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Interview with Sun's Florian Reuter
silentbob4 writes "Mad Penguin is running a series of three interviews with people in the trenches working to bring you OpenOffice.org 2.0. The first of these interviews, with Sun's Florian Reuter, covers some of the differences between the truly open XML found in OpenOffice.org 2.0, and the closed MS Word ML found in the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. He also discusses the importance of simple end users in the process of improving the code with bug reports."
are they insulting our intelligence!?
Interview with Sun's Florian Reuter
I read the title of that article and the first thing I thought was that Sun had developed a new piece of networking hardware and were actively interviewing it.
It's late here, I should go home.
READY.
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And what makes you think that MS won't follow suit.
Because historically they have always opted for locking customers in?
WebOffice will stand out and be adopted widely. (and quickly). Before the OOo2.0 is out we'll be ready for another revolution. So hurry Google with the WebOffice!
Sorry to disappoint you...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I only hope the new document format makes it easier for them (and third-party application) to convert an OOo document into readable HTML with style sheets. Whenever I write a documentation that is among others to be published on the web I am tempted to write it in OOo because I like it. I still end up writing it in HTML myself because I don't like OOo's HTML output.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
With the critical mass that the adoption of the open document format by Massachusets, google and others implies, the embracement of standards like XML and Xforms in OO.o that makes it pretty easy to create organisational workflows, this could be a real microsoft hobbler. Particularly if as seems likely, Microsoft keeps failing to adapt to an open standards world, and the price tag of OO.o stays lower than M$O.
Bring it on, I say.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
SOA (in Dutch) has the same meaning as the English abbreviation STD (sexually transmitted disease). kinda funny to read this in an article on software ;-)
I've actually RTFA, and I'm still at a loss about exactly _what_ is better about OOo's XML Schema, or wrong about MS's.
In TFA the guy just goes on about how his own XML Schema is, you know, lovingly handcrafted and how he _cares_ about your data. Which is just a content-free judgment call. Yeah, so he likes his own XML Schema better. Whop-de-do, that's such a total surprise.
It's not like if I went around the office and asked 10 guys I wouldn't get 10 different schemas, and each loves his own more and is convinced that everyone else's sucks. Just the proper way to use attributes alone has everyone polarized in three camps, with everyone in one camp arguing that the other two are awfully wrong and against the very idea of OOP or of XML itself. Handling validation and showing which fields are wrong to the user who filled the form? Yep, another clean three-way split, and I've actually had to implement three different ways to handle it, to please all three camps. And so on.
So that he loves his own more and thinks it's a better way to store my data, is very much expected there. I was already sure he thinks that. In fact, I'd be worried if he said he didn't.
What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format. If I try to retrieve that data in 5, 10 or 100 years, as in his answer, exactly in which way is OOo's format better? Exactly _what_ kind of data gets more benefits from his schema than from MS's in that context? In which way, and for what concrete reasons does he foresee that MS's own converters (which so far still import Word 6 documents with no problems) will break down and cry like little girls if fed a Word 12 document some 10 years from now?
No, really, it's not a flame. I want to know. If I'm to go there and pester my boss to switch from MS Office to OOo, I damn better have some very concrete arguments and use-cases. If my whole argument is "but some guy from Sun likes Sun's format more" and "but Sun's format is lovingly handcrafted with love and care for your data", chances are I'll get laughed out of his office.
So can anyone shed some more light on that issue?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There is no google web office. However there is and has been for many years think free office. Contrary to your prediction it has not been adopted rapidly or widely despite being available over the web and despite being a decent product.
evil is as evil does
There are more Web Office related tools on the web , indeed BUT it's Google who has the market-say these days and they have to cash on it. Web is the next stop and people ought to get that straight before it's too late.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Genuine stupidity perhaps, but artificial intelligence???
Riiiiiiight.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
People want something new! In the corporate and in their homes. It makes NO sense at all to tell all those word, excel and powerpoint experts that there's yet another Office suite which does JUST THE SAME. Whoaahh, now we're really excited. NOT!!!
MS Office product has a 90% domination in the World market! And that's a lot. There is no friggin way you can tell the *already tuned people/staff* to start working with a NEW breed of product. It's a challenging option. Lot's of desktop migrations from Windows to Linux see this as a MAJOR challenge.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
The enthusiastic rambling on "Web 2.0" in the opening paragraph is quite unrelated to OpenOffice, an old-fashioned stand-alone application. It's probably related to a mistake Florian Reuter makes throughout the interview. He speaks of "formulas" where he actually means "forms" - He's a native German speaker and mixes up the two words because the German word for "form" is "Formular".
