On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Mike Singer wrote:

*>   Thank you, Morgan, for your response.
*>
*>   Maybe you are right, I didn't try OpenOffice/StarOffice.
*>But I have few friends who have both StarOffice and
*>MS Office at their work. They told me I couldn't do
*>some things with  StarOffice:
*> - MS Automation (MS term)

That is where you get all those viruses in. No thanks. Staroffice has full
integration and resists viruses so far (f.ex. a Word macro virus will do
nothing in SO while it will ^%&! an installation if opened in Office).
Also SO files can be exchanged between several platforms (each running SO)
without problems, including towards M$ Office.

*> - VBA similar to VB6 and VBScript

SO has StarBasic which works like VBScript. All the usual embedded
programs and objects work as usual, like databases, images, anything you
want. SO is mostly written in Java afaik and there is a way to write your
own modules since one version of SO (OO = OpenOffice) is open source and
has full access to the API.

*> - ActiveX components (MSHFlexGrid and MSComm for example)

There are SO modules and components. ActiveX is a M$ proprietary
technology. SO does not use them because then it would be tied to Windows
platform. It uses its own version of controls (modules) so it works on
several platforms.

*> - MS SQL Server projects from within MS Access and so on...

SO comes with a database of its own and on Unix you have at least a round
dozen of choices, including Informix, DB2, anything with ODBC and ODBC2
connection, Postgresql, Mysql, Oracle, you name it, you have them all.

*>   I use Office as development environment mainly, not
*>only for typewriting.

Good. Then you have legal licenses for all Microsoft components you have
installed, since you develop software on this environment and distribute
it for money. Right ? 95% of non-corporate M$ users cannot afford the
licenses for all the components you have mentioned and use only a subset
thereof. If you would not live in a one-diskette country then you would
know that.

Peter

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics
(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics