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OpenOffice.org

Open Office .org logo
OpenOffice.org logo

OpenOffice.org (OOo) (not "OpenOffice," due to a trademark dispute) is an office applications suite.

Ooo is based on the open-sourced code from an older version of StarOffice that was acquired and made open source by Sun Microsystems with the aim of breaking the market dominance of Microsoft Office and allowing Sun access to rapid development with little cost. It also allowed the general public a version of StarOffice that was free including the source code. OOo is released under the LGPL and is thus free software. (It is also released under the non-free SISSL.)

Table of contents
1 Overview
2 History
3 StarOffice
4 Development
5 External links

Overview

The project aims to compete with Microsoft Office and emulate Microsoft Office's look and feel where suitable. It is also able to read and write almost all Microsoft Office files.

Primary platforms for OOo are Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and Solaris, with ports available or in progress for many Unix-like operating systems. There is a version of OOo 1.0.3 for Mac OS X, which requires the use of X11.

OOo Version 1.1 includes:

OOo can also, with some effort, be configured to integrate with other databases such as mySQL and postgreSQL, so as to offer similar functionality to Microsoft Access.

OOo has become the most prominent alternative to the dominant Microsoft Office application suite. The ability to import from and export to Microsoft Office file formats is the most important feature of OOo for many of its users.

Microsoft has publicly acknowledged OOo and denounced its usefulness. When the Israeli employment agency announced plans to switch from using Microsoft Office to OOo, an unnamed Microsoft representative was quoted ([1]) as saying "The employment agency has selected an immature and unproven software package and its functionality is at best close to Office 97."

History

In August of 1999, Sun Microsystems purchased StarDivision, a German software company who produced a commercial office suite known as StarOffice. Sun started giving away the then-current version, StarOffice 5.2, as a free download.

Sun announced OpenOffice.org on July 19, 2000 and open sourced the StarOffice 5.2 source code. The OOo website went live October 13th 2000 and made the source available for download.

Build 638c — the first milestone release — was released in October 2001. OOo 1.0 was released on May 1, 2002 and OOo 1.1 on September 2, 2003.

StarOffice

Sun subsidises OOo development in order to produce the next version of StarOffice. Releases of StarOffice since StarOffice 6.0 have been based on the OOo codebase (similar to the relationship between Netscape Navigator and Mozilla), with some proprietary components included:

  • Certain fonts (especially Asian language fonts)
  • Adabas B database
  • Some templates
  • Clip art gallery
  • Some sorting functionality for Asian versions
  • Some file filters.

Development

The OOo API is based on Universal Network Objects (UNO), the OOo component technology, and consists of a wide range of interfaces defined in a CORBA-like interface description language.

The document file format used by OpenOffice.org is based on XML and several export and import filters. All external formats read and written by OpenOffice.org are converted back and forth from the internal XML representation. By using compression when saving the XML to disk, OOo's files are generally smaller than the equivalent binary Microsoft Office files. The OOo file format is also the basis of the OASIS file format standard.

The OOo 2.0 beta and release candidate is codenamed "Q". The goals for this release are better interoperability with Microsoft Office, better performance (OOo is notoriously large and slow), greater programmability (better access to UNO), better integration — particularly with GNOME — and improved usability.

The OOo project is still essentially run by StarOffice staff, and getting non-Sun contributions into the core codebase is notoriously difficult. (See also Ximian About ooo-build, lack of interest in up-streaming.) The project may open up more in future, however.

Projects

Other projects run alongside the main OpenOffice.org project and are easier to contribute to. These include documentation, localisation and the API. There is also a scripting project which aims to be a repository for distributing macros. OpenGroupware.org (OGo) is a set of OOo extension programs to share OpenOffice.org files, calendars, address books, e-mails, instant messaging and blackboards, browse the web and access other groupware applications.

GNOME and KDE integration

OpenOffice.org uses its own widget toolkit and typeface-rendering libraries to ensure cross-platform portability. However, this comes at the expense of full native look and feel.

Sun and Ximian are working on full integration of OOo with GNOME. Ximian includes OOo in their Ximian Desktop product and Sun in their Java Desktop System.

Work is also in progress on better integration with KDE - Cuckooo (OOo as a KPart and hence fully integratable with KDE), KDE vclplug (using the Qt toolkit rather than OOo's own toolkit) and KDE NWF (Native Widget Framework, to give OOo the look of the host platform). This work was started by Jan Holesovsky and is currently sponsored by SuSE.

External links
Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.