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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.'"
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.
I think a lot of IT managers already have taken note. Most people in IT understand that Microsoft doesn't play well with others, which leads to the idea that your best bet is either to use only Microsoft Office or not use Microsoft Office at all. However, there just aren't loads of options there. Microsoft Office is what most businesses use, so if you want to do business with them, you might want to stick with MS. Further, people are accustomed to Microsoft Office, so there's that issue.
Finally, and this is not unimportant, even though OOo might provide a viable alternative to most of MS Office, they don't offer an Outlook clone. Many businesses are flat-out addicted to Outlook for their scheduling. OOo might do well to integrate Evolution and help Novell port it to Windows/OSX.
Either way, I doubt that the real problem is that IT managers are oblivious to the vendor lock-in MS represents, but rather that the lock-in has already taken place, and now the question is, how do you get out? The answer may be to push MS to support OASIS.
Yeah, but Microsoft defines 'interoperable' as 'able to work across a range of (current) Microsoft products'. So, by that definition XML with an embedded proprietary binary key is 'interoperable'.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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'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.
...how do you get out?
Spread the word and practice what you preach.
I believe the problem is not as much as people don't listen but the fact that people do not spread what they preach. As a business user, have you ever given an MS Office client an OO.org document? I know I haven't. Reason being is because the recipients do not have OO.org installed nor do they want to install it. And to force clients into downloading a >100MB file to read your document is preposterous!
What I believe is needed is a light-weight OO.org viewer that is quick to download and quick to open. Then we can give our clients OO.org documents and exclaim to them when they tell us they can't view it that we use OO.org due to its [insert fabulous reason here] and if they like they can download the free viewer here*. That or include the viewer or link with document. That way they know we use OO.org as we prefer the benefits it offers over those of MS and they are not forced to get something they're not comfortable ("opensource? my mcse guy said it's not free!")
*Said viewer should have link too full version so they have option of downloading OO.org
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
If all you need is for the client to view the document, send a PDF. That's what PDFs are for, and it also diminishes the reliance on Microsoft. Best of all, almost everyone already has a PDF viewer installed.
This just isn't true. Frequently Microsoft products can't open previous versions of Microsoft documents without formatting issues, and this doesn't seem to stop anyone.
When Word 97 was released they claimed it could read/write Word 95 documents. They lied. Their "Word 95" export was really a munged RTF saver and it caused no end of headaches for Word 95 users. It wasn't fixed for months, until SP1 for Office 97 was released.
Try using Office 2003 to open MS Works or Office 4.x files and see what happens. If it even tries at all, you better hope it is a plain-Jane file with nothing fancy, or it is all going to be screwed up.
Most documents convert fine. Other can be handled the same way ANY legacy format has been handled in the digital age -- stop using it and keep a couple copies of the old software around just in case someone needs to access the legacy data. I've managed document transistions at a couple large companies moving from RF-Flow to Visio; Wordstar to WordPerfect to Word; Lotus 1-2-3 to Word; and dBase 3 to dBase 4 to Access 95, 97, 2000 then finally Postgres.
The arguments are always the same.
Q. "What about all my old data?"
A. "Batch convert what you can. Hand convert what you use, as you use it. Leave the old stuff to decay and keep a copy of the old software."
Hell, most times we also needed to set aside some old PCs with the old OS just to run the legacy software. CLIX, OS/9000, OS/2, Windows 3.11, DOS 4.1. We had a legacy document room with a bunch of old computers at one facility. It was a working museum.
THAT is why open document formats are important. To avoid the necessity of working museums.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Think global, act loco
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.
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.