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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."
But most of the time i dont have the time or dont know how i can start helping...
Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names.
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I would agree with more frequent release cycles up to a point; they would have to ensure, however, that they don't begin to mimic M$ by releasing new builds simply for the sake of releasing them just to keep the name fresh in people's minds. Release schedules should only be to either implement beneficial features or to resolve any outstanding issues that benefit the user base as a whole.
This sig is six words long.
That is really one of the major blocks for most companies to use open source / linux software - lack of a good office suite.
For most companies the majority of computer use is editing documents. Composing proposals, making presentations, writing memos. All you need to do these things is a good word processor. If Linux had a better one companies would ditch MS and use it for the cost savings alone
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Yes, it is. It's one of the main reasons Microsoft has got its monopoly. All those documents used by businesses, out there in the real world, which cannot be trivially moved onto another platform.
Whatever your choice of OS, be in Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, BeOS, whatever... if you can't read/write the documents you need to because your work requires it; your bank requires it; job applications require it; etc., then you are stuffed and have no choice but to run Office. Then you have no choice of OS either.
OpenOffice is good, but it's still not good enough to allow a significant number of people to move away from Microsoft to open source alternatives. This is probably the single biggest thing that's stopping a lot more people from doing so.
So yes, I'd say it's pretty important.
If Linux had a better one...
I found it interesting in TFA when OpenOffice was compared to Firefox. Its not Firefox, it Mozilla. What OpenOffice needs to succeed is a decrufting just as Mozilla needed a few visionary programmers to come along and throw it all out.
IMHO, as it stands OO is a slow, crufty, bloated nightmare. For gods sakes, will someone drive a stake into the heart of this ten headed monster and kill it. Maybe a phoenix will rise from the ashes.
OO needs to take a long hard look at the success of Firefox. You don't win by being free, you win by being better. Firefox is better than IE. OO isn't anywhere close to better than Microsoft Office.
I hate the evil empire as much as the next geek, but don't let hate blind you to relative quality.
Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.
Sure, but I'll explain it to you.
1. Draft your document in vi, add some preamble and the requisite \begin{slide} and \end{slide}, etc. where necessary.
2. Compile.
3. Display on screen during the board meeting.
You can make things as simple or as complex as you'd like.
I have fond memories of seeing a few thousand of secretaries using a similar approach. Granted, it was Wordperfect with template macros, and not vi, but they had little problem generating long documents with complex structures and tables after learning some basic markup.
My suggestion is just to follow the mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox approach and break the suite up and develop the components separately.
Break off the wordprocessor and strip it back to essential functionality as was done with phoenix 0.1. Go for a rapid release cycle again as happened with phoenix with new updates at least every month. This will reinject vitality into the project. The full office suite will still be available as Mozilla is to this day.
The essential thing that Mozilla had was the gecko rendering engine and XUL. None of this was lost in moving to single app development. The essential thing that OpenOffice has is its well-developed ability to read/write MS office file formats and its own OpenDoc format. This also would not be lost by splitting off the wordprocessor.
The Office suite as a monolithic application was really a marketing innovation, not something that was user driven. Let's free ourselves of the unwieldy bloat it has given us.
How does a larger margin equate to fitting more text on the page? It sounds more like a trade-off between speed-of-readability, and amount of text on the page. I suppose you could argue that smaller margins save trees...
I tried to contribute to the OOo project on the marketing team. It was incredibly difficult to be taken seriously when your "product" moniker could not be distinguished from a web site.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project by submitting valid and repeatable bug reports but I was told that getting label and envelope printing working CORRECTLY was a feature request, not a bug, and would not be addressed in the upcoming release.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project but could not because the software build system REQUIRES PAM so I could not build the current tree (Slackware user). I WAS going to work on a stand alone viewer for Impress.
I would love to contribute to OOo, but the OOo team seems to want to make things as difficult as possible for outsiders to come in. Why on Earth would an Office Suite need PAM???
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
I'm surprised that 2 or 3-column layout isn't more popular than it is; then you can have minuscule margins and still have good readability.
One factor to take into account is that the smaller the width available for text, the more space is lost to word-wrapping.
I like LaTeX, but you know the default presentation in the standard document classes was only meant to be a quick demo, right? It was assumed that serious writers/publications would all create their own classes using sensible typesetting preferences. In reality, the demo proved to be "good enough" for a lot of people, hence the large number of obviously LaTeX'd articles in circulation among some scientific communities. The layout in the standard classes isn't bad in terms of typography, but it's nothing special, and some aspects are truly awful.
