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New OpenOffice.org-Based Office Suite
Voidhobo writes: "SOT, a Linux-distributor from the home-country of Linux, is offering SOT Office, a free productivity suite partly based on OpenOffice, for Linux and Windows. According to SOT, it is the only office application you will ever need, as it is fully compatible with MS Office and StarOffice." OpenOffice is great, so I hope their claims have merit.
The only problem with this thesis is that the huge,overwhelming, vast majority of software engineers and developers do not work on mass-market software packages, but on custom and/or specialized software for internal corporate use.
Make it easier and more cost-effective to produce custom applications (by, say opening the source code for the "base" applications), and you almost certainly create more software development jobs than you lose by turning base applications and operating systems into commodities.
Another thing to consider is that (gasp) there is life beyond software. Most companies that use computers (and software) aren't in the computer business, but use those computers to help produce something else, like animated movies or car parts. Heck, even airlines, hotels, and stock brokerages use computers these days, and if they can have computers that run a little better/faster/cheaper because of Open Source software, they can provide their products or services at a lower price.
Not that any of this matters to those whose only ambition in life is to write shrinkwrap software, but I thought I would throw it in here anyway.
- Robin
i think the functionality office provides us with is very cool, but the way we are forced to approach it via the gui stinks. hold your horses, and read further to hear my favorite view of the future:
;-) but: as long as the document-standards are open, since anyone can then build any gui layer on it they like!
i a not-so-distant future, the desktop will probably not be ruled by "office suites that need to be able to do anything including coffeemaking".
while i enjoy the efforts the open source community is putting into creating ms-office work-a-likes, that market will be history. everything is going to be webservices-based, and perhaps we will even reach the state where documents do not need to be tied to an application, but there will just be a unified (xml) document format, which can contain calculation-functionality (a-la excel) but also good layout functions to make it look nice. the whole idea of presentation software, wordprocessors, and drawing programs as separate entities is ridiculous anyhow in my perception. just choose the output device (printer, posterprinter, screen, beamer, webpage) and build the document.
as it is now, several (often small) companies exist merely because of the need to adapt the swiss-army-knife that office is into a specific tool that suits the client situation. there's money to be made there even if there is no officesuite, since there is always going to be a need for specific solutions.
so if you ask me: get rid of all those office suites, build something that can do all the things i mentioned before, and build gui layers on top of it that can handle the specific objects within the documents, like editing text, database connection, performing calculations, making drawings/graphs, etc...
we have all the tools. we have well worked out markup languages, style sheets, etc. we have good databases, good toolkits to build guis. things could become *really* platform independent, and we wouldn't have to worry about how to fit our grand scheme into the current situation, created by software giants as our favorite one from redmond.
money can be made by providing services to companies that need specific functionality, and not by making software that still needs to be adapted to do the job. whether the solution i propose is done using open software or closed software doesn't make a difference. (to me it does, but let's not go into the open = better than closed subject
More revenues and profit for software companies leads to:
Fewer jobs at the companies that have to pay for software licenses.
Smaller profit margins for companies that have to pay for software licenses.
Fewer new companies being created due to the higher startup costs of buying software licenses.
Free Software and Open Source leads to:
More jobs for engineers at companies who need people to modify freely available software.
Higher profit margins for companies not paying insane license fees to Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc.
Startup companies being able to spend money on their business rather than software licenses.
Adding features to software because they're necessary, not because marketing wants another bullet on the box.
Software being released/deployed when it's ready, not when a company needs to generate revenue.
A less jarring upgrade cycle for companies that actually use the software.
Not being left with your dick in your hand when the company that makes your proprietary accounting package goes out of business without passing on the source code or any means of future support and leaving your data in a proprietary and inaccesible format.
No BSA.
No companies paying off their congresscritter to pass the DCMA.
Bottom line - proprietary software hurts a lot more companies than it helps.
If you want to work for Microsoft, Free Software might be a bad thing. If you want to do real and useful work with a tool that works well it's a very good thing.
Never forget that Microsoft Office, Windows, Visual Studio and so on are designed primarily with one goal in mind: maximizing Microsoft's profit margin. That goal directly conflicts with the goal of a company that uses those tools - namely, to spend as little as possible to get the job done well. The same is true of just about any proprietary software package - the number one goal of Adobe, Macromedia, Quark and every other proprietary company is to sell more licenses. That means that their goal is to cause their customers to buy more software, more rapidly, than they would want to. Spending more IT budget on licensing than personnel - meaning, in reality, fewer jobs. If every company had one or two people supporting Linux and OpenOffice, say, there'd be a hell of a lot more jobs than are created than the 10,000 or so created by Microsoft.
I mean, do you all want to work as sysadmins on Linux and databaseadmins on MySQL instead of software engineers & technical managers on projects that aim to sell the software you have created?
Yes. Working on a team with the goal of selling software means having to work closely with marketing and salescritters. That's punishment enough for anyone.
If a SW package 'A' has less value then 'B', then one should probably use 'B'. Closed / Open source doesn't have any bearing. The OSS argument is that many OSS sw packages bring similar, and in some cases greater value to the table than closed source software.
There are certianly exceptions. But for the most part, I see companies taken to the cleaners for software whole capabilities they will never truely exercise. (Could have bought something smaller and less expensive)
I'd love to see any data/examples you have on this. I think history paints a somewhat different picture. As a software company (be it MS, Oracle, IBM, McAffee, etc) finds a successful product, they tend to expand in their own industry and dominate it. I highly doubt that you can find ANY example to support your ideas above. On the contrary, we have MS (desktop and office suites), Oracle (DB), IBM (used to dominate on servers, DB, etc), McAfee (anti-virus).Further, the billions made by SW companies goes into the hands of Executives, Share Holders and VCs NOT into the hands of the everyday worker. I'm not a class warrior, but let's call a spade a spade.
On the contrary, the best example I've seen used OSS software when they started out and MIGRATED to more robust closed source solutions as NEEDED (think sprial dev methodology). If they had gone straight to the expensive solution, they would have managed to waste a lot of money on stuff they didn't need and would have needed to purchase more sw later (as some requirements weren't totally hashed out early on). NO, I really don't. And I DON'T work as a sysadmin, I AM a software engineer who does development and integration work. When I'm building custom SW, more of the money spent on development goes to me as oppoesed to a COTS company where I'm also supporting the beaurocracy.Again, I'm not opposed to closed source, I almost took a job with a closed source company, but I think it's incredibly mis-leading to say that closed source software drives the industry when most programers don't make their living writing closed source software..
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy