There goes the Sun! There goes the Sun! And I say it's NOT all right!

Another brick seems to be falling from the Microsoft empire's Wall. Increasingly, I'm getting documents sent to me in .odt format. That's the Open Office equivalent of Word. You know, free and open and all those good Mom and Apple Pie things, right?

Uh huh. Try converting one if you haven't got Open Office.

It's easy enough to do online; there are bushel bunches of converter apps that will take your .odt and spit it back to you duly .doc'd within seconds. Which is fine other than the fact that you're putting it on someone else's server. When it comes to client-confidential things, I'd rather not do that. So I checked to see if there was a resident one I could run locally.

Sure enough, there was. Past tense. Hasta la vista, baby.  This article explained what happened, in rather bad English no less:

Install Sun ODF Plugin for Office and when you double click on .odt file it will be automatically opened with Microsoft Word application.

However as you might be already knowing Sun was bought by Oracle and as rest of greedy and money hungry monsters, Oracle discontinued the Sun ODF Plugin 3.1 for Microsoft Office and it is no longer available for free on the Sun (read Oracle) website. The link is discontinued and by search you can’t find it on Oracle’s website. Sic Oracle. Shame on you. Not only that, Oracle has changed the name as well and it is now called Oracle ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office.

As much godforsaken editing as that paragraph needs, it's right. There are linkies all over the Internet to this simple little beast, all of which bring you to this page:



I tried clicking that one link in the upper right, but "SCREAM" was not one of the "I want to...." options.  (I've read elsewhere that you can now buy the tool from Oracle, but for close to 100 bucks and only as part of a multi-user site license.)  The article above included a link to a supposedly still-available version of it, which I have not installed, and probably won't install on this computer until I've tested it on our old mostly-offline one.

So let's review. Oracle hates Microsoft. Oracle controls a sleek and simple tool that enables people to wean themselves off Microsoft.  Oracle decides instead to make it a profit center to dissuade people from integrating their product into the still-MS-dominated universe, forcing people to install the whole memory hogging OO suite, which makes Oracle how much? Oh, right. NOTHING.

People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?  (Oops. That quote is the intellectual property of Rodney King Enterprises LLC. Wonder how much HE's gonna charge me for using it....)


ETA. Well whadya know? Ta ting woiks! At least on the XP machine, it does. Now to see if it gets on well with Vista. If not, I don't mind the occasional sneakernetting.