[luau] MS Office, WordPerfect, StarOffice

[W. Wayne Liauh]

I have been frequently challenged as to why I am so stubborn about 
WordPerfect and "ignoring" StarOffice/OpenOffice.  It is very difficult 
for me to explain the reason w/o further inviting the wraths.  But there 
was an article in Wall Street Journal which may somewhat explain why:



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The Wall Street Journal
MOSSBERG'S MAILBOX
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
July 25, 2002

Q: In your column last week, you complained that Microsoft charges
families too much for Office XP and doesn't allow families to install
a single copy of Office on multiple PCs. You made good points, but
instead of begging Microsoft to do the right thing, why didn't you
tell people to switch to the free office suite, OpenOffice, or Sun's
very similar $75 suite, StarOffice, or to the WordPerfect suite?

A: That's a good question, which I received in various forms from
dozens of readers. Here's my answer.

In the case of the WordPerfect Office suite, it's also fairly
expensive and also is licensed on the same one-copy-per-PC model
Microsoft follows. (You can put it on a second PC, but can't use it
on both machines simultaneously.) Corel , WordPerfect's maker,
doesn't enforce this license via "activation," the way Microsoft
does, but you are still violating the license if you buy one copy and
use it to upgrade an entire family's computers, unless there are only
two and you constantly police their running of WordPerfect, which is
absurd.

In the case of StarOffice, which is essentially identical to the free
OpenOffice, you are given a family license that covers five PCs. But
I reviewed the new 6.0 version of StarOffice (equivalent to the 1.0
version of OpenOffice) recently and found it too complicated, quirky
and buggy to be a reliable replacement for Microsoft Office for
mainstream, nontechnical users (read the review).

Believe me, if WordPerfect drastically cut its price, and/or offered
a family license, or if the OpenOffice/StarOffice product were
simpler and more reliable, I'd be glad to recommend them as
alternatives.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg at w... 
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