Re: [school-discuss] FW: OpenOffice in education

[ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>]

On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 10:31, Michael Shigorin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 09:50:15PM +0000, ian wrote:
> > > > One of "extra features" in SO7 vs OOo 1.1 is QA.
> > In what way? The QA procedures in terms of software debuhgging
> > etc are common to both OO.o and SO7.
> 
> Obviously not, judging from ~year old experience with parallel
> releases on some specific hardware (video artefacts with OOo, all
> clear and somewhat faster with SO7).
> 
> > They are managed through the OO.o QA project and the guys could
> > do with more help if there is anyone with time.
> 
> Ian, you don't have to convince me :-) 

I'm not trying to, I'm genuinely curious because AFAIK. Apart from some
proprietary filters such as for WP, some clip art and templates, OO.o
1.1 and SO7 are identical code subject to the same QA procedures. It is
possible that releases have some different defaults eg I found some
problems with 3D rendering due to the OpenGL defaults that might or
might not have happened with different default settings.I'll ask and
find out as I would be interested to know if there are fundamental QA
differences. In fact OO.o 1.1.1 is being released and this probably
fixes bugs that will not be fixed in SO 7.0 

>  I've found myself using
> OpenOffice build 633 or like that, and use OOo 1.1.x now, and
> have served some considerable amount of OOo packages off our FTP
> server (we do some half a terabyte monthly these days, and the
> traffic is growing).
> 
> So it's not bashing but rather kudos to Sun folks who seem to
> have found what to use to convince customers (besides brand).
> They should earn something to cover the costs of running
> OpenOffice.org and having fulltimers working on the project.

Yes, Sun have done a good job and I hope they can make money out of SO
and OO.o (There is dialogue going on about these issues between Sun and
the OO.o community). Sun do of course save the cost of MS licenses
across their company and they do have the Java Linux desktop to sell to
the Chinese et al. They are also getting the free contributions from the
community in language localisation, marketing and development so its not
one way traffic.

-- 
ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>