[sword-devel] OpenOffice/StarOffice

[Leon Brooks]

Bryan Fordham wrote:

> Open Office is the code from Star Office, released by Sun.  I don't use
> Star Office so don't know its status.

OpenOffice is the bits from StarOffice that _could_ be GPLed (the rest 
was burdened with licencing agreements, as if that issue hasn't had 
enough of a hammering here). StarOffice, per se, is not GPLed, it is 
only free-for-personal-use (now free for practically any use, I think).

Even trimmed down, however, you'll need *three*gigabytes* of disk space 
to unpack and build the remaining OpenOffice source. (-:

There is a derivative of OpenOffice already, named MozOffice, which is 
an attempt to integrate OpenOffice with Mozilla. At which point Mozilla 
will truly have earned its moniker at least in terms of sheer size - but 
OTOH what you can do in XUL at that point will have to be seen to be 
believed...

I have not yet tried OpenOffice (waiting for the first independent 
version) but do use StarOffice 5.2. In fact, I have used SO 5.2 to 
translate a Word 2000 document into a Word 6 document for an Office 97 
user (nothing that Office 2000 produced would load into Office 97 
without crashing it), and it does write credible RTF output such as is 
required of a Sword module.

Cheers.