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Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org
[vmlinuz] writes "O'Reillynet is running an article about 'Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org' which explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects. The article also discusses the importance of a shorter release cycle."
If something's in beta, people won't want to use it because it just doesn't sound reliable. If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.
Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.
I think it can be argued that, for wide-scale adoption of Linux, the first step will be the wide-scale adoption of OpenOffice over the MS office suite.
After that, switching out the underlying OS becomes transparent (Ok, more transparent for more people).
I guess I subscribe to the idea that a key foothold MS has (at least in the corporate world) is that all of our data is stored in their propietary file formats. Or, in other words, the problem in switching people over isn't that they have to run a MS os, they have to run the MS apps, in particular their office suite. Excel and Word are defacto standards to run a business -- and by extension the MS OS.
It's in that sense that I do think OpenOffice is incredibly important to the OSS world at large. The threat of being a credible (or higher quality, more useful) replacement is higher than with what's happened (and happening) with Firefox vs IE, since IE is also free. MS Office is far from free -- and I think it'll be easier to justify abandoning it because of the cash saved.
If I were MS, I do think OpenOffice is the one OSS project I'd be most nervous about, as it's one of the major threats to the monopoly, and an attack on one of the biggest reasons companies are forced to pay for the MS OS.
BTW, the web browser is probably the other "very important app" for the same reasons, and it's cool that Mozilla Firefox has grown so much. At work it doesn't matter that I choose to run Linux, since I'm running the same web browser as many people who are running Windows (my company is already formally supporting, and recommending, Firefox for internal use). Again though, imagine that IE was an extra app that companies had to pay money for -- I wonder what the Firefox adoption rate would be.
One last thing, it's no surprise that MS has from the beginning to "subvert" the web and web standards. It's all about the formats. I guess they simply arrived way too late to the Web to completely take it over. But I'm sure they know that if they had managed to switch everyone over to ms-propietary-html to surf the web, we'd be paying through the nose for IE and their OS and Office monopoly would be further protected.
I agree that Open Office is one of the most important open source projects. This is because it won't be a Linux derivitive that makes its way onto the desktops of the masses first. It will be open, free applications that can reliably provide the benifit of expensive commercial applications on the *Windows* desktop. A company I work for is interested in an open source "Save to PDF" tool because, well, have you priced Adobe's Acrobat lately? Not cheap. So, they are willing to consider this open source replacement to distribute to the general population. It provides most of the functionality that most of their user base needs and saves them money. The users don't even need to learn anything new. But ask them to swap out their enterprise desktop? Forget about it. If Open Office can get there (and it will *long* before Linux deriviti do), the Corporate World(TM) will open its loving arms.
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