On 19 Mar 2001, Philip Hands wrote:

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StarOffice will import and export MS Office files. You can also give StarOffice to students and staff to use at home. Sorry to be pedantic about this but, StarOffice is not Open Source Software. Given that OSIE is about promoting Open Source/Free Software, I don't think we should really be encouraging people to use software that doesn't actually qualify? OK, so there is supposed to be Open Office in the wings, about to take over from Star Office, so people will argue that StarOfiice, and similarly Netscape, are almost free enough, and are about to be replaced by things that do qualify, so we shouldn't worry about it.

A large proportion of StarOffice is open source (in the form of OpenOffice). I am happy to assume that OpenOffice will soon reach the same state of usability as StarOffice, and think that in the meantime there is no harm in promoting StarOffice. If OpenOffice did not exist then it would be a different situation. As for Netscape: there are many open source alternatives that are of similar or better quality. I know for a fact that Mandrake have not upgraded to Netscape 6 and will be ditching Netscape 4 as soon as a couple of memory footprint issues are worked out of Mozilla - I presume other distributions are doing likewise.

Personally, I'd argue that neither Star Office, nor Netscape, are of a quality that one could be proud of,

I've never had any problems with StarOffice - it certainly isn't any worse than MS Office (which is the 'standard' against which it is going to be measured by most people). Netscape 4 is a horrible browser, but I am very impressed with Netscape6/Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine - what do you find wrong with it?

If there is not a viable Free Software alternative for something, then perhaps we should concentrate on promoting Free Software where it is ready, or perhaps on helping to ensure that the almost viable alternatives come to fruition.

Unfortunately, if you decide to "wait until it's ready" then you can end up waiting forever, because there is always something new being developed that will bring massive enhancements. KDE - supermount - KDE2 - CUPS - OpenOffice - Mozilla - SAP - XFS - the nature of the beast is that there will always be exciting projects still in a development phase. At some point you have to say "let's go with what we've got now" and accept that you will have to wait a few months for extra features 1, 2 and 3, because if you wait until features 1, 2 and 3 are released then you will find some new must-have features 4, 5 and 6 that will have just started development! The cycle never ends. Michael Brown Fen Systems Ltd.