Past Meeting - January 22, 2004

Learn about OpenOffice.org -- an Open Source Application and Project
Thursday, January 22, 2004
6:30 P.M. - 8:00 P.M.

Join your colleagues at the next meeting of The San Diego Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), featuring Dan McCrimmon of Sun Microsystems and Louis Suarez-Potts of OpenOffice.org. They'll be explaining the Open Office productivity suite, its open-component-base APIs and XLM-based file format, and the OpenOffice open source project.

Sun Microsystems
Building Sun SAN05
9540 Towne Centre Drive
San Diego, CA 92121

Summary:

Dan McCrimmon and Louis Suarez-Potts gave a tag-team presentation of the features and organization of the Open Office suite. Dan was on site, and Louis participated via phone. They showed how Open Office can be used to reproduce the functionality of Microsoft's Word, Excel, and Powerpoint all for free. Dan pointed out that Sun's version (called Star Office) is the same as Open Office, but comes with Sun's support and $70 for Sun's version. While the value is excellent, Dan noted that neither version comes with an e-mail program, contact managers, scheduler, or database, and so it is not a complete replacement for Microsoft Office. He also pointed out that more and more large organizations are adopting Open Office because of its great value and cheap price.

Abstract

OpenOffice.org is both an open-source application and project. It is free. The product is a multi-platform office productivity suite compatible with all major file formats.

The OpenOffice.org source code initially includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based
file formats and other resources.

OpenOffice.org's mission is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.

StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation.

This talk will discuss the features of OpenOffice, the history of OpenOffice.org, and how you can become a member of the OpenOffice.org development community.

Presenter Bios

Dan McCrimmon is long time San Diego area software developer and development manager and a long time Sun employee. Dan has developed, or managed the development of, compilers, operating systems and end user application programs.

Louis Suarez-Potts is the Community Manager of OpenOffice.org since its inception and chair of the OpenOffice.org Communty Council, as well as the senior manager for community development at CollabNet, Louis Suarez-Potts holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on an in-depth examination of the difference corporate-sponsored open source projects have made to the logic and practice of open source.