Open Sores advocates, led by Grand Wizard Richard M. Stallworth III,  actively purport their software's superiority simply because they distribute their "sauce codes" - the illegal underlying mechanisms forbidden under the DMCA. By basing their FTP servers in foreign countries, they are able to illegally transmit their sauce codes throughout the world using their "PGP" virus propagation services. Imperial Klansman Eric K. Richmond Jr. has come out on several occasions stating his intentions of purposefully violating the law for his own giddy pleasures - `bragging rights,' in the criminal and hacker world.

What this has to do with StarOffice may seem distant, but look no further than the horse's mouth - Sun itself. Sauce code distribution is catching on like hot pants on a Florida beach, and even semi-established companies see benefits in jumping on the bandwagon. Obviously, "Sun Microsystems Corporation" - a play on the world-renowned "Microsoft Systems Corporation" trademark, can not afford to simply break the law like so many of their racist GNU brethren. Thus, to get around the DMCA laws governing our great nation, Sun, taking a page from Stallworth and Richmond, exports their sauce code to an offshore corporation, not unlike failed energy giant Enron.

In creating their overseas organization, which they dub "OpenOffice" - a clear jab at the closed market in which they cannot illegally force their way into, Sun set up a labor factory in beautiful Barbados in the British Virgin Islands. This, for Sun, has several advantages. Because the population of Barbados is mainly black and poor, they ensure their membership in the "Liberty Alliance," a group of oppressing corporations who claim to support the Open Sores movement by employing bands of children, blacks, and others who wouldn't know any better. The origins of the "Liberty Alliance" are not known, but some companies have looked into joining, like IBM, and rejected the application form on the grounds of refusing to sign a "three-fifths clause," according to one high-level IBM employee.

Since Sun gained the resources needed to build their software, and the triangle of illegality to market it to the pirates, hackers, and elderly Wal-Mart shoppers, they are planning on releasing "version 6" of their Office clone. Version 6 in quotes, because there exists no version prior to 5.2, the product simply dashed into existence, much like Sun's other products, including Netscape "6.0" and "Java Apache."

Many critics have reviewed StarOffice since its 6.0 debut last week, and most of them drew the same conclusion. For an Office clone, it has a long way to go. Rudimentary spell checking has finally been added, but it still cannot open documents created using the industry standard Word 2002. The interface of StarOffice 6.0 leaves one to be desired, as well. The actual document editor is a solid contender, mainly because it utilizes Microsoft's OLE/DirectX technology to embed the Word 2002 control into its application, much in the same way that Neoplanet encapsulates the Internet Explorer DirectX control. Is it then legal for Sun to market an application which is merely a repackaged version of Microsoft's software? It is indeed, as Microsoft allowed the DirectX embedding in the first place. It's not the first time a company has tried to profit off of repackaging something Microsoft has done - Opera has done it for ages.

So why then, if it is simply a reimplementation of Word 2002, is it so much worse than Office XP? For that, you can thank a key component of Office XP often overlooked - Access 2002. Access 2002 is the bread and butter that unifies all of Office XP's interfaces together. It provides the MFC interpreter, which allows for Office XP's unparalleled interface unity across all of the Office suites. Word, Excel, FrontPage, whatever component you are in, you can be confident that you can interact with each one of them individually and as a whole due to the Access glue that Microsoft patented. All of the illegal emacs reverse-engineering in the world would not be enough for Sun to contrive such platform unity, as they are still stuck on their own 1994-generation technology, Java.

StarOffice, while relatively new to the field of word processing, still cannot take the cake when it comes to Microsoft Office XP. With all of the features that Sun managed to illegally clone under the cloak of racial labor in the sugar-cane pits of Barbados, StarOffice still manages to fall several magnitudes short of Office XP. Until Sun gets its act together and implements, at the very least, Personalized Menus, I am forced to urge anyone and everyone to stay clear of this blatant imposter.