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Interview With Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org
silentbob4 writes "Hot on the heels of yesterdays interview of Sun's Florian Reuter posted on Slashdot comes a two page interview with OpenOffice.org's Gary Edwards. In this installment, Gary discusses the importance of open document formats and hints to the release date of OpenOffice.org 2.0: 'No one knows for certain when OpenOffice.org 2.0 stable will be released, but Mad Penguin's bet is that the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.'"
Excellent article, a bit long of a read but worth it. Read it!
As for pending relaase of stable OOo 2.0, the article mentions:
I need more specific data. I buy Ultra-Pasteurized milk, and the carton I recently bought has an expiration date of late November! I guess I can wait until then, I've waited this long. But, could I possibly be optimistic enough to hope he only means regular pasteurized milk? That would get me OO a couple weeks sooner!
Another interesting observation in the article:
Discounting that Gary obviously completely advocating OO and probably had a disdain for Microsoft's XML implementation, I think to the extent that what he is pointing out is true, IT managers should take note . Unfortunately most won't or don't. We live in an age where decision makers chant the "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" mantra, and the threat that continued Microsoft upgrade stand to completely lock in a shop to only Microsoft products probably won't frighten them. But with slightly less myopia, IT managers should realize this pending lockin could jeapordize subsequent ability to exchange information and perform transactions with other organizations (factor in the additional pending Trusted Computing technology and this gets downright scary).And should you choose not to read the entire article, read this gem of a question and response from page two:
Interesting stuff...
I have a carton of non-fat powdered milk I keep in my fridge cause I have no cabinet space... *sigh* that stuff lasts forever.
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
I hereby proclaim the lacto-expiration the pseudo-unit of time. This fills an important gap in the pseudo-unit lineup, which includes the football field (length), the Library of Congress (data), and the Hiroshima bomb (energy).
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
...to joke about milk. But, after reading the other posts, that topic's already soured.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I drink it straight from the source.
The milk in my fridge has only a "sell by" date, not an expiration date. Will that also tell me the release date?
I just hope the OO developers aren't rushing OpenOffice v2 just to give the public a version update. I would gladly wait another two months if it meant OpenOffice would have fewer issues. If milk expires, you can always buy another carton. If the product is sour when it comes out, then it's time to switch to a different brand.
2005-10-17
If you're an alien, throw a wild drunken party.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Netcraft just confirmed it- your milk's expired.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Now go add it to the list of strange units of measurement.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I just remembered I had milk in the office fridge from 03/05. I guess that was the Longhorn countdown milk. Here's hoping OO.o can do better!
So yeah, MS have taken a completely transparent and useful XML format and munged evil hidden data into it. It can probably be reverse engineered, but still it manages to miss the entire point of having an XML data format in the first place
Game dev and music blog
Sigh, yet another SHAMELESS money grab as developpers rush out another product in time for the Christmas retail season... :)
Please do something about the OpenOffice documentation, especially for developers. Right now it ranges from nonexistance to horrible. Attempting to do anything, and i mean ANYTHING using OpenOffice.Basic, requires hours upon hours of digging through forums, obscure, incomplete or outdated documents. I realize that the everyday user is the main target of the suite, but right now people who want to do just a little scripting are left with virtually no choice but use MS Office. I'm an above average programmer, and this lack of documentation has left me helpless and frustrated. Some kind of tutorial, or even an updated, consistent documentation from an individual developer's point of view (not someone's who has been developing Ooo for years and knows the code by heart) would be a perfect addition to an otherwise great product.
His name means what?! lol
Too bad someone mod you down.
It may seem like a nit, but I believe one of the factors slowing acceptance of OpenOffice in many departments and small businesses is that Calc doesn't have a stable sort (i.e. a sort that preserves the order of rows that are unaffected by the sort) while Excel does.
Many shops use spreadsheets as a kind of quick-and-dirty database, and they rely on the ability to sort on 4 or more columns. Calc can only support sorting on 3.
Unfortunately, 2.0 won't fix this as the bug was marked as a "do later".
it's enough to curdle your insides
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What is the GUI architecture of the 2.x series like? Are they still using their own home-brewed GUI toolkit, or have they transitioned it to be a wrapper around Qt, GTK+, Win32, etc.?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Or "To run Microsoft Office Professional 2003 right, you have to have Microsoft servers installed." Which is absolutely not true. I suspect he means that there are various features of Office 2003 that interact with Microsoft server products, but those are two very different claims. There are other totally bogus claims in there, too, such as non-Microsoft tools being unable to manipulate Microsoft XML formats.
