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KOffice Developers Reply to Yates
danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."
I wish my organization would switch to some kind of inexpensive standard. We are starting to feel pressure from problems caused by running different versions of Word, or upgrading from OS9 to OSX and wishing they could take their license with them (without running in classic mode), or some people don't think it's worth the money to switch from AppleWorks (which sucks, by the way) to Word, and then we have to try to read documents in ClarisWorks (which also sucks) format in Word and vice-versa, and we are getting SICK OF IT! And I only work in an elementary school!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
...that the response was basically an ad?
In Massachusetts, is it considered criminal to mislead the government or the administration in such a fashion? Could legal action be taken against Microsoft based on these blatantly false claims (ie. that KOffice is directly derived from StarOffice) that were presented to the administration as fact?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
They say it's "illegal" to standardize on OpenDocument and back that up with the (false) claim that the tools that support it are from a single codebase.
All so they can convince the Mass. gov't to use their own single codebase "standard."
Wallin made statements like:
"KOffice is the most comprehensive of all office suites in existence, comprising no less than 11 different components in one well-integrated package."
Is it really, though? I mean, it's one thing to have 11 different components. But it's another to have all those components working well. While the very core KOffice applications like KWord are acceptable, some of the other components aren't exactly the most usable. To declare KOffice as being "the most comprehensive" office suite might be somewhat incorrect.
"Last, but not least: Within a year, KOffice will likely run on Windows as well."
This could be a very dangerous thing to claim. Let us say that in a year, KOffice is not running on Windows. This claim has now left the KOffice team in a very difficult position. They have no choice now but to include support for Windows within a year. Otherwise Microsoft and others could point to this letter as being a work of deception.
I commend Wallin for attempting to set the record straight regarding the claim that KOffice was derived from StarOffice, but perhaps some of the claims are going a bit too far.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Actually, yeah. Microsoft could, in theory, insert all of the OpenOffice code to read and write OpenDocument into Office, since it is LGPL. They'd just have to contribute back changes / enhancements to the OpenDocument code itself.
This is the first I've seen of Yates' letter from Microsoft. He makes some points, and I'm curious to know how their own format compares.
How many different applications from different vendors already support the MS XML format? How does this number compare to the OpenDocument number?
OpenDocument will be usable on a number of CPU and OS platforms. How many CPU and OS platforms will be supported by MS's own XML format? (I use a Solaris workstation at work and do not myself have access to a Windows PC until I get home, at which point I'm not "working" anymore)
How long ago was MS's own XML standard finalized? And how widely is it in current use today? (I honestly don't know either since MS tools don't run onmy workstation at work, and I don't do this sort of thing at home to be worth buying their stuff myself) Has this been long and wide enough to "prove itself" in comparison to how long and wide OpenDocument's use has been to date?
If MS is losing business due to the choice of standard, why does MS not implement this open standard in their own product?
What are the costs involved with implementing MS's own XML format for 3rd party vendors in their tools such as OpenOffice, KOffice, etc?
MS seems to dictate what capabilities are required for "modern documents". Surely the committee that decided on OpenDocument knew what their own needs are and will be, and could determine if OpenDocument's capabilities were suitable?
I'm not saying this is true. I doubt even Microsoft thinks it's true. However, as long as the masses are convinced of it, Microsoft will use/abuse this for marketing and PR. Every time someone uses Linux or OOo, Microsoft will paint them as fanatics and crazy people, out to get Microsoft.
Personally, I have never learned LaTeX, although I used to use LyX quite a bit before OpenOffice. It was in many ways better than OpenOffice, but it took me quite a while to learn how to do new things. Also, of course, I could never share documents with others at work.
.pdf. Also, since there are now very nice LyX ports (and officially supported by the LyX team!) for Windows and ports for OS-X, it's worth another look. The learning curve is much less steep now. And, using LaTeX on the back end (ahem) virtually guarantees much nicer-looking, and consistent, documents than using even OpenOffice (which I also like quite a bit, but only for the sharing of documents with Word-crippled colleagues).
You might want to try the 1.3.6 version (latest stable), or, if you're adventuresome, the 1.4.0 in CVS. LyX is NOT designed for short documents, such as very quick notes or things of that nature. But it's phenomenal for long documents (several page letters, technical notes, books, theses, and, with the beamer class, even presentations which knock the crap -- admittedly not a difficult task -- out of PowerPoint).
I suppose you meant you could never share *editable* documents with others at work. Well, LyX exports to just about every "nice" standard, including
Neither is Word. The appropriate program for such things is WordPad (in Windows world) or gedit (in Gnome world). Word is too complex, and its many features get in the way and become distractions - the constant automatic spell checking underlining every mistake you make being a good example.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
KDE-centric: what's wrong with that exactly?
Can't you run KDE applications on Gnome too, using the KDE-libs, and doesn't the letter announce a port for Windows?
How about something that runs in Windows and OSX (where Office lives now) ? I don't believe there is anything currently that does this. OpenOffice is coming soon but I dont see any other office suite that will for either coming anytime soon.
That might have been Alan's point.
Word is not a word processor, but something for "manipulating, organizing, and retrieving text-based data in a format rapidly parsable by human eyes as part of a workflow or thought process"?! That's one of the most abstruse excuses for MS Word I think I've ever read. Maybe I would understand it better if you could render that statement with multiple fonts, had access to character kerning, and did some kind of multi-level outline.
Most people use Word to gratuitously format specious documents that they capriciously attach to emails, when a simple bit of text would do. And by most, I mean like 90%. The other 9% are printing clipart flyers on poster paper to advertise their pet avocation on a light pole. 1% of folks are creating paper forms and such which will continue to be required until such time as 100% of our population is connected and computer literate. Which unfortunately probably means forever. LaTeX would serve them fine.
But back to your point, I'm curious - what particular feature of Word helps you organize your text-based data over and beyond what plain text and a good text editor? Let me guess: the colorful sparkles.
Yates' objection was spurious from the beginning. Open Document is an open standard, so there's nothing to stop anyone -- Microsoft included -- from implementing a fully compatible Open Document import/export filter for their software. The only reason Microsoft is reluctant to do so is because it might loosen their monopoly grip on the office software market.
Simply put, blame the EU. We have to pay Value Added Tax (VAT) for sales to European customers and we don't have to do this for non-European customers.
Our US$ prices and our Euro prices are identical in numbers. This currently means a value difference of about 20%. This is close to the amount that we have to pay in VAT -- 16% now, going to 18% shortly.
If you can present a European VAT number, we can ship without VAT to you, but you have to pay your government's import VAT instead.
The European VAT tax system is convoluted, but the intent is not much different from the U.S. where you have to pay either sales tax or use tax.
Martin Kotulla SoftMaker Software GmbH
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Lay out a time table or suggest a work-around for the missing feature if you want to make US customers confident about your product, and save your sleepy excuses for the Italians.
I've found just a few bugs, for example German documents often spill into neighboring French documents, and the Italian and Spanish support needs a lot of cleaning up (especially the Spanish support: it really stinks). But I'm a believer. French software runs much faster!
The trouble is, word processors don't actually fill a niche. They exist halfway between two niches - text editting and typesetting. They are too bulky and complicated to be efficient text editors, and simultaneously inadequate for any serious typesetting task. In short, they're a solution looking for a problem.
I know that a lot of people find them 'fast and efficient' for many uses, but only because they don't have the basis for comparison. Yes, compared with a typewriter and white-out, they're fast and efficient. However, compared to real text editting and typesetting tools (like vim or emacs on the one hand, or TeX/Adobe/Ventura on the other) they are horribly inefficient kludges.
Business is about getting as much as possible for as little effort as possible. In such an environment, if you can get and keep the world for the cost of just a little whining, why wouldn't you? If it were less expensive for Microsoft to make their product better, they'd do that instead.
In the business universe, Word/Excel/Powerpoint is the de facto standard. If you don't have access to these formats, you're going to have trouble working with others.
This is why Firefox is a true success. It has changed the market so that Microsoft's best cost/benefit option is to actually make IE better, which makes life better for everyone.
What's more, by doing so, Firefox either drives up Microsoft's operating costs, prevents those resources dedicated to fixing IE from doing other things, or both. And by doing that, Firefox creates opportunities for Microsoft's competition.
It gets worse for Microsoft: As investors see that Microsoft is having to spend more to make the same amount of money, real questions about the value of the company's stock happen. That sounds ridiculous, right? Oh ye of little faith:
Stock chart for MSFT
Well, some forerunning university departments (*cough* GT ECE *cough*) offer certain courses (*cough* ECE2031 *cough*) where formatting guidelines make it a pain to use LaTeX sometimes. Hasn't stopped me from doing it anyway, just as a big fuck-you to them, but seriously... They require that an image appear right after an introduction and before an explanation, which makes the documents look less than fantastic due to the fact that you can't let LaTeX do its thing and put figures where they would be most appropriate. In typesetting a set of results, I actually had to \clearpage after a figure so that I could put equations where they were supposed to go. Disgusting.
And, naturally, they don't provide a LaTeX class for their supposed IEEE format, so most other changes (e.g., box around figures and tables) had to be hacked in manually.
Try the koma-letter2 style in LyX (at least under LyX/Aqua, for the Mac). I defy you to find an simpler letter-writing utility. You'd actually have to make an effort to get it wrong.