Salman Khilji wrote:
offerings also and decide on using those instead of Ms Office.
I'd like to add a comment regarding MS Office. There is no way that OpenOffice (or ANY other office product) is ever going to beat MS Office. Even if Open Office were to be better than MS Office some day, it still wouldn't.
Today, even if companies wanted to use OpenOffice or some alternative product, they will be forced to use MS Office. The reason being that the US goverment (or at least the DoD that I am aware of) requires on government subcontracts for all documentation to be delivered in MS Word format. It used to be WordPerfect a few years ago. Back in those days even if you wanted to use Word, you had to use WordPerfect because that is what you customer wanted.
If the customer (the government in this case) had been satisfied with Word Pefect for so long, then why switch to Word all of a sudden? What happened to all the investment that they had made in WordPefect? Clearly Bill Gates all upper management people in M$ have the power and contacts up there to influence such decisions. Who knows---they might have paid several individuals big $$$ to make the decision to switch to Word and dump WordPerfect.
So unless the OpenOffice community can come up with some magic like that, I am afraid, we'll have to live with the piece of crap for the rest of our lives (Have you ever tried to create a large document in Word with Graphics?) What we need is the government make a decision for all documentation to be delivered in "XXXXX Office for Linux". Untill that happens, all of us will be slaves to Bill Gates.
Salman
All you have to do, at least in Star Office 6 is to save you work in "Word" format - it does that. So, what would stop you from submitting something then? It is done simply because they are all running M$ Office and don't want to worry about incompibility - aka not being able to open the document and then getting someone's State Rep or Senator calling them up giving them a bad time ( Generals, Colonels, Majors, etc... hate dealing with politicians or the public for the matter). So, since all the government work stations are using M$ Office (and hence why all the things need to be in word/doc format) they mandate that so they can open the dumb thing. And for your info the presidents web sitie is running on Linux. Also, read Open Source is good for America - US military advised at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27822.html . To quote" "The report recommends the DoD create a "safe list" of approved products, encourage interoperability with commercial software, and promote it all round as A Good Thing. " And to read the official report, go to: http://www.egovos.org/pdf/dodfoss.pdf "The main conclusion of the analysis was that FOSS software plays a more critical role in the DoD than has generally been recognized. FOSS applications are most important in four broad areas: Infrastructure Support, Software Development, Security, and Research. One unexpected result was the degree to which Security depends on FOSS. Banning FOSS would remove certain types of infrastructure components (e.g., OpenBSD) that currently help support network security. It would also limit DoD access to--and overall expertise in--the use of powerful FOSS analysis and detection applications that hostile groups could use to help stage cyberattacks. Finally, it would remove the demonstrated ability of FOSS applications to be updated rapidly in response to new types of cyberattack. Taken together, these factors imply that banning FOSS would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and securityfocused DoD groups to defend against cyberattacks." Also: "...Create a "Generally Recognized As Safe" FOSS list. This list would provide quick official recognition of FOSS applications that are (a) commercially supported, (b) widely used, and (c) have proven track records of security and reliability--e.g., as measured by speed of closures of CERT reports in comparison to closed-source alternatives. Initial applications for consideration would include, but not be limited to, the set of 115 already used applications identified by the survey in Table 2, plus other widely used tools such as Python (http://www.python.org/) that did not appear in this first set of results. In formulating the list, quick consideration should be given in particular to high value, heavily used infrastructure and development tools such as Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Samba, Apache, Perl, GCC, GNAT, XFree86, OpenSSH, bind, and sendmail." And in the report it mentions 115 OSS programs, including Open Office. Most if not all programs are found in the SuSE Distro, as well as other Linux distros. Now, I'm not saying the the DoD is going to contract directly with SuSE (being that it's built and maintained in a foriegn country). However, IBM does alot of things with the DoD and has a "LONG" history with the DoD. I wouldn't be surprised to see having a SuSE distro in an IBM machine used in the DoD. Most likely anything that has to be sensitive is running on the NSA developed "Secure Linux". So, my friend. It's all about funding and contract cycles. The DoD and Congress go by the generally accepted 5 year plan with yearly budget adjustments. Ya, their more than likely backroom money deals going on. But if Bin Laden's buddies crack into an M$ machine and cause a problem, you and I may never hear about - but somebody will. Not to mention the money they will save by not buying per seat licenses for... you know who! Especially in the present economic climate (and the forth coming budget balanced against new mandates involving security). Just MHO, Curtis