Of course, when someone doesn't even know the name of the product they are talking about, it is also an indication that maybe they don't know what they are talking about. There is no "Microsoft Office XP Professional 2003." It's like listening to people talking about Linsux or Winbloze; I wouldn't instantly grant them much credibility, regardless of how well they knew one side of the issues.
And Microsoft is partly to blame here, too. There are two distinct Microsoft XML formats. One is Word ML, that is supported by Microsoft Office 2003 Professional today. As far as I know, approximately no one uses it, since it is only available in the professional version. This is the format that Edwards is constantly complaining about. The second format is the new format that will be introduced in Office 12. It should be supported more widely (i.e. at least in all versions of Office 12, and possibly through older versions of Office with a plugin), and is seen by Microsoft as their future Office document format. Edwards seems to be unaware of this distinction.
Another questionable part are his claims, that Windows XP is not widely used (he claims that older versions of Windows are more popular), that 15% of Internet users use OpenOffice.org, that OpenOffice.org has a higher install base than Microsoft Office 2003 Professional... I don't know the facts, but these aren't obviously correct, and some credible references would be nice.
I could go on about additional mistakes and misleading stuff in this interview, but I see no need to. I read it as a cheerleading session between Mad Penguin and an OO.o developer. The stuff about Microsoft is gratuitous Microsoft bashing, and not based on facts.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
Why has everyone suddenly gone googoo over XML? As all this interoperability nonsense shows, it often is far from the perfect solution.
At the firm I used to work at we had a rather sane policy: send short memos as plain text files, and larger documents as PDFs. Of course, the PDFs were generated via LaTeX, so the LaTeX source to the document could also be sent, too. We didn't have to worry about all this crap with MS Office.
We'd often hear stories from new employees about the troubles they'd gone through with documents at their previous place of employment. So we were always quite glad that we avoided all that. It does take some time to use LaTeX, for instance, but after the initial learning curve (which is far shallower for most people than is widely thought) its users were far more productive.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"What is the most unusual place you and your wife ever made whoopie?"
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Tell him that that his new workplace is casual dress.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It's not just the OpenOffice project that suffers from a complete lack of quality developer documentation. I recently was doing some work with embedding Mozilla's Gecko engine, and I ran into the same problems that you did. Assuming you can even find documentation, it is often years old and out of date. Sure, there are examples, but they're horribly commented and not very useful to learn from.
We don't have time to go digging through the Mozilla source to find out each and every little nuance that wasn't mentioned in the three-year-old documentation. So please, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org developers, provide us with some recent, useful documentation and examples! That is perhaps the greatest favour you could do at this time.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I hear that gcj is now far enough along that it's possible to build OOo without using Sun's not-free-as-in-speech implementation of Java. Have any slashdotters tried it? Does it improve OOo's performance at all, since gcj can compile to native code, or does it not matter that much, since only some parts of OOo are in Java? Will there ever be a day when apt-get on Debian causes a binary compiled with gcj to be installed? Will there ever be a day when you can install OOo on FreeBSD via the ports system (from source) without going through a ridiculous amount of pain (installing Java, which is ridiculously hard because of licensing, and then compiling OOo, which is also always an exercise in frustration)?
OOo 1.x was unacceptably slow for me, even on fairly fast machines. Is there going to be any progress on this front? CPUs aren't improving as quickly any more, and hard disks' performance increases are always at a lower rate than CPU and memory. In general, I see the power-hungriness of software increasing starting to greatly outpace the power of the hardware, especially on non-Linux platforms.
As long as I'm flaming OOo, what about documentation? I recently started digging around for documentation for the OOo spreadsheet, and although there were a whole bunch of docs that were available free online, none of them were comprehensive. (E.g., if you want to fit a line to some data points in OOo, there doesn't seem to be any official documentation anywhere on how to do it. You have to use linest(), and googling on that turned up some third-party docs on university web sites and e-mail lists, none of which had complete, correct info.)
Find free books.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to buy Parmalat.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I'd like to hear about Java-free builds. In particular, I wonder whether anyone has made progress plugging in SQLite in place of their Java-dependent database engine. Database access seems to be the only important feature in 2.0 that depends on Java.
While an OOo built with Gcj and Classpath is, apparently, legally unencumbered, the future of the language is uncertain. Some us would prefer, for a variety of reasons, to have OOo not dependent on Java for core features.
Why do you have to wait until some specific version is released? Most major open source projects make frequent builds available of their development sources or before stable releases. Go ahead and use the betas or pre-release builds. Chances are the quality is suitable enough for you.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"You'd better get going, because milk gets sour. Unless it's UHT milk, but there's no demand for that. Because it's shite."
There are a lot of old computers out there that have not been upgraded. Windows 98 is still common, though mostly for kids games these days. (The games don't run on the parent's XP system, but the next kid can enjoy it just as much as the first) Many offices are still running Windows 2000 on the desktop. (NT 4.0 is still a popular server platform, though it is dieing slowly)
Many home users are using OOo, because it is free and better than whatever came with their system. Many offices are still on Word 97.
The market share of those using the newest versions of Microsoft stuff is increasing, but there is a large amount of old stuff out there.
It is very hard to count marketshare. OpenOffice.org is a freedownload. How many have downloaded it once and installed on many machines? Many companies have a site license for Microsoft software, whatever comes with the PC is wiped when the machine arrives, and their version installed. Don't count the shipped version of software as in use. So nobody really knows what the true numbers are.
I agree that his numbers sound exaggerated, but I wouldn't call them bad without getting his justification for them. He might know what he is talking about.
A showstopper (#i55330#) has come up, and as a result there will be a third Release Candidate. So estimated time of arrival has gone from 13 October to the 20th.
Dave Winer seems to some sort of bee in his bonnet over OpenDoc. He doesn't seem to say why.
What's important is what the standard document format is RIGHT NOW, and right now, it's the binary office format. Until is OpenOffice absolutely, positively 100% compatible with no headaches, it will continue to be a project that people shy away from.
Yes, yes, yes, I know it's relatively undocumented. But that's not an unsolvable problem. If they really want OpenOffice to be adopted, they need to solve this problem. Have a big "bug drive" where everyone sends in MS/Office documents that don't open right in OpenOffice, and vice-versa!
Why is compatibility such a hard concept for people to get that it's the single most critical feature? OK, they're volunteers, and maybe they don't care about people adopting their program. But if they do care, then they need to clue in.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
My fridge is broken. Yay - I get OpenOffice 2.0 today!
...you insensitive clod!
In the quote you actually use, he doesn't say "Office XP Professional 2003", he says "Office Professional 2003" which does exist.
/ professional.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy
Due to the similarity in file formats and program functionality it's not completely unfair to use "XP/2003" as nomenclature but Mad Penguin's punctuation is not Gary Edwards fault.
Finally, he says you need Exchange 2003/Sharepoint/Project Server etc. to use Office 2003 to the fullest - which is true because MS uses proprietary means for information sharing, whereas with open standards it wouldn't matter which server people use. "Using Office right" involves data interchange if we are to believe Microsoft (with those stupid dinosaur ads). You fail to address this point.
Here is your "standard" answer: These are open source projects. If you find a problem with them, fix them yourself!
Why would I want OpenOffice.org in my refrigerator?
Except in the cases of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, they're not just your typical open source project. They're constantly billed as "Microsoft killers". Considering their corporate backing, such projects should be able to offer far better documentation. I'm sure Sun or AOL could spare a developer for a few days to write some decent documentation. The benefits of such documentation may far exceed the initial costs.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm a student you insensitive clod! I have lots of expired milk in my refrigerator.
Yeah, nevermind all that. We don't have time to wade through your source code and your lame documentation! And we're too cheap to buy a product or toolkit that includes proper documentation already! And we're too cheap to float the cost of some technical writers to keep the documentation for your free software up to date. Just fix your documentation NOW NOW NOW!!! It SUCKS!!! It SUCKS, YA HEAR ME!!! Write us some @#%#$^ documentation NOW!!!
WAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!
Much appreciated, thanks.
...when someone asks how you got the full version of Adobe Acrobat, one can just say, "I didn't. I just used OpenOffice.org to export a PDF. Microsoft Office can't do that without that overpriced Adobe thing, but OOo can."
When they ask how you found that, and then why they are stuck with that $x00-$x000 piece of crap Microsoft calls an office suite, you can look at them and (before answering said questions) smile at them and yourself with pride.
My new compy has OpenOffice.org, and no version of Microsoft Office (save for maybe WordPad, if that counts), for obvious reasons hinted at above.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Just saw the older post.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The cost is irrelevant. Microsoft provides Internet Explorer for free, too. And the documentation for their MSHTML control is superb. I would expect the Mozilla group to be able to provide similar, if not better, documentation.
In the case of Mozilla, it would greatly benefit them if their product were to be embedded all over the place. Of course, non-Mozilla developers need solid documentation and solid examples in order to learn how to embed Gecko. Such documentation and examples currently do not exist.
The same goes for OpenOffice. If these products want to be seriously used, then they will need to provide sufficient documentation. It's as simple as that. The price they're charging for their software is irrelevant.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Someone clue me in please? The curiosity is kililng me.
Really well worth the read!
Well done Mad Penquin and REALLY Well Done OASIS and the people and organizations that have made XML ODF possible.
Dude
Seriously, WTF?
OpenDocument isn't a web markup. It's an office document format.
HA! I just created my first Gecko component just a little while ago and I know exactly what you are talking about.
Not to mention they seemed to have changed the way it works a bazillion times (it seems every release it's done differently and people invent new component API's every month; and they're all incorporated into the base Mozilla code! Sheesh!). It's near impossible to get a straight answer as to which API to use and how to make the damn thing work.
I distribute my resume as a .PDF. Unfortunately, I almost always get the response: "Could you send this to me as a Word document? It's our standard format." Of course, not owning a copy of MS Word, I must try to use OO.org's converter and *pray* that it looks right on the other side.
I've especially had this problem with recruiters, since they like to re-format the resume and put it onto their standard letterhead and preferred layout. Since I know that, I'll generally try to get away with sending them an RTF, since it tends to be less dicey.
Distributing PDFs is a great idea, and if people were less anal about getting Word docs (many times as a matter of company policy or procedure), it'd work great.
Personally I'd be happy if my milk woulnd't get sour everytime I fire the beast up.
OO.orgs speed issues is the major showstopper for me. And I am running it on Windows AND on Linux. Linux is even worse, sadly. Not exactly good advertising when trying to talk someone into switching OSes.
I'm looking forward to a new release of OO as much as anyone, but there are some serious issues mentioned in the issue database that are over 3 years old and still unresolved. Why are they saying that 2.0 is at release candidate status?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hey folks, does anyone have an X version of OO 1.1.5 for OS X? I need one and I don't want NeoOffice.
If you have instructions for compiling OO 1.1.5 from source for OS X, that would help too.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Err, is that fresh, or long life?
The 2.0 RC download link does not work, it's got an invalid hostname. If you change: http://download.services.openoffice.org/2.0.0rc/in dex.html
to
http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.0rc/index.html
it will work.
It is not possible to be perfectly binary format compatible.
First, even Office itself isn't.
Second, if you succeed, M$ will move the goalposts. You can't lead and you can't catch up. It's as pointless as a dog chasing its tail.
OpenDocument offers the only sane path out. "I know this game, it's called cat and mouse" "how do you win?" "don't be the mouse". Time to make M$ chase after our document formats.
I am lactose intolerant you insensitive clod
Once you get on the Microsoft treadmill, it's very hard to get off.
The sure do have a lot of control over you, don't they....
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
The sad thing is that MS will probably market their incompatible version of XML as "XML - Extended version" or "XML Plus" or some other fantastic non-descript name. They will tout its interoperability with their own products and point out how nothing from OpenOffice will correctly open their files. In addition, the fact that MS Office won't open files from OpenOffice will make people think that OpenOffice is not sharing information. Remember, the game is all about perception. 90% of the people don't care how their documents open, they just want it to work. If they can not open their 12 year old Word document in OpenOffice they won't like it, never mind that they can't open their 12 year old Word document in Word 2003 either...
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
I think anyone who would use OO.org is probably lactose intolerant.
The company I did intern work for over the summer received a lot of .pdfs. Problem was, their internal resume-searcher system (need a contractor with skill x? Just search for it. Very handy) could only read text, doc, rtf and (I think) html.
I spent a couple of hours figuring out a system to handle this (hey, I was cheap labour). I ended up using the trial download of this system which worked very well. The bonus was that it has a command line interface so it was easy to do a vbs wrapper to recurse through the folder-full-of-resumes looking for pdfs. It's a very good litte program, at least til someone writes the necessary filters for koconverter. (And no, I'm not affiliated with this company).
Anyway, the point I intended to make is that there are good reasons for companies to be unhappy with pdfs that are completely separate from the standardisation thing.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
the cow is empty.
I meant that they (the people who want to export PDFs) will call MS Office a "$x00-$x000 piece of crap". Me, I like the smart tags, XML export and stuff of that sort, but a plain Joe Aijuswanamakeacrobats that sees a OOo PDF just wants to export nice PDFs, and would consider something big like Office worthless if it can't. (For now) Office doesn't do it on its own, and I like making a PDF once in a while.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Date by which OOo 2.0 should be out, as judged by the milk in slashflood's fridge.