* Randy Kramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> And I keep getting confused -- did Star somehow acquire the old
> Wordstar? And incorporated parts of it in Star Office?
Nope: StarOffice was created by a guy from Germany some years back.
Something like the Compaq/HP garage thingie :). He founded
StarDivision and moved to Hamburg, where most of the OOo/So
developer are still working (I don't think, that there are so
many 'originally sun' people around). In 1999 StarDivison was
bought by Sun and then they put the code under OS license.
Anyway, Most of the code is still 'made' by the old
StarDivision developer in Hamburg.
Some other notes, regarding the 'slowliness': up to version 5.2
StarOffice had a 'integrated desktop', which came with windows
manager and some other stuff ("Everything in one place"). This
confused MSO users a lot and after 5.2 most of the stuff was
removed (you can still here some users crying about that...). Just
after that and some initial cleanup and 'make it run again', the
code was released in october 2000 as Open Source.
6.0 is IMO still a 'recover version', making everythingwork
again. A developer said (in a german newsgroup), that SO still
'starts up' a lot too many and too big libraries at startup, but
that this is one place which is worked on.
And AFAI see it, the real developer, who dig deep into the code, are
still not really a lot and mostly the old people from StarDivision
times. IIRC the calc Easteregg showed three or four people, and
that's the second 'biggest' part of SO/OOo after writer.
Jan
