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IBM Wants to Port Office to Linux
shfted! writes "OSNews reports: As part of its initiative to put Linux on the desktop, IBM Corp. wants to migrate Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite to Linux. Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation."
Why use Microsoft Office when Open Office is getting so good?
eclecti.cc
Big Bleu cheese and WINE?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Last one using windows is a rotten egg!
Does this mean we'll finally get clippy?
WOOHOO!
the moment we've all been waiting for??
Too bad the leaked code wasn't Office's latest version.
Microsoft needs a way to sell massive mainframes running Linux, so they're porting over the biggest, most resource using, application ever: Microsoft Office.
They'd be better served by finding an existing project that doesn't emulate Windows and putting developers on it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yet more evidence of the fact that Microsoft's days are numbered. The reasons for various organizations staying with them are steadily being taken away, one by one. I'd like to see one of those counters like they have for various social events counting off the number of organizations that have decided to go with open source as an alternative to MS.
Alas, this is only a good thing. Microsoft isn't wholly evil, they have just become something along those lines due to their position in the marketplace. Some competition capable of putting the fear of God into them will do nothing but improve things for everyone.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
we already have that. WINE!!!
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I'm seriously questioning the validity of this article. It says an IBM spokesman said they got access to parts of Microsoft code. Something I believe is very unlikely given the IBM's purpose. And on the contrary Microsoft denies any involvement.
Not that I don't hope it would be true...
they certainly wouldn't need to do it by emulation should there be another source leak....*cough*
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Will Microsoft try to sabotage this by "upgrading" Office in future versions to things that are difficult to "emulate" or include a clause in the EULA that says "You may not run this with a compatibility wrapper" or Linux or anything else? I could see this happening.
IBM tried to emulate Win16 application compatibility with its OS/2. As a result, nobody cared developing application of OS/2 as such. IMHO, emulation is a dead-end branch of development in this case.
For some reason (probably licensing issues with Sun) or compatibility with the rest of MS office document base, IBM does not want to develop OpenOffice or Corel WordPerfect Suit. I am just wondering - have they given up on their Lotus completely then?
I hope they DON'T go the "emulation" route - i.e. WINE
While WINE is a nice attempt to make a Win32 compatability layer, it is just too flakey to be used in a day-to-day business sense. IBM has used WINE before for providing Linux apps - HomePage Builder comes to mind immediately - and it was NEVER stable. Display problems, startup flakeness, and just general unstableness made the product truely painful to use.
If they want to do it right - and impress people at the same time, they should make a NATIVE APP
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
If Microsoft is not involved and is not providing any source code or detailed internal specs, the only reason IBM could provide a superior office suite to that offered by OpenOffice.org is a simple resourcing issue. IBM has a great deal of money and programming expertise to throw at such an effort. With this in mind, why wouldn't IBM simply become a greater contributor to the OpenOffice.org effort?
What could IBM achieve on it's own that they could not achieve in colaboration with OpenOffice.org? This whole effort seems rather strange and somewhat poorly thought out.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
It looks like you are trying to build your kernel, would you like me to help?
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
The /. community should be rallying behind this. IBM tends to deliver and it's becoming more apparent than they see an IT world without Microsoft.
Revenge can be sweet (OS/2).
If they can port Office without help from Microsoft, maybe they could also implement compatibility with open standards.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
A big name has seen what linux has to offer. It doesn't cost them anything and people are willing to accept it, or even want it. Why pay for windows on a machine that will just be formatted once the customer gets his hands on it. On the other hand, if they want it, they can put it on themselves, and less problems arise. It's win/win.
How about Crossover Office by CodeWeavers. You can run the full Office suite including Outlook and Access. It works VERY VERY well. Better than running on Windows actually.
"It suits us fine the Microsoft and Sun fight about office application suites. We stay away from that. The reason we don't collaborate with Sun is that they're too small," said Pettersson.
The only problem is that 90% of the office users Think that they need MS Office to be productive. About 2% of those users actually use any of the 'features' or even much more than Word. Most people don't know how to set up a macro or even what a macro is or does. THe only thing that is keeping 100% interoperability from happening is the fact that Visual Basic is proprietary and can not be ported to linux at all. now if someone could develope a wrapper that would have the speed and functionality to be able to use Windows macros then Open Office would stand a chance.
Without that, the whole Office software couldn't be properly integrated.
To make Linux inferior and totally broken we need it! Port it to Linux! Finish your work, IBM, buy SCO and be friends again with Microsoft!
Dinosaurs are large.
And they don't collaborate with other animals because they are smaller.
That's why they don't exist anymore.
Yeah, this is great news and it only proves that IBM's in it for real. IBM is also creating a _desktop_ version of Linux - Blue Linux. It's not out yet, but PC Magazine's John Dvorak has already seen it.
HERE's the PC magazine article about it.
Oh, how many posts are now being composed in how many minds that state that IBM has now betrayed the FOSS Movement by not acknowledging the greatness of OpenOffice? How dare they!?
Come on, people, calm down. If IBM is doing this, they're acknowledging what everyone without ideological blinders admits: until OpenOffice can write a file that's 100% compatible with its Office equivalent, it won't make any headway. MS is too entrenched at this point. I can hear those same people as above screaming about Linux, but it's also a different battleground being fought in the office suite theater than in the desktop OS one. It's a hearts, minds, and heads battle rather than an economic one (which is the only argument that has been proven effective on non-tech types when it comes to converting systems to Linux). We've all heard the stories about the intransigent secretaries. That's where the fight will take place, and it's going to be a much harder battle that needs a much more polished product.
I'm hoping that IBM realizes that it owns Lotus and uses that particular brand for this effort. It still has some cachet in corporate circles.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
I positively agree. If IBM wants to put effort in Office products, they should contribute to Open Office, instead helping MS porting their product.
It is ways more clever to help making an MS compatible free office suit alternative but to subsidize a monopoly.
Now since openoffice is already pretty far developed, a vote for supporting this product at least, koffice could need some more support either. MS does not need any support at all.
If IBM want to put effort in windows emulation, they should support wine. I'd definitely love to run tomb raider on my linux box.
Crossover Office has been great for me on my laptop. I work at a plant with 1000 Microsoft users and they can't write a five-word meeting notice without putting it in a Word document. For the sub-$60 license fee, it has been worth every penny. I keep Star Office going on my Sun and Ooffice on my desktop linux system, but more often than not, they can't properly open MS documents. Yes, it would be great if I could convince a billion dollar company to convert all its employees to Ooffice, and convince all our vendors and customers to convert, and convince all the technical organizations to use Ooffice presentation software at the conferences. But instead, I just paid the $60 and got back to work.
Can someone who has the sourcecode to MS Office please post it on the internet? Thanks.
IBM already offers Lotus Notes to its employees using Linux via WINE -- available for download by employees as part of its C4EB (Client for e-Business). They call it NUL (Notes Under Linux).
I have no special knowledge to substantiate this, but I expect they would take the same approach to accomplish this; it would certainly fit the pattern. In the end, we could see a substantially improved WINE as a result.
In the original swedish article it's written that Microsoft believes that IBM probably is working on a Terminal Emulation solution, not a emulation solution.
I have to say that MS getting work done for them is a little unsettling. However, the problem is not A Decent Office Suite For Linux. We have at least a usable one, OpenOffice, though it isn't utopian.
The problem is A Decent Office Suite For Linux That Can Interoperate Flawlessly With Microsoft Office. There's a lot of content out there in Office format, and having darn near perfect support for the format is important for any adopters.
May we never see th
Embrace, Extend, ...
These IBM and Microsoft Reps must come pre-made or something... Petterson... Perrson... come on, too many similarities there. They must buy from the same company.
i would view it as contaminating the linux operating system with MS's foreign programming techniques and bugs
And this, my friends, is the attitude that keeps Linux off the desktop.
There's a word for it: elitism.
You must REALLY hate WINE.
Having said that, it would be nice if a huge company like IBM would get behind a project like OO or KOffice, but the economics of the situation make that look like a very remote possibility. Unforrunately, we have to live in corporate reality when dealing with corporations, no matter how angelic they may seem (this year, anyway).
I can't believe no one has pointed this out yet:
From the article:
"Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation."
IBM:"..But we're working together with Microsoft, who have provided us with part of their code. We've worked together like that previously."
So Microsoft isn't working with IBM but IBM is working with Microsoft because MS has provided them with part of their code. Hmm does MS have split personalities or something?
btw, what is a PHB?
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=phb
patiently waiting for more Eureekas...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Check out:
http://vigor.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
I see this is yet one more area where emacs is lagging behind vi;-)
Have a look at Codeweavers Crossover Office.
It's a commercial Wine derivative that allows running a lot of Windows apps, including the full Microsoft Office suite.
And Office works extremely well. In fact... even better than Openoffice. Startup time is shorter than Openoffice. Rendering is good and fast. Compatibility is of course perfect.
{{.sig}}
Note that the article is saying that IBM wants to migrate Office to Linux. Not "give away for free". We'd still be paying monopolistic prices for it.
Velox Versutus Vigilans
Stefan Pettersson, technical manager for IBM's Lotus division in Sweden, said that there will be a Java client of Lotus Notes some time during the second half of 2004. This means that the first "native" Notes client to run under Linux will soon be available.
How exactly is that "native? I'm sorry, but a java version is only native to that weird Sun java cpu that never made it out of production... it's nothing more than emulation for a machine that doesn't actually exist.
The more software that can run on Linux, no matter the pedigree, implementation or emulation, the better.
What keeps you from foisting a Linux Desktop on the secretary isn't her ability to figure out the interface. Hell, my mom handles BlueCurve on a RedHat box like no one's business. The secretary needs an Office suite that opens Office docs and spreadsheets.
I love OpenOffice. I am writing my dissertation with it. But until OOrg can really open and manage Office file formats (including Macros in spreadsheets) then it will just be ours, not theirs.
Because the only software that will be 100% compatible with Microsoft Office is Microsoft Office.
Are you sure? Even between diferent versions of MS Office I usualy have some compatibility problems.
What of the recent announcement that office 'just works' under WINE? I tried the newest version of wine and office certainly doesn't work, but if the report from wineconf is true then the 60 dollar codeweaver software might go the way of the dodo and give IBM a headstart into doing this.
the ONLY reason to port MSOffice instead of just use openoffice is because you have already written office macros or extensions in VB and don't wanna rewrite em. other than that, its a total waste of time, since OO.o is more stable anyway. i CAN see the attraction in this for some businesses, because they dont wanna re-do their stuff, but what we REALLY want, is a open source port of VB, and then integrate it into OO.o
-ted
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
We'll, since Indian programmers are so cheap, and there are zillions of them, why doesn't IBM just hire a whole bunch of them there and re-write MS office from scratch.
Probably wouldn't cost that much, especially since they are moving all their software development there from the states anyhow so all the infrastructure to do this is already...
They would create a cross-platform Office program that is better then OpenOffice. OpenOffice is what I use, but I can say without a doubt it has some major flaws. If IBM created one that could compete with Office and was opensource, and then cheap or free for the binary, it might start being used. Just porting a really horrible office program isn't going to appeal to most linux users, it is also going to support M$ more. This is not the right direction for IBM to go, and I for one hope this project is stopped.
Mabye IBM ( & others ) thinks Open Office is to S--L--O--W, big, unweildy etc etc.
It could be a good thing for OO as it might convince them to clean up their code( get the lead out ).
Steve
maybe that has got to do with Sun's suggestion to IBM regarding a Linux desktop, they "offered" in a open letter the Java (Linux) desktop ready to go on their homepage for a few weeks ago.
And since IBM wants to be the leader of the pack...
Why is there after so many years still not a Lotus notes client for Linux? Why jump on MS to port office then?
As if OOo isn't bloated. It runs at about half the speed Office does on my computer. Besides that, what you view as bloat is FUNCTIONALITY to someone else. 90% of people will only use 10% of Office's capabilities, but those 90% will all use a different 10%.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
and IBM really has Ofice for linux, it will make a huge impact on windows sales. Most of the reason Microsoft is able to sell it's other products is because of office. Once office is liberated from windows, most everything else will become irrelevant. Microsoft's decline from leader to just a player will accelerate. contrary to what some believe, they will be around a long time. But their role will change and their fortunes will diminish. Even if Bill and Steve don't know much about technology, they know their business.
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft": REM Slashdot limits subject length, and Penny-Arcade authors have probably never coded in BASIC
To expand on what the others have mentioned: OpenOffice.org not only will handle documents from different versions of M$ Word better than the current version of M$ Word but also will often read corrupted M$ Word documents that make M$ Word crash. Seriously, people have reported here on Slashdot that they use OO.o as a recovery tool for .doc files.
If those Indian programmers are as good as Indian tech support, the Office software they create will be loaded with bugs and full of security holes... That will be a perfect port after all.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Office's ubiquity is why OO and KOffice are pretty much doomed. If IBM can port Office and retain all of the functionality without dragging it down to OO level slowness, why not do it? No more whining about not being able to open .DOC files, unless you're RMS.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
is openoffice really that slow? i use kword and it seems alright, works fine. but fiddly sometimes, but still. is it an openoffice variant?
Available here: vigor.sf.net
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
In business, its all about money. (More on this later).
Can MS-Office be ported to Linux technically? I would say yes, because they were able to make a Mac OS X port, which has BSD-Unix underpinnings. Pretty much anything than can be done on BSD can be done on Linux. So no great feat of technology would be involved on getting MS-Office ported to Linux.
Now lets talk about why MS would or would not want to do this. If enough of a market existed (read: Corporate customers clamoring for a native Linux port), MS might have an opportunity to retain those customers (and maybe get a few new customers) and make some money doing it. So there is an opportunity for them there in the office suite market. The danger is this: MS-Office & MS-Windows are mutually supporting monopolies in the corporate world. . As long as Office effectively requires Windows, every corporate desktop sold with Office almost guarantees an accompanying windows license. So double the revenue for M$. A native Linux version of MS-Office would undermine Windows. Once Windows is undermined, then Office itself might be jeopardized because they are mutually supporting.
A native Linux port of MS-Office is just too much of a threat to the MS monopoly structure. MS knows this, so such a port will never see the light of day.
Netcraft confirms?
Ironically, except in a few situations, IBM is a very anti-MS Office shop. Those people who work for IBM have had to live with the Lotus Suite of tools for everything they do.
As a former IBMer, I find it hard to believe they would give any support at all to MS Office. Then again, it's a big corporation. This could be a case of some department breaking with company normality.
-ALinux
...that mentioned that if linux got big, big enough that MS couldn't ignore it, it would THEN have to provide software for the OS so as to not lose sales.
Jonathanjk.com
But it's actually a lightbulb instead of a paperclip.
Even though a FREE alternative is available, you're still bitching about MS making money! What's wrong with you? Is it not OK to make money these days? Are only Indians allowed to make money on programming?
when handing a PPT to a client, the last thing one needs is a rendering issue.
Adobe and Aladdin make products for that. Look up Acrobat and Ghostscript.
Maybe some of you guys still remember this article on Microsoft's presence at LinuxWorld Expo. It suggests that if Microsoft would have announced a Linux port of Office it would have meant the end of Linux.
At one point I thought I saw a clause in one of the Microsoft EULA's that would prohibit usage of MSO ( and related products ) on anything other then a legally licensed Microsoft OS...
...
This issue was brought up on a wine list I believe... But since you can't legally reproduce the EULA, it might not be an issue now anyway, or it might have been a beta.. etc
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's worth noting that the Lotus source code could be compared to a 200 line "Hello World" in GW-BASIC. From what I've heard it's a mess, and maintaining it would be more difficult than scrapping it (The reason it was "ported" with WINE).
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Since we already have a version for OS X ( a unix like system ) , It might not be so difficult to create a port to linux (another unix like system).
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
Yes.
Kword is a totally seperate project.
Steve
Yee, but I cannot live without Clippy. From CodeWeavers site: "One thing that does not quite work though is Clippy. While it runs well enough for a screenshot it will cause Word to misbehave. This is why it is disabled by default."
MySQL Error 1040: Can't return sig, Too many connections!
I believe MS already uses programmers from India.
MS Office is allready running in a UNIX environement (MacOS X). So IBM could also port not the win32 version but well the MacOS X version. I m not sure that Apple would be extra happy but the Macintosh business Unit in Redmond could be interressed.
What is the best solution:
I think the second solution could have some advantage for IBM but It will not allow an transition from MS Windows to linux for 95 % of the population who runs on x86
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
The problem is A Decent Office Suite For Linux That Can Interoperate Flawlessly With Microsoft Office
That is a crutch...a band-aid...a solution that only sees the problem. An also-ran...why is the target always Office? Get away from that and focus on the target that Office presumably seeks.
What is needed is a total, up-front suite that works well and is cross-platform compatible while addressing the needs of the majority of users.
Anything else is just a bag on the side...
..."I did not have sex with that woman" (she had sex with me...)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, what they'll do is patent something in .NET that Mono needs to be able to run, thus rendering useless the whole thing, and the new .NET-ified applications unrunnable. Some people here were born yesterday. M$ is like the IBM of old. IBM is like the IBM of old....
Stick Men
ibm will probably just steal the MS office code like they stole that SCO code...
*wink*
contaminating the linux operating system with MS's foreign programming techniques and bugs
There was something very similar mentioned here on slashdot the other day:
Microsoft Brings Security Holes to the Mac
Maybe I'm missing something tearingly obvious here... but everyone seems to be assuming either an emulation layer or totally rewriting the Windows version of Office.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to start from the version written for OSX?
I was using Knoppix the other day, and i mean, it has come a long way, so has linux. 5 mins and boot into linux on the go? could you do that with windows? im not sure if you could, but just having that ability is great. IBM seems like a leader in the movement to convert to linux, but i know that dell has a linux developement unit. I mean, if IBM changes the world thinks about opearting systems (or atleast the ones that use windows), then maybe we freed from the grip of microsoft.
Visual Basic is proprietary and can not be ported to linux at all
You say it as if it were a bad thing..
When they bought Lotus, they acquired Lotus SmartSuite, the MS Office "competitor" that included Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Word Pro, and some other software Personally I worked for Lotus for years and tried to avoid this software at all costs.
Lotus Word Pro (originally Ami Pro) was an OK word processor with Word import/export filters, but it never reached the level of MS Word compatibility required for seamless interoperability.
Regards,
Dan
This is some guy that's trying to make an impression for a pet project of his, not global IBM strategy. I bet he's in for some angry phone calls from various people, including his boss who'll likely be pestered as to why one of his subordinates is talking to the press about things that isn't his business.
The reason Microsoft hasn't heard anything is probably because he's been talking to people at his level in Microsoft, who has no authority to make any real decisions, just as this guy is unlikely to have.
Has IBM never heard of Crossover Office? Part of my job requires me to use Excel every day. I tried using the OOO spreadsheet program, but the formulas I was using in the spreadsheet (nothing beyond addition and division) weren't moving back and forth properly, and our customers use Excel.
I have a shortcut to Excel on my Gnome toolbar. It's that simple.
Repent, for the Apocalypse is nigh!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I really am just throwing out ideas here, but the mention of Java made me wonder if this has something to do with C#/CLR/Mono.
Maybe a future version of Office is being developed on the CLR platform, and IBM is trying to get it to work on Mono?
It's a long shot, I know, but not completely impossible.
ok this really sucks!!
now people will think "oh ibm preferred ms office on linux, so maybe it IS better than OOo".
things like this matter for the public opinion... OOo is a damn good office suite, there is NO need for M$ Office in here.
If they want support for more stuff, why dont they help OOo development?
Now if they'd only create a native Lotus Notes client port, then I'd be really happy.
I do tell anyone that is sending me any document to save it as an rtf file or I will not take it. Not can't. (I could easily fire up Office on the mac), but won't.
I don't want (crappy) user formatting for the stuff they send me (I layout books among other things) - and these 'authors' want to bold and italisise everything, not to mention giant 96pt Comic Sans titles and headings.
I'm all for powerful word processing, but not at the cost of readabillity, usabillity, and compatabillity.
The first is the 'authors' fault. The rest is Microsoft's.
I like to do my part to ensure interoperabillity. :)
codeweavers already ported office to Linux via their crossover plugin. But then again ,who cares? I'm much happier with OpenOffice
-Cnik
That's called trying to have one's cake and eat it too. Once they edit the slides you've given them, they'll create their own rendering issues and blame you. I can see no other way to close off possibility of rendering issues in a Microsoft Office document than to close off editability. Besides, in slides distributed to the public, do you really want them editable?
Oh wait, Java is compiled into byte codes which aren't recognized by any CPU except the Java Virtual Machine
Not always. See GCJ.
whereas the C "byte codes" map right up to processor instruction sets (object code or executable).
I consider x86 executable code "bytecode" because half of the non-cache die area in a modern x86 CPU is spent translating x86 bytecode to instructions that the processor understands. Other architectures have much smaller decoders. Do you create a distinction between instruction decoders implemented in hardware and instruction decoders implemented in software? If so, how do you justify this distinction, given the existence of hybrid instruction-decoding methods such as Transmeta's Code Morphing technology?
C is an easier to use assembly language.
OK, granted, bad example. Please substitute "C++".
Or here's another line of thought that more closely relates to what I was really trying to say in my reply to your comment: I do not find "nativeness" a useful end goal in and of itself. Once loaded, modern Java platform runtimes can achieve low execution times without your precious "nativeness." What benefit do you find in "nativeness"?
Besides, in slides distributed to the public, do you really want them editable?
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. If the client is paying you to construct a template, prototype, baseline plan, or somesuch, they are paying you, specifically, for something they can edit. They may introduce rendering issues when they do, but at least you have given them a clean start.
In a mixed-OS organization there will be Exchange servers and decision makers that demand Outlook, especially its scheduling/meeting/groupware. OO doesn't come with a mail client, let alone a MAPI aware Exchange compatible one.
... "The reason we don't collaborate with Sun is that they're too small," ...
<sarcasm>Yeah, Sun is not a player.</sarcasm> How big do you have to be for IBM to collaborate with you?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
It's true! Just try these two simple searches:
link:www.microsoft.com
link:www.slashdot.org
Google returns about 124,000 sites that link to Microsoft, and about 171,000 that link to Slashdot!
This is undeniable PROOF that people who actually matter (i.e. webmasters) care more about Slashdot than Microsoft!
> 90% of the office users Think that they need MS Office to be productive.
This is patently false. I've yet to come across a single user that wants to be productive. As long as he/she doesn't have to do anything new, it's OK.
There is an episode where Homer goes to clown school and there is much madcap as everybody confuses them.
With great power comes great fan noise.
I just downloaded the CodeWeavers CrossoverOffice libraries, and holy cow -- it really works. I need to be able to run Microsoft Word occasionally within my organization (Word is, unfortunately, the very best group document development package I've found, largely because of the annotation and change tracking capabilities), and in the past I've either dual-booted or used VMWare to get into M$ Office, but Wine/Codeweavers runs it natively. Apparently, the free Wine will run Office just fine if you use native Losedows DLLs that you copy over from your Losedows installation.
One thing that I have been wondering for forever is why IBM has never open sourced Lotus Smartsuite and ported it to Linux. It is a nice little office suite and in my opinion far superior to OpenOffice.
I don't understand the people who are saying open office is so great. I use the latest version (which has been the latest version for a while) and I don't see anything particularly interesting. Maybe in 2.0?
IBM wants to port MS Office to Linux because IBM wants to sell Linux desktops. Bingo! Sun is selling their "java" desktop. IBM can include in their desktop everything that Sun has on theirs plus the MS Office port. Many people like MS Office; many people think they need it. IBM wants to make money. MS makes a lot of money on their MAC Office port. If you had to use one which would be, a desktop with Office port or one without?
I know, the one without, blah blah blah....
It might not be as crazy as it sounds.
Let's assume IBM gets Office running 100% perfect on Linux. Doing so removes a HUGE barrier to Linux acceptance in business. Lots of organizations are actually married to Office more than they are to Windows. Let them keep their Office installations, but move them to Linux, and you end up decimating a huge piece of Microsoft's business.
I think this can be a very good thing.
Thanks a lot, IBM, for refusing to do this for OS/2 when it had millions of users. Idiots.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
kill -9 `ps -ef | grep -i clippy | awk '{print $2}'`
I think ciaran_o_riordan has the right take on this. When proprietary software is running (say, by emulation) there is little desire to pursue software freedom.
This is partially because of the ethics the open source movement teaches--practical ends are the goal, not software freedom. When an open source program won't do the job, that movement gives one no reason to reject proprietary alternatives. Ironically, that means the open source movement's philosophy can sometimes advocate for software that is not open source. Once the desire or need for a program is sated, very little interest exists to write an open source replacement.
The free software movement, by contrast, does not have this built-in problem in its philosophy. Non-free software is rejected because (as the name says) it doesn't have the freedoms of free software--put briefly, the freedoms to share and modify the software.
It's not surprising to me that IBM would champion this. The open source movement was started to speak to business desires and it's doing an excellent job of that, even if it means giving up software freedom to achieve that end. Open source software can be a genuine contribution to our community when its advocates work on free software. I'm grateful that many open source advocates do this (IBM, for example, has contributed work to the Linux kernal under the GPL). But this is not always the case.
Digital Citizen
How about opensourcing the M$/WordPerfect format code?
Or has OSS xlation already surpassed Lotus' own Word/Excel format?
(then again, I'd rather have an OpenOffice Charter that can take over for Visio, use XML, and be integratable into an SNMP net monitoring system.. Oh, and it must at least read/write visio XML...)
About 2% of those users actually use any of the 'features' or even much more than Word
And how many Openoffice users use the vast majority of features available in Openoffice? I agree with you that few people use most features, however that is generally the case with a lot of software.
I don't agree with you that most users of MS Office feel they need the product to be productive. I'd bet there are more users than not who have *no choice* but to use MS Office where they work or software has been purchased that hooks into MS Office and *only* that office suite.
Sure, I personally don't use ms office, or office-type software like OOo - but what about all those messy excel/vba-kludges out there in businesses? (somewhat bad) solutions to problems that are expensive to re-solve.
another thread, since someone else had made a comment about IBM porting Office to Linux.
I've heard rumors within IBM (about several months ago) that they already have a hacked version of Office running on Linux! This came from an employee who has supposedly seen it.
I am not so interested in the leaked win2k code. There is nothing there that would be useful to anyone. I wouldn't want Linux/BSD tainted with that garbage. However, I would LOVE to see Office code leaked. If we could get those file formats.... mmmmmmm. Microsoft would be up Shit Creek.
Fucked up mods, that's no troll!
I bet my left egg the mods who moderated that troll works at Redmond!
> And this, my friends, is the attitude that keeps Linux off the desktop.
:-)
Please... Even though I agree that we need to be pragmatic in order to get OSS onto the desktops around the world, I also get a little tired of people trowing around absolutes (especially while complaining about other people being elitists). Just because you dont like the attitude, it doesnt mean that linux would be on desktops everywhere if it werent because of it.
There are probably many many many reasons why linux is only on the desktops of a few percents of people.
Is it the attitudes of OSS people?
Is it the fact that linux doesnt come preinstalled?
Is it because linux needs program X?
Is it because linux needs more company support?
Is it because of the inertia of companies.
Is it something else?
My feeling is that it is a mixture of the above.
But with luck, patience and hard work we will of course overcome those in time
It could be proof of ongoing antitrust violations. Lets say IBM releases a special version of WINE that lets you run Microsoft Office on Linux. Then let's say Microsoft goes to the EU and says "it's all open standards, we don't have any unfair advantages or hidden APIs!". The EU can then go, bullshit, look at all of the extra crap that Wine had to do to make Office run on Wine. If Office were using the open standards, Office would work on vanilla wine. ...
Whoa.. wait.. now I'm kind of getting stuck on this thought. Vanilla wine. What would that *taste* like? Vanilla vodka is pretty good but vanilla wine sounds questionable.
Kinda like "Who's not with us, is against us!" ?
Why are there people so narrow-minded to think open and closed software can't play along?
All these companies work pretty (*very*) hard (yeah, yeah... even MS, else they wouldn't be where they are today) at making software in a market where there's so much competition. God forbid they get paid for their time efforts, right?
And even if you've ment "open" with "unfree": not giving away your source seems like a pretty good way of not having your competition having the same edge you have.
Don't get me wrong: I really like the Open Source model because it gives software the chance to grow beyond the limits of propietary software, but it doesn't make 'em enemies.
I have been running Office 97 and several other Windows programs under Red Hat 9 Linux at home. Codeweavers makes CrossOver Office which has wine enhancements that make it possible to use Office 97 and several other Windows programs under Linux. Those few Windows programs have been stable and have never crashed on my computer.
c e/ supported_apps/
The Office 97 runs well under Linux but,I have noticed a couple of minor bugs. They are very minor and only occur when I try moving the same document back and forth between Windows and Linux. For instance, with Word 97 I have told it to print 10 copies of a documnet that was originally created with Word 2003 under Windows and it would only print 1 document. I ended up having to press the printer icon 10 times to get 10 copies. That bug never occurs when I originally created the document with Word 97 under Linux.
When using Excel 97 under Linux I also ran into a minor bug. I started with a spreadsheet that I created with Excel 2000 under Windows ME. Then after importing it into Excel 97 under Linux I started to modify the spreadsheet. I had trouble modifying the formula in one cell and ended up having to delete that formula and re-enter it. I then also found that in the modified cell I could not precisely match the original font that Word 2000 under Windows had used for all the other cells.
That may or may not be good enough for business use. I have had good results running Word 97, Excel 97, Powerpoint 97, Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and WinZip under Linux. I do not use those programs every day so perhaps there might be another bug or two that I have not yet uncovered. CrossoverOffice also provides an easy to use front end to wine for installing those programs. Here is a link to the list of Windows applications that CrossoverOffice supports:
http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/cxoffi
It means 'Microsoft', not 'Mdollar'
The name of a string variable in 8-bit BASIC ends in a dollar sign. Thus, M$ is the name of a string variable that tepples assigned to hold the string "Microsoft". If you don't know much about 8-bit BASIC, you can read more here.
Kids these days, growing up on Python and not knowing what it feels like to program in real 8-bit BASIC.
Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation.
Mmm, yes. That worked out so well for IBM in the past. I'm sure Mr. Gates is laughing his ass off. (Cue maniacal laughter)
If the client is paying you to construct a template
I forgot about that use case. But if one is creating a new template, isn't it feasible to do the whole thing in OO.o from the start? And which rendering issues have you found in PPT files exported from OO.o?
I gotta echo the other guy, OpenOffice.org 1.1 really is that slow. I use it when I need to open a document that kword can't deal with, but otherwise ignore it because it is so slow. (My computer isn't fast though) Now that there is a new version of kWord I'm interesting in if it is enough better than I can uninstall OpenOffice.
I agree, but not for flamewarring purposes. I tried Gnome for awhile, and generally got a feeling of dissatisfaction with GTK. It's more annoying to theme, and doesn't play well with others. QT has a much more modern design and much more potential.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Not to mention, Sun SUCKS. I hate their, 'now we like Linux, now we don't' attitude.
so we are going to get virii too
SHE does throw dice.
try latest version. Staroffice 7 is lots faster than previous versions. The pain is gone! (and I'm free from windows now)
"Blue Linux" does not exist. What we have is Linux Client for E-Bussiness (C4EB), a Linux RH9 desktop that includes IBM apps such as a Lotus Sametime (an excellent Instant Messaging program) client, a Lotus Notes client (Windows version) running under WINE, and a few other things useful in the IBM Intranet.
There are about 20,000 users or so at the moment, and the IBM Linux desktop community is very active. The IBM CIO is extremely supportive: whenever we see a boneheaded internal site requiring MS IE only or other such atrocities, we report it and the Office of the CIO puts pressure on the site's maintainers to toe the line and support Mozilla.
Bottom line: "Blue Linux" = customized RedHat 9. It's hardly our own distro. But IBM is not just promoting Linux and recommending it to customers. We're also eating our own dog food.
We are studying a migration to a Fedora-based C4EB.
IBM wants to make a version of Microsoft Office that runs on Linux. This does not necessarily mean that IBM is going to redistribute a modified version of Microsoft Office. IBM probably will create an emulation layer for Office. IBM's access to the MS Office codebase will just make the job easier. Virtual PC, for example, does just this and the copy of Windows 98 has to be sold separately and intactly.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Once the code is at the machine level, that is the "fastest" it will go regardless of the caching and decoding that occurs at the transistor level at the CPU. Hardware isn't as maleable as software is.
Then one might argue against considering x86 machine code strictly "native" because Transmeta's Code Morphing technology translates it into EPIC code for the CPU core to execute. What essential distinction do you find between code compiled to JVM bytecode and JIT recompiled to run on a common CPU and code compiled to x86 bytecode and JIT recompiled to run on a Crusoe CPU?
And would you consider Pong compiled to x86 instructions and running on a PC not in "native" instructions because Atari sold a popular version of Pong implemented entirely in discrete logic?
The additional layers (exception handling, garbage collection, etc) that are omnipresent in Java happen in software
C++'s exception handling and malloc() need just as much software support.
"Once loaded" and "can achieve" which I would easily rewrite as "may achieve" are the big problems.
"Once loaded": Any system, not just a JVM, needs to boot up. General purpose workstations don't start a graphical user application within one second of power-on either. And in fact, JVMs have become mature enough that "may achieve" means often does achieve.
nativeness doesn't suffer from the requirement of being all things (AWT,GC,Exceptions,OO,etc) to all people(byte code portable) at some higher meta level(even further away from the hardware).
Granted, but do you advocate writing PC applications directly for Win32 in assembly language rather than for some portable toolkit such as wxWindows, GTKmm, Qt, etc? Or do you approach this argument from the perspective of one developing video game engines for handheld devices, where every cycle does in fact count?
From http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/js-linu x.html
Schwarz: "[...] To help IBM with your transition, we can offer a desktop for every one of your employees - with a free right to use the desktop at home - for $50/employee. [...]"
He's talking about JDS. Just a part of the full article. Basically Schwarz offered something to IBM. It's also an open letter, which has a purpose too; the general public. Discussion, sells, etc.
IBM's quote you quoted can be an indirect reply to Sun. Hard to proof, easy to speculate.
PS: A lot people will agree with Schwarz' "I guess I just don't understand your Linux strategy." now.
IBM has taken Office 2000 and wrapped it up into an rpm (they alien'd fine) then distributes it with wine on the same disk. I got to play with it about a year ago. It ran just fine on my linux box once I was over the Shock and Horror that Word 2000 was running on Debian laptop.
ya, go on.. convincing yourself why you don't have jobs =)
If I were a normal company with a product and some company came along and offered to port my application to other platforms for free, I would most likely jump at the idea. However, if you had a monopoly on the desktop OS market and willing to use illegal tactics to guard your share, how would you behave?
MS may have stated in the past that the reason they don't port Office to Linux is that there is 'no demand'. Now with the Linux desktop share challenging the Mac share, thos arguments are being diluted. If IBM were to offer to port it for free, gee... seems like a great deal for any company... unless you are trying ot illegally maintain your monopoly of course.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
I have been an employee at IBM for three years. When I started, all the machines for employees came preloaded with Lotus SmartSuite. It was also preloaded with viewers for various Microsoft Office file formats. If you had a business need for writing Microsoft Office documents yourself, your department could buy a licence for you.
One year ago this changed. Now Office XP is part of the standard platform and is available for download for all employees (via an IBM intranet web-site where you can download all the software that is part of the standard platform) without additional charges for your department.
At least this is the situation for IBM in Europe (EMEA).
Astronomy 1&1: The sun only looks so small, because it is so far away.
In fact, it's rather large!
The only good thing of M$ is, that it loads really fast.
After you install MS Office, Windows loads big portions of it during Windows boot. So your initial boot takes longer, but then your Office apps launch quickly. This tradeoff makes sense for desktop systems with large amounts of RAM, which is all of them these days. But it kind of sucks for laptops, which are booted more often than desktops, and not always to run Office.
I have the Open Office Quickstart Applet running in my GNOME desktop, and this does the same trick for OO.o; large portions of OO.o are preloaded for me. On my laptop, I don't run that. I like having the choice.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
MOD UP!! Really interesting!!
One could make the analogy that this is a similar situation if the government charged an entrance fee to public buildings.
I work at a bank, we do not allow the use of Access for multi-user systems because Access has a tendancy to self-destruct when more then 1 person is using it ...
t able/ap ps/KDE3.x/office/kexi-1.0beta2-update1-win32.exe
You are MUCH better off to get a copy of MySQL and use Kexi (http://www.kexi-project.org/) as you Access like GUI design tool....
Kexi 1.0Beta2 for Win32
http://www.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde/uns
Great - they wasted millions on OS/2 and Windows emulation with Microsoft swapping and changing API's, now they want to try Office.
it would be extremely cost ineffective to switch to OO because it is free but pay a consultant $2k for a couple of weeks work
If you have more than about five Microsoft Office licenses, paying a consultant to translate your scripts may in fact prove less expensive than paying Microsoft for the next version.
The Mainframe is really quite unlike any microcomputer architecture in the way it deals with IO (devices can actually talk to each other directly, I believe)
Devices on a SCSI or FireWire bus can talk to one another without help from a "master" device. So if your external hard drive, your DVD burner, and your DV camcorder use a FireWire bus, does that make your computer a mainframe?
(somewhat bad) solutions to problems that are expensive to re-solve.
Is it more expensive to port the solutions to OO.o's scripting or to license the next two versions of Microsoft Office throughout your organization?
It's too late. Office is too big and too old. Any change will wreck something else. Not least, because core aspects of its behaviour were never documented, even within MS.
that need more features and support?
Come on IBM support OpenOffice or some other open source productivity suite instead of supporting another port of the same ol junk. May throw some programmers at OpenOffice if you don't want to donate money. But at least try to support the Open Source community in more way than just using it.
I have had many clients ask for an alternative to MSAccess and I'd love to recommend OpenOffice and it's data query ability. But currently it just doesn't seem to be up to spec compared with MSAccess.
IBM just couldn't resist putting the biting "Sun too small" remark. Hillarious.
No more whining about not being able to open .DOC files, unless you're RMS.
Or you're on a workstation that isn't x86 or PowerPC. Or unless you're at home and poor. Even if IBM manages to get Microsoft Office for Windows and Microsoft Office for Mac to run under API translation with no visible flaws, that won't make a Microsoft Office license any cheaper.
Don't forget that this is the same Microsoft who cooperated with the same IBM over OS/2: The Next MS-DOS, then walked away in favor of its own Windows NT: The Next VMS, bashing the OS/2 it once supported as the bastard child of a dinosaur company.
.mdb files.
IBM may be slow to catch on to a lot of things, but I believe their OS/2 wounds are still not healed enough yet that they trust the "Micro"computer-"Soft"ware behemoth farther than they can throw it.
IBM-supported Linux systems might be made to run Microsoft Office with IBM's blessing, but only as a small spite to MS. IBM might be philosophically able to bless such a configuration (MS-Office on Linux), but Microsoft never could. Microsoft Windows will rest in peace next to Microsoft Bob, before you ever see Microsoft Office for any OS Microsoft hasn't invested in.
A true spite would be an OOo install option to be completely MS-compatible, including load/save defaults.
On something of a sidenote, using the integrated database front-end allows more possibilities than embedded (and inadequate) Access
That's because Microsoft Word takes some of its page formatting cues from the characteristics of your default printer. If you take your Microsoft Word document to another computer with the same version of Microsoft Word but a different make and model of printer, the formatting won't look the same.
If you want page breaks to appear at given places, then insert page breaks. Don't press Enter a dozen times until the cursor happens to be on a particular page.
What do you regularly print that is so sensitive to hairline differences in margins?
I've tried many times over the years to switch to OO, but people keep sending me documents that use the 2% you refer to. I use very few of the features in office, but that really doesn't matter if I can't view or print your documents correctly, does it?
Something that would solve this problem much of the time was software PDF generation from Windows. But there's no way I know of to do that without paying somebody (Adobe, that shareware guy, or Apple, where PDF generation is included in the OS).
There's no way on Earth we can send a spec out to a client for sign off, for example, if there's a possibility that it won't render correctly.
Do you want the client to edit the spec before signing off? If not, OpenOffice.org can export PDF, and any computer with the no-charge Adobe Reader can read and print PDF. Yes, Adobe Reader is a separate download, but at least I'd guess it's already on an order of magnitude more Windows computers than OO.o is and possibly on more computers than even Microsoft Office itself.
Why not just pour the effort into openoffice? Using MS Office will just be a licensing mess later down the line. I'm sure MS will love to have parts of its codebase used in Linux so they can cause trouble like SCO is right now. Uptill now, Linux has been going much cleaner than BSD and has had few issues in the court, and noone could touch it legally.
openoffice can open Word Excel etc docs just fine, and if its streamlined further, optimised, ported everywhere etc, its already better than MS Office with about the same interface.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
There are reasons Linux hasn't seen mass desktop acceptance, configuration and application base among them. "Attitude" doesn't keep an OS of the desktop.
Wow. IBM is seriously twisting the lion's tail here. By saying, "Your flagship product will run on your competitor's OS, whether you like it or not" they're inviting MS' wrath. They're going to do anything they can to make this as hard as possible on IBM.
The question is, how much can MS do to integrate Office into Windows without running afoul of antitrust law? I'm all in favor of Microsoft being able to do anything they can to improve their products, but creating new Office features that hook deeply into Windows isn't going to go over well with the DoJ.
Word Viewer can be used with most Linux browsers if you also have the CrossOver Plugin installed. CrossOver Plugin is one of the two main products that Codeweavers make for running Windows stuff under Linux. They make one product for running Windows browser plug-ins and another product for running some versions of Microsoft Office. A person could download the viewer for free from Microsoft and then for $40 purchase CrossOver Plugin. Here is a link that mentions running Word Viewer under Linux:
i n/ supported_apps/
http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/cxplug
I agree that governemnts should not unnecessarily force everyone to use one companies propriatary format. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and they should never force anyone to use one of their products. Fortunately, I have seen more government documents in PDF format than in MS Word. Another thought I have is that a proprietary format that keeps changing every few years should also never be used for archival purposes. Decades or centuries from now a document that has survived and is in a widely used well documented open format could more easily be read. It would be best if governments stick to using formats such as PDF, XML and HTML because they can be used with any operating system.
