Slashdot Log In
Interview With Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Oct 12, 2005 12:43 PM
from the inside-perspectives dept.
from the inside-perspectives dept.
silentbob4 writes "Hot on the heels of yesterdays interview of Sun's Florian Reuter posted on Slashdot comes a two page interview with OpenOffice.org's Gary Edwards. In this installment, Gary discusses the importance of open document formats and hints to the release date of OpenOffice.org 2.0: 'No one knows for certain when OpenOffice.org 2.0 stable will be released, but Mad Penguin's bet is that the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
got milk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent article, a bit long of a read but worth it. Read it!
As for pending relaase of stable OOo 2.0, the article mentions:
I need more specific data. I buy Ultra-Pasteurized milk, and the carton I recently bought has an expiration date of late November! I guess I can wait until then, I've waited this long. But, could I possibly be optimistic enough to hope he only means regular pasteurized milk? That would get me OO a couple weeks sooner!
Another interesting observation in the article:
Discounting that Gary obviously completely advocating OO and probably had a disdain for Microsoft's XML implementation, I think to the extent that what he is pointing out is true, IT managers should take note . Unfortunately most won't or don't. We live in an age where decision makers chant the "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" mantra, and the threat that continued Microsoft upgrade stand to completely lock in a shop to only Microsoft products probably won't frighten them. But with slightly less myopia, IT managers should realize this pending lockin could jeapordize subsequent ability to exchange information and perform transactions with other organizations (factor in the additional pending Trusted Computing technology and this gets downright scary).And should you choose not to read the entire article, read this gem of a question and response from page two:
Interesting stuff...
Re:got milk? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of IT managers already have taken note. Most people in IT understand that Microsoft doesn't play well with others, which leads to the idea that your best bet is either to use only Microsoft Office or not use Microsoft Office at all. However, there just aren't loads of options there. Microsoft Office is what most businesses use, so if you want to do business with them, you might want to stick with MS. Further, people are accustomed to Microsoft Office, so there's that issue.
Finally, and this is not unimportant, even though OOo might provide a viable alternative to most of MS Office, they don't offer an Outlook clone. Many businesses are flat-out addicted to Outlook for their scheduling. OOo might do well to integrate Evolution and help Novell port it to Windows/OSX.
Either way, I doubt that the real problem is that IT managers are oblivious to the vendor lock-in MS represents, but rather that the lock-in has already taken place, and now the question is, how do you get out? The answer may be to push MS to support OASIS.
Parent
Re:got milk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spread the word and practice what you preach.
I believe the problem is not as much as people don't listen but the fact that people do not spread what they preach. As a business user, have you ever given an MS Office client an OO.org document? I know I haven't. Reason being is because the recipients do not have OO.org installed nor do they want to install it. And to force clients into downloading a >100MB file to read your document is preposterous!
What I believe is needed is a light-weight OO.org viewer that is quick to download and quick to open. Then we can give our clients OO.org documents and exclaim to them when they tell us they can't view it that we use OO.org due to its [insert fabulous reason here] and if they like they can download the free viewer here*. That or include the viewer or link with document. That way they know we use OO.org as we prefer the benefits it offers over those of MS and they are not forced to get something they're not comfortable ("opensource? my mcse guy said it's not free!")
*Said viewer should have link too full version so they have option of downloading OO.org
Parent
Re:got milk? (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you need is for the client to view the document, send a PDF. That's what PDFs are for, and it also diminishes the reliance on Microsoft. Best of all, almost everyone already has a PDF viewer installed.
Parent
Re:got milk? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm the only one who uses OO at work here (alongside Office) and I send out a lot of PDFs. I've had numerous people ask me how I do that especially when they know I don't have any of the Acrobat stuff...
Sadly they then say they wish Office had that and go about their day...
And... (Score:3, Informative)
...when someone asks how you got the full version of Adobe Acrobat, one can just say, "I didn't. I just used OpenOffice.org to export a PDF. Microsoft Office can't do that without that overpriced Adobe thing, but OOo can."