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Well, that's exactly what I'm asking. If the XML Schema for it is published, why can't I write a simple XSLT to convert it to some other format?
There's one important point most people seem to have forgotten so far. IIRC, to have the MS Word XML schema you have to sign a patent license. In essence what this means is that Microsoft want to retain control over how you use your data (ie. how you handle your documents, parse them, etc.). This should concern you. It goes against the purpose and the openness of XML, in my opinion anyway.
The questions people should really be asking are:
Or am I just spreading FUD?
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
... I'd like to give an example. Everybody has filled out a form with a request for vacation holiday to submit to your boss. You have to fill out the starting date, the end date, how many days you want to be gone, and who is responsible when you are gone. You first have to get the form, you download it, you print it, you fill it out. Then you mail it or you get it to your boss in some other way. Then the request gets granted, then somebody has to maintain the data base of how many holidays you have left, and so forth. It is slow and inefficient.
:)
With web services and service-oriented architectures and X-forms, this process will be entirely different. You'll download the forms from your company's website, fill out the form, press submit button, the data will be sent to a web server which maintains the holidays left, and everything will get done automatically. It will tell you if you have enough days left, a notification will be sent to the person who has to approve the holiday application, and the whole process will be much smoother. This is how web flow will be done more and more over the next year or two. Having support for the end user this way will be a big deal, and will change how we think of collaboration with forms.
No offense to anyone involved here, but I worked at a company that was doing that over a year ago with Sharepoint/MSOffice. The backend technical details were probably slightly different than what they're talking about here, but lordy this is nothing revolutionary. The fact that OO is now offering a way to do it - maybe. The thing that bugs me is that reading things like this, I get the impression that people working on things like this (I don't mean vacation request systems, but many open source projects in general) is that features like this area touted out like they are something new or revolutionary. It indicates that they're probably not keeping up with with other vendors/platforms are doing. I wish I could put this in to words better, but I don't have any more time right now.
creation science book
And what makes you think MS won't follow suit
Because they said so? While that may mean nothing, at this point it is MS' position that they will not support OpenDocument formats, regardless of requirements by governments. MS Not supporting OpenDocument
Now MS is claiming the open document standard is inferior, yet they sit on the standards committee. Instead they support the MS XML standard which is a standard for MS documents. Which means it owns (under copyright and soon patent), the format and standard.
Office 12 XML documents will not have an easy introduction into many non-Microsoft products. To do so, you will need to license the format from MS, who has said it sees no reason to support OSS in this regard and the use of MS XML in a GPL'd product would invalidate the GPL, and the MS license. (Microsoft does have some very smart lawyers writing their EULAs and contracts). All the others would need to pay a fee and it is doubtful MS would provide a discount to the disadvantage of their own products.
A better read on OpenDocument vs. MS XML is found on Wheeler's page
The format matters because a company, in part due to its responsibility to stockholders, must have planned obsolescence. MS documents from the 80s are difficult to open and read, even in MS products. An open standard ensures that my documents are available to me, through many companies, for a very long time. Governments need this and are now getting smart enough about technology to understand and demand it. And while no one can imagine MS being gone, the same was said of dozens of top 20 companies over the past 20 years.
As for the comment about the learning curve between open office and MS Office, we can now thank MS. With office 12, they cannot claim an easy transition, the product takes a new direction and whether it is better or not, is irrelevant. The learning curve of going to 12 will be greater than moving to Open Office which retains the current MS office look and feel for the vast majority of users.
Outlining that works. Save to PDF. The ability to hand a CD to a friend who needs an office application. LaTeX. The ability to tell the BSA to go to hell when they knock open your door at 4AM. Not having to deal with "You can run this program 50 times until you prove you aren't a thief" popups. Being able to wipe the hard disk and reinstall without being told "you can run this program 50 times until you prove you aren't a thief", again. Being able to add hard drives and RAM and upgrade to your hearts content and never hearing, "This is not the computer I was installed in, you are a thief". The ability to install the software on my other machine without worrying that wiping the first doesn't quite cover the license to install on one machine only.