StarOffice has the advantage of being the more thoroughly qualified product.
In one sense, that puts a little further out the edge due to community contributions.
To make modifications, one can easily download the corresponding code and work with the community."
StarOffice is built with open-source software (same code as ) but the license of the actual application is closed. "But support, services, training are also available for, and many prefer it over StarOffice because it may be in a language that StarOffice is so far missing, or because an officiating body has insisted that the license of the application be open. "Itis also more for those who wish to buy, again at the outset, the support, services, training that Sun sells. "StarOffice is pitched more to those who want the indemnification against suit by Microsoft: governments, OEMs and to those who want the ease of having at one go the application plus the most useful extensions," Mr. TMO asked about other details that the customer should know about that would help them decide which package to use. In fact, there is a a plugin that gives users the ability to read/write ODF, and with Open Office 3.0 and StarOffice 9.0, weill have native support of OOXML, which MS Office 2007 uses." The connecting thread is the file format and the understanding that what counts is creating, communicating, preserving files in a format that resists the fragility of monopoly and the reliance on any one company. "In short: and the Mac version in particular, suture the wounds inflicted by 20 years of divergence.
"But the Mac presence grants CIOs and others tasked with choosing the right software for their organizations the assurance and confidence that they can adopt the OpenDocument Format (our native format and the only published ISO standard file format for office documents) and have an office array that includes Macs, Linux, Solaris, Windows and so on. The Mac element is pivotal, too, even in areas where you see few Macs, such as in India - though that may be changing, too. "The business of supporting and, for that matter, StarOffice is in fact growing astonishingly fast around the world. Suarez-Potts explained whatis going on behind the scenes. The Business Model: Compatibility and Continuity
When StarOffice 9 ships it will be identical to 3.0. Recently, Sun released StarOffice 9 beta, which includes a native version for Mac, and those betas do not come with support. The community supports over 350 small companies located throughout the world that offer that kind of support." In addition to Sunis support, community support ranges from per-call support on "How to I do X?" to a complete corporate migration from MS Office to StarOffice. "Most importantly, business users can obtain enterprise-level support from Sun (but not just Sun) for either StarOffice or in many countries and many languages. "We at Sun are packaging StarOffice so that enterprise customers will have popular and useful extensions at hand, on the same CD, whereas for, the community has kept the download relatively lean, and if you want more extensions - and who doesnit? - you can download them from our repository.