Star Office 8 Release Scheduled for Tomorrow

I guess the code is good enough to shove into a pay for, proprietary product, but not up to the exacting standards of a free software project?

At any rate, this should address the concerns that have been voiced (wrt the Commonwealth of Ma. decision) over OpenDocument format only being supported by one freebee product that's still in beta...

In all fairness, Fedora and SUSE both ship the OOo beta as their standard office suite.

sbergman: I would have shifted all my developers to the commercial version if I had reason to believe that Massachusetts was going to go with OASIS open doc. That would have taken the argument away that the only OpenDoc product was openoffice.org without support - something the Federal Acquisition Regulations might have challenged.

I'm glad to see it.

But, they should get right to finishing OOo 2.0

While I do agree that getting an officially supported, non-beta, OpenDocument supporting suite out is a good thing, I do have a couple of questions:

Federal Acquisition Regulations can dictate the purchasing policies of individual state governments?

Sun can, at its own discretion, for whatever reason they deem sufficient, divert the the bulk of OOo developer resources to their proprietary Star Office product?

Neither one of these things sounds good to me, if true.

Answers to your questions:

#1 Under a fairly new law - states and lcoal governments can purchase off the same GSA schedule. So, a vendor like Sun doesn't have to maintain 50 separate schedules. As a result, the FAR's kick in when a state uses the GSA aggregate buying plan. (please don't make me look up all the acronyms and regs).

#2 Sun pays the developers of OOo and they are Sun employees or contractors. So, they do what they deem to be in their best interest.

In this case, I also feel it's in our best interest.