Subj : Re: Telgate/Mudgate Echo
To   : Deuce
From : Tracker1
Date : Mon Jul 04 2005 04:31 am

Deuce wrote:
>> Yeah, I haven't seen much that works *BETTER* than commercial alternatives,
>> OpenOffice.org and Mozilla products aside, and those don't really include
>> installers, they're included with about every distro on the planet... Hoping
>> for more from SuSE as well, especially with Novell behind the wheel, time wi
>> tell of course.
> 
> I've seen quite a few things that work better... and I don't list OOo and
> Mozilla among them.  OOo has never been better than Office... and I doubt if it
> ever will be.  As for Mozilla products, well... I'd just start a flame war I
> don't want to have.

Not need to start a flame war, I guess "better" is a pretty subjective term.

> But for huge complex programs with industry-specific features... well... open
> source will probobly never make it as good as closed source.  Remember that
> most of the OOo code was developed as closed source... as well as a good chunk
> of Mozilla stuff.  But, I can easily imagine Mozilla becoming "better" than IE
> due to the fact that programmers use it.  I can't see OSS replacements for
> CorelDraw, AutoCAD, Office, Illustrator, etc. etc. ad nauseum ever being better
> than the commercial versions.

As for the above, I don't think Office can improve much from where it is, I do 
think that even MS-Office 2000 is better than OpenOffice, not MS-Office97 or 
earlier though... I think some features in OOo are better, and I remember 
trying out an early version of StarOffice I was handed by a Sun employee at 
Comdex in 98 iirc...  It was nice, especially on the solaris box (the backup 
server was a solaris box, with a tape jukebox (that thing truely sucked)), in 
any case, I think there are plenty of commercial products leaps and bounds 
better than F/OSS alternatives (mostly in regards to consumer products not 
usually communications and network products) .. it's kind of a nice balance at 
the moment, there are plenty of choices...

-- 
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1(at)theroughnecks(dot)net - www.theroughnecks.net
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