Could an open source package genuinely be good enough to challenge
Microsoft Office?
One of the recurrent themes of this column has been the rise of
open source software. After all, it is in many ways one of the most
characteristic products of the Internet, and its unique global
collaborative approach would be unthinkable without such an open
network.
As I noted a few months ago, open source companies may be taking
something of a battering along with all the other dotcoms, but open
source itself continues to flourish. By its very nature, open
source is largely immune to the economic ups and downs of the
proprietary software companies, since its coders work for love and
glory rather than salaries and share options.
A good example of an area where open source is making important
progress is the Open Office project (
www.openoffice.org/).
As a useful
background
document explains, this began life as the closed source
program Star Office, which Sun bought in summer 1999 and released
as open source in October 2000. There is a
birthday
page celebrating one year of existence as open source,
which offers a good
summary
of how things have gone and what has been
achieved since then.
Among the
white
papers there is a good introduction to the
project as well as a useful
technical overview and a
roadmap.
The latest binaries and source code are
available for three platforms (Windows, Solaris,
GNU/Linux). Those who are chary about downloading cutting-edge
software might prefer to go instead for the official beta version
of
Sun's Star Office 6.0, which is based completely on Open
Office code.
Sun also offers a variety of background documents from its Star
Office 6.0
home page, including more about individual components
such as the
word processor,
spreadsheet,
presentation and
drawing software.
As the
What's New page indicates, one of the key advances of
Star Office 6.0 is its move to open XML-based file formats. This
will be a real boon for companies faced with managing myriad
incompatible proprietary formats for older data. But, equally
importantly, Star Office is designed to open most of the latter
with near-perfect fidelity.
This is a crucial issue: for no matter how good Star Office is, or
how cheap it is (Open Office will be free, while Star Office 6.0 is
likely to be very cheap), if it does not provide a means for users
to access their existing Microsoft Office files it will fail to
make any serious inroads into the corporate market. My own rough
testing suggests that Star Office copes well; a more detailed
review of its
capabilities.
Star Office 6.0 is one of the most exciting programs I have used in
a long time. Even though it is cheap, it is extremely powerful, and
is largely backwards-compatible. Companies would do well to start
exploring in detail whether its capabilities are good enough yet to
allow it to replace copies of Microsoft Office when the final
version appears next year.
As well as allowing significant sums to be saved at a time when
Microsoft's corporate licensing is becoming increasingly
aggressive, there is also the significant advantage of being able
to customise the Open Office version to meet specialised
needs.
In the new year: Eclipse