When they ask how you found that, and then why they are stuck with that $x00-$x000 piece of crap Microsoft calls an office suite, you can look at them and (before answering said questions) smile at them and yourself with pride.
My new compy has OpenOffice.org, and no version of Micros
Resumes (Score:4, Insightful)
I've especially had this problem with recruiters, since they like to re-format the resume and put it onto their standard letterhead and preferred layout. Since I know that, I'll generally try to get away with sending them an RTF, since it tends to be less dicey.
Distributing PDFs is a great idea, and if people were less anal about getting Word docs (many times as a matter of company policy or procedure), it'd work great.
Parent
Not just a "standard format" issue (Score:3, Informative)
I spent a couple of hours figuring out a system to handle this (hey, I was cheap labour). I ended up using the trial download of this system [solidpdf.com] which worked very well. The bonus was that it has a command line interface so it was easy to do a vbs wrapper to recurse throug
Re:got milk? (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't support editing so well, so that's the real question. When you're sending a document, do you want the recipient to be able to edi
A lot of nonsense, too... (Score:2)
Or "To run Microsoft Office Professional 2003 right, you have to have Microsoft servers installed." Which is absolutely not true. I suspect he means that there are various features of Office 2003 that interact with Microsoft server products, but those are two very different claims. There are other to
market share (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a lot of old computers out there that have not been upgraded. Windows 98 is still common, though mostly for kids games these days. (The games don't run on the parent's XP system, but the next kid can enjoy it just as much as the first) Many offices are still running Windows 2000 on the desktop. (NT 4.0 is still a popular server platform, though it is dieing slowly)
Many home users are using OOo, because it is free and better than whatever came with their system. Many offices are still on Wo
Re:got milk? (Score:3, Funny)
I just want to know if the primordial version was called OOo 0.0.
milk (Score:5, Funny)
Re:milk (Score:5, Funny)
At least you can look forward to getting Duke Nukem Forever before it expires. Maybe.
Parent
Re:milk (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, you can pass the time playing a game on your Phantom [infiniumlabs.com].
Parent
A New Pseudo-Unit! (Score:5, Funny)
Cool! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A New Pseudo-Unit! (Score:2)
I only came in... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I only came in... (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, they are getting pretty cheesy too... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I just hope... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I just hope... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, continuous waiting for the "X" release can make
Why wait? (Score:3, Insightful)
Monday! (Score:5, Funny)
Confirmed!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Dang. (Score:5, Funny)
Fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
So yeah, MS have taken a completely transparent and useful XML format and munged evil hidden data into it. It can probably be reverse engineered, but still it manages to miss the entire point of having an XML data format in the first place
Re:Fantastic (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Why the fascination with XML? (Score:4, Interesting)
At the firm I used to work at we had a rather sane policy: send short memos as plain text files, and larger documents as PDFs. Of course, the PDFs were generated via LaTeX, so the LaTeX source to the document could also be sent, too. We didn't have to worry about all this crap with MS Office.
We'd often hear stories from new employees about the troubles they'd gone through with documents at their previous place of employment. So we were always quite glad that we avoided all that. It does take some time to use LaTeX, for instance, but after the initial learning curve (which is far shallower for most people than is widely thought) its users were far more productive.
Parent
Re:Why the fascination with XML? (Score:5, Informative)
Well no, it shows that if you try hard enough, you can undo the interoperability benefits of XML.
Yes, it's not perfect, but it solves a number of problems:
And, of sheer practical benefit, if you start what seems to be a "small, simple" format, you don't have to hack these things on afterwards when reality kicks in and your "small, simple" format balloons in complexity.
XML certainly isn't a silver bullet, but it's a hell of a lot better than creating a format by hand.
Parent
OpenOffice documentation (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just the OpenOffice project that suffers. (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't have time to go digging through the Mozilla source to find out each and every little nuance that wasn't mentioned in the three-year-old documentation. So please, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org developers, provide us with some recent, useful documentation and examples! That is perhaps the greatest favour you could do at this time.
