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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."
And sometimes, not even then.
+1 Insightful! Wish I had mod points to give you...
Speak truth to power.
Troll. Linux isn't compatible with linux, either. My Fedora packages don't work right on Yggdrasil. The world hasn't ended.
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.
Below is a link that describes how to run the MS Viewer under Linux. You could pay $40 to codeweavers and nothing to Microsoft and then download the free viewer.
i n/ supported_apps/?id=63
http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/cxplug
I agree that governments should never force us to use any companies proprietary product. Governments should stick with the widely used PDF format or something similar instead. There are free PDF viewers available for various operating systems, including Linux. For blind computer users a text file or other choice might also be a necessary alternative. I am not sure exactly what visually impaired people would need.