Re: [cobalt-users] What's this?

[Bruce Timberlake <Bruce.Timberlake@xxxxxxx>]

Peter Masloch wrote:
> 
> Star Office is not made by SUN. It was original
> from a company in germany and is part of Red Hat
> and other Linux dist. since a couple of years.

Star Office is an office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation
software, drawing package) compatible with Microsoft Office and others. 
The entire codebase was acquired from a German company by Sun a few years
ago.  The codebase was subsequently open sourced IAW the GNU Public
License.  There now exists two versions of the original StarOffice - a
commercial version, developed by Sun, named StarOffice, and a similar
version with fewer features that is free, developed by Sun and the open
source community, named OpenOffice.

There is detailed information at http://www.openoffice.org/ about the
differences between the two; I won't try and repeat that info here.

Sun continues to support and partially fund the development of OpenOffice,
while simultaneously making support and training available to purchasers of
StarOffice.  The two products share a similar codebase; StarOffice has
enhancements not available in the normal OpenOffice distribution.

StarOffice is bundled in some Linux distributions, but usually the
"premium" versions of the distro that require purchase.


--
Bruce Timberlake
Sun Cobalt Technology Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

E: bruce.timberlake@xxxxxxx
T: 877-718-3569 / x69369