Of course, a lot of professionally typeset books have truly awful typography as well these days, either through using poor technique, or through trying to be a bit too clever. :-(
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As Much as I hate to admit it, Access should be on that list as well. Knowledgeable managers use Excell to connect to databases, and pull the data they want out for reports. Many, many other managers use Access, connect to the "real" backend database, and use QBE (Query By Example) to generate their reports. Also, many small businesses seem to think it is a real database.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Anyways, that isn't the real problem. The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is highly non-portable. Everybody uses TeX in a different way, an since Tex isn't very self-contained that leads to problems.
The fact is that LaTeX isn't an analogue to MS Office, or even MS Word. For instance, how do you make a figure? The answer is some external program. And what format should the figure be in? That depends a lot on what output you're working towards - a .png works great for .pdf output with pdflatex, but not for .ps files. And for that matter, "compiling" a text document (some indeterminate number of times) is a completely obsolete idea.
LaTeX is perfect for one or a small number of highly technical people to compose a document, and that is about it.
As for professionally typeset books, books on 8.5" paper are rare.
Google tags things as beta for many reasons. I think the term should be banned now (see post below). Really, every google app is subject to frequent and major change.
Beta means that the code is feature complete, but not tested. I am pretty sure that all of googles apps have seen enough use to identify most of their flaws by now.
Google hosts these apps and makes improvements all of the time. The beta tag might be there for legal reasons (google news), and that has some validity to it. I really think that they call everything beta because they want the ability to freely modify it in the future to fit their plans. This includes being able to stop a service at any time. They present services as a beta, and can kill it if they want. Its just a beta, so people should not be creating production code around it. Google Scholar not paying the bills? Can it!
Of course things like Google Maps ARE being incorporated into production codebases. While I don't really think that incorporating a free beta service hosted by a different company into my companies site is a good idea, other people don't mind.
If Maps were to go away, the people relying on it for production apps would be screwed, but Google can say that it was a beta and cover their ass that way.
Really, 90% of googles apps are production ready code simply tagged as Beta for a variety of reasons. None of those reasons relate to bugs or stability of the code.
- Lack of Microsoft Office
- Typically, people don't want to go to the command-line and 'apt-get' or 'make install' or 'emerge' et. al. their software. Most people want to be able to go to website XYZ and download something that shows an icon on their desktop. That icon when 2x clicked will launch an installer and do everything for them in a little user interaction way such as:
- Launch Installer
- Click "Next"
- Click "I agree to the soul sucking license agreement"
- Click "Next" a few more times
- Click "Finished"
- The installer for the Operating System must be as easy as Windows or MacOS X
- Linux/*BSD need to have the following:
- Pre-Configured Systems at retail outlets such as:
- Wal*Mart
- Costco
- BestBuy
- Circuit City
- Fry's
- Sears
- Support from Major software vendors such as:
- Microsoft
- Apple (Quicktime/iTunes)
- Macromedia
- Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat)
- Alias/Wavefront (Maya)
- Quark
- Other Major vendors
- A Call Center
- The user should have a standard command-line available, but should not ever really need to touch it if they don't want to
Between Linux and *BSD, I believe that the very nature of the GPL hinders Linux in becoming a serious desktop OS. By the very nature of the BSD License, BSD is more ideally suited to be supported by major software vendors than is Linux. (This thought is incomplete as I have to leave) I will explain why I believe this on my own website and post the URL here for anyone interested.Sorry all you OpenOffice guys, you have to face facts though, Microsoft Office is THE BUSINESS STANDARD. Just about every major business under the sun uses the Microsoft Office suite, it is installed on all desktop workstations from the Janitor to the CEO.
Once OpenOffice provides all the same functionality as Microsoft Office in a consistant way, offers technical support (excluding forums, because mom & dad want to be able to call someone), and can be purchased, even at a nominal price in places like Costco, then it will become more popular and has a chance on the desktops of corporate America, provided of course that it is 100% compatible with whatever the current version of Microsoft Office is.
Oh and OOo or OpenOffice.org is a stupid name to call the suite, drop the .org and just call it OpenOffice.
and then have a nice little icon in their "Start" menu or on their desktop that they can lauch the application with.
Sorry, The GIMP doesn't cut it
Without a place where users can call and speak to a live person for support, Linux/*BSD will never gain significant marketshare outside of the server room.
Do you know of an easy way of getting PDF annotations back into LaTeX source? It would be really nice if there were some way that, in conjunction with something like pdfsync, the PDF annotations could be translated back into \annotation{this is a note} style sections in the LaTeX source.
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