6.3.1. History
Throughout the last decade the office domain has typically been
dominated by MS Office, and, let's
face it: the Microsoft Word,
Excel and PowerPoint formats are industry standards that
you will have to deal with sooner or later.
This monopoly situation of Microsoft proved to be a big
disadvantage for getting new users to Linux, so a group of German
developers started the StarOffice project, that was, and is still,
aimed at making an MS Office clone. Their company, StarDivision,
was acquired by Sun Microsystems by the end of the 1990s, just
before the 5.2 release. Sun continues development but restricted
access to the sources. Nevertheless, development on the original
set of sources continues in the Open Source community, which had to
rename the project to OpenOffice.
OpenOffice is now available for a
variety of platforms, including MS Windows, Linux, MacOS and
Solaris. There is a screenshot in
Section 1.3.2.
Almost simultaneously, a couple of other quite famous projects
took off. Also a very common alternative to using MS Office is
KOffice, the office suite that
used to be popular among SuSE users. Like the original, this clone
incorporates an MS Word and
Excel compatible program, and much
more.
Smaller projects deal with particular programs of the MS example
suite, such as Abiword and MS
Wordview for compatibility with MS
Word documents, and Gnumeric for viewing and creating Excel compatible spreadsheets.