No thanks
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
I have been working for IBM for almost a year now, and have yet to see a copy of MS Office anywhere in the facility. Granted it is easier to get a brand new computer than a copy of software, I find this interesting that IBM plans to "port" MS Office to Linux. They have been pushing Lotus products at our location, and rightly so. Of course Lotus does not seem to be in comparison with OpenOffice in terms of Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. So the only Lotus product I use is Notes. OpenOffice works so much better for me, and it is easier to get than a Corporate copy of Office in these settings. Why not improve on an already stellar office suite? Or at least endorse Lotus products for Linux!
Maybe they want to create a Linux anti-virus industry.
Stick Men
Of course, if the format was open, you'd just be able to write the document yourself (like as XML) and then tell the engine to go ahead and print it.
I'm no DBA, but I know enough to design a proper database and write applications that use said database, but what I simply don't have time for is creating data-entry forms, generating reports, etc. Someone else does that. Someone else using MS Access. He's just barely "computer literate," but using Access he creates very nice reports and data-entry forms.
There's a whole book on creating data-entry apps for MySQL, using C/C++ and GTK. Yeah, I have time for that shit. I have 30 other projects that need to be done yesterday; I think I'll continue to let the windows-weenie handle everything but actually designing the databases.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
An option that isn't an option is a spec. A 'fixed' spec.
If I were IBM, I would stick to Open Office.
It's already so similar, stable, and well done, it's worthwhile to invest. Here's what I see it needing:
- Good Mac OS X port (get Apple on it's side)
- Some UI polish, needs graphics, UI cleanup, streamlining
- Slight improvements to compatibility with MS Office, especially Power Point.
It's already a pretty solid product. It's got some great bonuses (free PDF output for example). What it needs is some cleanup.
IBM could easily provide this. Then have an MS free product that could help bring Linux to the desktop.
Apple would be wise to invest in this as well I might add. Get rid of more MS dependancy.
Apple's UI experience would be good as well.
PDF documents would definately be a better choice than Word documents for government use. Adobe has free PDF viewers for Windows, Linux, Mac, Symbian OS, Palm OS, and Pocket PC. Most Linux distros come with xpdf. Some Linux newbies may not realize xpdf is there because it is not listed in the menu. It can be started from the command line by typing xpdf.
To create and edit a PDF file Windows users have at least one choice besides Adobe. The OfficeReady PDF Edition software will create PDF files from Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. I believe that Adobe owns the PDF format and that it probably is not an open standard. But, at least PDF viewers are available for free for most operating systems. That can not be said about Word. From what I have seen PDF files seem to be common on government websites.
The only drawback to PDF is Windows users need to download the free viewer the first time they view a PDF document. Some inexperienced users might hesitate to do that. In that case using a document in Word format might be OK if the PDF version is also available right next to it.
IBM already owns its very own office suite would only really need to make it work on Linux http://lotus.com/products/product2.nsf/wdocs/sshom e .
It already has MS Office Compatibility and it has a MS Access like program called lotus Approach. Then again Kexi is already being distributed with the PL version of Open Office. What I don't understand is why IBM could not at least help out with some Lotus Approach code to improve Kexi. Also Open Office already has an MS Access filter for Access 97 and partial filter for MS Access 2000.
Seriously, as low desktop computers cost from Dell, HP, ECT are shipping with a stripped vesrsion of WP anyhow I don't understand why IBM doesn't do something simular with Lotus??
Although to be honest the MS Office thing is an HR issue matching KSAs and the amount of people who list on their resume that they know MS Office, although 98% of them are lying and its more acurate to state that they have seen MS Office, can open MS Word , and type into it. Regardless its a PHB issue, as a high level of generalization occurs across Word Processing, E-Mail, and Spreadsheet applications anyhow in otherwords if you can work in one you can work in any of them. To be honest you could probably replace MS Office with another office suite and just give it the MS office Icons and tell the PHB and underlings its the newest version of MS Office and they will believe you and work in it.
IBM could gain a lot of office sales by porting Office to Linux. Let's face it. StarOffice/OpenOffice is good but MS Office is a far surperior product and the lack of MS Office is probably one of the key obstacle of Linux Desktop adaption.
Currently, IBM is the only company with the right image, business and technical ability to leverage such porting. If the Office for Linux comes from MS, it creates a headache for MS marketing. Novell? Few would believe the products would last. IBM on the other hand, has the right image, the open source friendly image. Once IBM finish the port, Linux advocate everywhere will be cheering for IBM and prompting Linux on desktop even harder. However, since IBM will be the only source for MS Office on Linux, it effectively turns the Linux users into its marketing and sales.
It would be really smart for IBM to take the move. There is really no reason for IBM to back OpenOffice or StarOffice. It doesn't make business sense for IBM.
This is another one of those little things that should remind us that while IBM may do some great things with and for Linux, they are a corporation out to make cash. IBM needs an office suite to pitch to management types with a one suite mind. I'm sure IBM would rather sell them its own software, they will do whatever it takes to make the sale. I'm sure that's what lead them to Linux in the first place, and that may be what turns them against us some time in the future. Free/Open software is our philosophy, but it's their sales gimmick at the moment.
Beware the wolf in sheeps clothing. Anyone else remember when Caldera was our friend too?
I mentioned our club's photos being coverted into huge Word files. I am not totally sure which version of Word she used. I wonder if the newest versions of Word still do that? I agree that our whole town needs an upgrade. About half of the dial-up connections in town are at 26.4K. Some people do have high speed connections.
Sometimes (but not always) the grep in that pipeline will actually grep its own entry in the process list and as such will wind up killing itself, making the pipeline screw up. YOU ARE TEH PIPELINE FAILAR.
When contemplating a shift from Win32 to Linux, the first thing the "cons" bring up in Productivity SW. At the top of that list is Office. Sure, OOo is getting good, but it is not perfect, and Office is a moving target, with the new Forms piece MS just rolled out, and DRM etc.
Because MSOffice is so key to business anymore, the idea of replacing it can kill many alternative OS ideas.
So, if you want to get out from under 2K/XP, your first goal is to squelch the "cons". If you cna prove Office will run in the new environment for little additional cost, they have no case anymore (Well, they will trot out other apps, but little else is as convincing a case as Office).
Later, once the switch has occurred, you can run the numbers on Office and THEN make the switch to OOo, after people have gotten used to the OS change (and I am sure OOo will be loaded on it, so they can play with it...)
Yes, it isn't a purist attitude, but only on /. do folks seriously believe big corporations will make a plunge into this arena. Corporations like low cost, but they also like comfort.
One can read into this statement from IBM something state many times over the past decade. The OS is becoming irrelevant to the masses. What matters is the apps they use.
The Office package is very good. If there's anything from Microsoft that shines, that's it.
Man, do I have to object to this statement! Our company uses Office extensively (as what company doesn't) and this simply is not true! From the poor user interface design to the uncountable bugs to the severe security issues in Word and Excel, Office is a huge, kludgy, bug-ridden mess. Fact is, I suspect most of the resistance to moving away from Office comes from the huge learning curve that it takes to force Office to do what we were told it would do in the first place! If that effort had to be repeated for another suite with the same problems then it just wouldn't be worth it. But that analysis completely ignores the fact that nobody except Microsoft could possibly design and implement software soooo badly.
God, no, IBM! Please develop an alternative that "just works".
