[vox] Reasons you might not want to use OpenOffice

[Bill Kendrick]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 12:44:01PM -0700, Ryan Northrup wrote:
>    I'm certain that OpenOffice was created to provide a less-expensive
>    alternative to Microsoft Office (which is expensive), not to prevent
>    monopolistic accusations against Microsoft.

Well, OpenOffice was the 'open sourced' version of StarOffice, which
Sun got when it acquired StarDivison.  (Similar to how Netscape Navigator
became Mozilla, eventually leading to its components becoming the Firefox
browser & other apps. See also: SeaMonkey.)

Refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey

PS - My own app, Tux Paint, was created because there was a niche to fill
(art software for kids, for the Linux operating system).  That it was
eventually ported to Windows and Mac and has become immensely popular on
those platforms has been thanks to help from other volunteers.
I do encourage it, though, and make the ported bits part of the upstream
code base.  "Think of the children!" and so forth... :)

-bill!