service contract or agreement still generating revenue. Sometimes running a business defies logic...

I don't think its a big problem for Sun to do this Star Office birthed OpenOffice.org and Sun still employs developers to work on the project - and with what i've seen i don't think a service contract will work for this kind of product. I've seen and done thousands of deployments of OpenOffice.org in schools business etc, but apart from the initial learning curve - of which in-house training quickly takes care of - they have never request service contracts of any sort, and guess what, you'll probably never see a single patch from them either.

Sun needs to pay its developers - Star Office is not the best way of ensuring that but its one way

StarOffice exist so customers can have a support contract with SUN. It's not bad as it may sound. Sometimes you have a lot of users and can't tell them "Wait 'till I google for a solution...".

There are IP considerations with OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.

Sun owns the copyright on OpenOffice.org (and requires a contributor agreement for anything of significanc) for a reason. It's because they've had a cross-license with Microsoft for the past five (5) years, and many aspects improved document compatibility in the OpenOffice.org base has been a result of that access.

I mean, people wonder why MS Office compatibility got "so much better" with OpenOffice.org 2.0+. It was that cross-licensing agreement. Other people (wholly ignorant of this history) have been demonizing Novell, and claiming they are "poisoning" OpenOffice.org by contributing on it with an agreement with Microsoft. Ummm, what's so "different" about Sun's?

This is a reality of and in business. Although end-users rarely run into this stuff, it is a consideration for any business. The indemnification details are things they care about, not just against Microsoft, but for anyone who would claim IP issues with the product. Sun owning the copyright and having its various agreements are not necessarily a "bad thing," even if they are not completely "clean room."

Just a consideration people often forget about. I've been paying for StarOffice 3.0 since the mid-'90s, and every version since. You can install it on up to five (5) systems you own as well with a single, personal license -- even work systems.

Thursday 13 November 2008

SO has differed from OOo through inclusion of commercial products and additional database support as well as the templates. In particular that has meant the addition of the Mastersoft import filters for the Windows version and commercial spell tools (CorrectSpell up to SO7 and Franklin with SO8).

The SO9 beta did not include either the Mastersoft filters or the commercial dictionaries. We will wait and see what happens with the actual release. The filters are used for older file formats. The improvements with HunSpell spelling engine may make use of the commercial products unncessary.

I could not download a trial version of star Office 9