"After going premium and suffering some community fragmentation, the OpenOffice.org open source office suite is being taken in a new direction by a company named Ulteo. A brainchild of Gael Duval, founder of Mandriva Linux, Ulteo's mission is to serve as a platform for putting applications onto the web. Using this approach, Ulteo has released a public beta of Online OpenOffice.org, which quite literally puts OpenOffice.org inside a browser."[source]
The community fragmentation referred to here is a bit disturbing but not too surprising. You have to figure that Sun is in the OpenSource business mainly because it punishes Microsoft (or threatens to, or at least annoys them) which is, of course, in Sun's interest. But you also have to figure that the moment it has the opportunity,Sun will go corporate to the degree that it can. I don't want to go into the details at this point, but you can read about it here.
The Ulteo service is available here. It is getting some good reviews (seeming better than Microsoft's version of an on line office). I suggest you don't bother looking at it yet .. give it a day or two, as everybody is trying to get on the server right now. Wait 'till Christmas morning when everybody is busy with other things.
Hey, the University of Minnesota Office of Information Whatever did not allow me to install Openoffice.org on my managed computer. HA! I say to them. (If this on line thing works)
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