Interview With Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org

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.'"

got milk?

[yagu]

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:

No one knows for certain when OOo 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.

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:

Gary explains, Microsoft's Word ML will only interoperate with its own locked stack, require customers to become complete Microsoft shops if they hope to achieve the same level of fluid information flow available through truly open SOAs.

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:

MP: Is this lock down aimed at blunting the spread of OpenOffice.org 2.0?

Interesting stuff...

Cool!

[Short Circuit]

Now go add it to the list of strange units of measurement [wikipedia.org].

OpenOffice documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do something about the OpenOffice documentation, especially for developers. Right now it ranges from nonexistance to horrible. Attempting to do anything, and i mean ANYTHING using OpenOffice.Basic, requires hours upon hours of digging through forums, obscure, incomplete or outdated documents. I realize that the everyday user is the main target of the suite, but right now people who want to do just a little scripting are left with virtually no choice but use MS Office. I'm an above average programmer, and this lack of documentation has left me helpless and frustrated. Some kind of tutorial, or even an updated, consistent documentation from an individual developer's point of view (not someone's who has been developing Ooo for years and knows the code by heart) would be a perfect addition to an otherwise great product.

Stable sort in calc

[dbhankins]

It may seem like a nit, but I believe one of the factors slowing acceptance of OpenOffice in many departments and small businesses is that Calc doesn't have a stable sort (i.e. a sort that preserves the order of rows that are unaffected by the sort) while Excel does.

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".

Why the fascination with XML?

[CyricZ]

Why has everyone suddenly gone googoo over XML? As all this interoperability nonsense shows, it often is far from the perfect solution.

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.

Re:got milk?

[nine-times]

Of course, OOo includes an "export to PDF" feature. So, even if you're on Windows and don't have Acrobat (or some other PDF generator), OpenOffice has you covered for read-only portable documents. Someone might argue that you should use OASIS because it's more open, but at least PDF is a lot more open than the Word format, and arguably more supported than Word even.

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 edit the document easily? If the answer is yes, you probably don't want to use a PDF. If the answer is no, there isn't really a better format to use.

Milk getting sour during startup?

[Lispy]

Personally I'd be happy if my milk woulnd't get sour everytime I fire the beast up.
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.