Look, you can't go back and CHANGE YOUR POINT after I responded to it
Wow, this brings back fond memories of Usenet around 1988. The next thing that should happen is that one of the posters should threaten to unsubscribe from Slashdot.
I know it isn't OpenOffice, Star Office, or MS Office, but IBM already does have a office product (a pretty damn good one if I may say so) called Lotus SmartSuite. When they bought Lotus for 123 and Notes, WordPro and the rest came along for the ride. Anyway, up until fairly recently IBM was mandating use of SmartSuite for all internal and external communications. You couldn't even get Office off of ISSI (the internal app installer) without having bought a license via ReqCat Web (procurement outlet). Now that has all changed and from what I understand, the current system builds are coming with Office and SmartSuite installed. There has not been a mas exodus to MS Office (hell, a lot of the old timers still use TSO/ISPF and VMMail to compose notes, send mail), but with each retirement and onboarding of new folks, that changes.
The IBM client for e-business uses crossover office (it has too) because (at least in earlier versions than the RH 9) there were menu items for office products (word, at least) and Lotus Notes (both of which I believe to run exclusively under Crossover office). Word wasn't usable, because (as I said before), you have to have your own license and installation media (trick ISSI or bring a CD from home or somewhere).
Anyway, onto my point. IBM has never really shown any interest in porting it's own competing Office product to Linux. Instead, it seems to be happy with backing ooo or Wining-Word. What could that mean? Hmmmmmm.....
I used to work for IBM, now I just work at IBM.
I've been using the Fedora-based beta for a few months now, and it's been working very well. However, I've been hearing rumors that it's a dead end.
It's just the lawsuit fairy tanking up on carbos for this one.
This must be some sort of joke. I use linux because it works, not because its infested with ambiguous calls to memory gobbing functions with obscure reasoning behind them.
I always thought that changing to linux especially for any business is all the little applications that people use through the company. Whether they are custom databases, or accounting software, manufacturing software, old DOS applications they may have counterparts in Linux but the conversion costs are hugh. The costs are huge and the disruption can be great even when just a few locations or just a few people are using them.
Many companies have struggled just going from one Windows version to another just because of this. They eventually make the conversion but that is because most of these applications do convert. When they have to abandon them all, it is a much harder sell and decision to make.
What about crossover office, like what is included with Xandros.
VENI, VIDI, VICI, DIXI
>>It's Free and doesn't have all that Java baggage.
>So is C#.
Free as in beer or free as in speech?
Will M$ continue to move the goal line, so that clones will never be current (as it does with M$Office formats)?
gewg_
it is getting close apparently.
There is an happy gui interface to an ODBC object, but it is not displayed as it is not fully supported yet.
http://dba.openoffice.org/FAQ/index.html
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Hasn't this already been done? We have CrossoverOffice installed on our linux machines at work. Its MS Word, Excel, etc for linux through wine. Don't know who its actually made by. The rpm we install is called cxoffice.
My first guess was that IBM were going to highlight Microsofts (still running) monopoly. They declare they want to port the app, Microsoft say no, IBM squeals to the DOJ.
The Lotus Smartsuite crash!!!!!
Mainframes do I/O using a "Channel Program". This is a sequence of commands assembled by your system software to perform an I/O task. The task may be made up of hundreds of I/O commands. (which use the Single-Byte-Command-Set architecture.) After the I/O program is built, a single CPU instruction (start subchannel) begins I/O program execution. The processor is not interrupted until the execution of the program is completed. A "channel processor" (these days ususally a PowerPC chip) handles all the actual work.
SCSI is loosely based on the architecture, but does not have the concept of a channel program, so it has none of the CPU conservation benefits.
The advantage of this whole setup is that the box can be doing fantastic amounts of I/O streams simultaneously, since the CPUs do not have to coordinate all of it. We all know that Disk is WAAAYYY slower than memory, so this way you can be doing useful things with a large number of I/O paths until you finally exhuast your quite substantial processor resources. UNIX-style architectures bog down at far slower I/O loads.
The disadvantage is that it blows for charachter-by-character interactive (i.e. Telnet) use, due to the overhead involved in creating the channel program. Transactions actually do okay, as the overhead isn't that terrible, compared with the work usually required to process the transaction itself.
The other disadvantage is you need an expensive box to just get an admin console, since the ONLY way to get I/O in and out is this huge channel system, a RS-232 just doesn't work. (These days, it is an xSeries Pizza Box w/ an ESCON card. It used to be this behemoth about the size of a dorm-room refrigerator.)
SirWired
replying a trifle late -- but....
Several of the tools in the 'Rational Unified Process' use Microsoft Word document templates for their on disk format.
If IBM wants to make the entire Rational suite available on Linux, and retain compatibility [esp backward compatibility] they need to be able to read, create and update Office file formats.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
That is probably part o fthe reason they are building their own Java tools, rather than working with Sun on Suns Java tools.
Slightly off topic, I wonder if OpenOffice document viewers for Windows/Mac would help the adoption of openoffice.
Ahh.. IBM just want to be another company that ports/clones M$ Word? If there is going to be a word processor for Linux, why are we trying to take the bad and the ugly along with the good? Micro$oft Office is not the do all and end all of Office suites.
Personally, I hate M$ Word with a passion. I'd rather use VI to LaTeX my document. Okay, that is not for everyone. I realize that. At least it will not try to get smart on me and capitalise things that should not be capitalised and it will not add spaces where there should be none. I know you can turn off auto correct, but that just introduces more steps I'd rather not have to do. It will allow me to insert text between two different types of formatting and also let me choose which type of formatting to use. Did you ever try to insert some unbolded text right next to some bolded text in M$ Word? After you inserted the text, you found what you entered is bolded? Don't even get me started on page numbering in word. I still use a separate document for a title page, when I absolutely must use M$ Word at work. Do we really need to deal with those section breaks when we simply wish to change the page numbering?
Yes, I want my scientific/technical paper to look the way I want it to look with out having to fight with my word processor. My biggest beef with OpenOffice is the fact that it tries to emulate Word so closely. Otherwise, why would you leave out a feature like reveal codes from OpenOffice? If you are going to borrow features from other word processors then try to get some good features like reveal codes from WordPerfect. Don't just conform to what ever Micro$oft shoves down our throat.
For now, if the document doesn't require formatting, I am going to stick to plain old text from VI. If it does require formatting, I will use HTML or LaTeX, depending on how I intend to present my document.
Anyway, that is my two cents worth on word processors and office suites under Linux. IBM should take the WordPerfect source from Corel and port the newest Wordperfect for Linux. I am sure there is at least a few that agree with me on this. I am probably should have used some word processor to correct this comment, but what the hell, if you love M$ office then bring on the flames.
I haven't seen much mention of Lotus SmartSuite in this conversation. IBM owns Lotus. Lotus SmartSuite was a pretty decent competitor to Microsoft Office up until a couple years ago. (Millenium Edition was OK, and 97 was pretty good.) The code should still be pretty decent. At least there should be some good stuff we could rip out of it and use in OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnome Office. So why doesn't IBM open the code for SmartSuite? Perhaps there are parts that they can't free, but there's got to be a lot of good code there even after removing encumbered code.
So my big question is, if IBM is talking about Linux office suites, why haven't they opened or ported the one they own?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.