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."

Comments

back-patting

[AceJohnny]

This is sad to say, but...

you do realize this is mainly some gratuitous back-patting on the part of the OSS community, right?

I'd like to have some nice graphs to show you, but the 'alternate' office suites represent less than a smidgeon on the pie graph of office suits.

Mr Yates is going to take that letter, and promptly trash it without even reading it. Then he'll return to his real job: lobbying the gov for them to use Office, in the sake of 'interoperability'. And chances aren't ridiculous that he'd win. This IS the gov that basically called off the antitrust suite.

This letter will have absolutely no influence whatsoever on Microsoft. Except if they manage to have it taken up by some major publication, it won't have any readership out of the already converted geek community, us.

The starting point of contention is a 'minor' technical one, about the codebase of KOffice being distinct from Star/OpenOffice...

Back to work, guys.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[IdleTime]

You gotta be kidding me?

What are you doing for a living? There is no way in hell I would use LaTex for anything but scientific papers and even then it's not too good.

If i were to spend my days fiddeling with latex I wouldn't get a thing done. Plus the fact that latex is not exactly a Windows product either and a lot of us have to deal with multiple OS'es and communicate with user on various systems. Latex ? hahahahah