Parent
It benefits them to offer such documentation. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the case of Mozilla, it would greatly benefit them if their product were to be embedded all over the place. Of course, non-Mozilla developers need solid documentation and solid examples in order to learn how to embed Gecko. Such documentation and examples currently do not exist.
The same goes for OpenOffice. If these products want to be seriously used, then they will need to provide sufficient documentation. It's as simple as that. The price they're charging for their software is irrelevant.
Parent
Stable sort in calc (Score:4, Interesting)
Many shops use spreadsheets as a kind of quick-and-dirty database, and they rely on the ability to sort on 4 or more columns. Calc can only support sorting on 3.
Unfortunately, 2.0 won't fix this as the bug was marked as a "do later".
Re:Stable sort in calc (Score:3, Informative)
Sure it does. Position your cursor in the top left cell of the section you wish to scroll. Then View->Freeze Panes and everything above and to the left of that cell will be locked.
How do you make a Penguin mad? (Score:3, Funny)
Non-free? (Score:5, Insightful)
While an OOo built with Gcj and Classpath is, apparently, legally unencumbered, the future of the language is uncertain. Some us would prefer, for a variety of reasons, to have OOo not dependent on Java for core features.
Re:Non-free? (Score:3, Informative)
http://dba.openoffice.org/drivers/sqlite/ [openoffice.org]
http://oooauthors.org/en/FAQs/Database/connectors/ 20041114b [oooauthors.org]
http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/html/ [ch-werner.de]
but I'd like to hear from people working on it. Will there be an OOo package with SQLite or something in there, and no Java? (E.g. on Debian and Ubuntu?)
ETA 2005/10/20 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ETA 2005/10/20 (Score:3, Informative)
Well, looks like it's fixed now...
Milk getting sour during startup? (Score:3, Interesting)
OO.orgs speed issues is the major showstopper for me. And I am running it on Windows AND on Linux. Linux is even worse, sadly. Not exactly good advertising when trying to talk someone into switching OSes.
Re:My Milk Never Expires (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:My Milk Never Expires (Score:2)
Re:Soo (Score:2)
Re:Soo (Score:2)
His name means what?! lol
Re:Milk expiration dates? (Score:2)
Re:Geez (Score:5, Insightful)
When Word 97 was released they claimed it could read/write Word 95 documents. They lied. Their "Word 95" export was really a munged RTF saver and it caused no end of headaches for Word 95 users. It wasn't fixed for months, until SP1 for Office 97 was released.
Try using Office 2003 to open MS Works or Office 4.x files and see what happens. If it even tries at all, you better hope it is a plain-Jane file with nothing fancy, or it is all going to be screwed up.
Most documents convert fine. Other can be handled the same way ANY legacy format has been handled in the digital age -- stop using it and keep a couple copies of the old software around just in case someone needs to access the legacy data. I've managed document transistions at a couple large companies moving from RF-Flow to Visio; Wordstar to WordPerfect to Word; Lotus 1-2-3 to Word; and dBase 3 to dBase 4 to Access 95, 97, 2000 then finally Postgres.
The arguments are always the same.
Q. "What about all my old data?"
A. "Batch convert what you can. Hand convert what you use, as you use it. Leave the old stuff to decay and keep a copy of the old software."
Hell, most times we also needed to set aside some old PCs with the old OS just to run the legacy software. CLIX, OS/9000, OS/2, Windows 3.11, DOS 4.1. We had a legacy document room with a bunch of old computers at one facility. It was a working museum.
THAT is why open document formats are important. To avoid the necessity of working museums.
-Charles
Parent
Re:Geez (Score:3, Insightful)
It was November/December of 1997, so yes about 8 years ago. And I was working at a Fortune 500 company who's Executive VP (pre-CIO days) insisted on immediately upgrading half the company to Office 97 to "standardize". That was 3,000+ desktops on one version and 3,000+ on the older version. It was a
Re:Geez (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent