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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 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
Isn't your mom kind of getting tired of that?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
You do realize that was, like, eight years ago, right? And then they fixed it ("months"? Good lord!). Are there hiccups? I'm sure there are. But in practice, very few people moan about incompatibility issues.
:-)
s p9 -n05 (Scroll down to #4, about half-way.)
& Cr=unesco&Cr1=
It was November/December of 1997, so yes about 8 years ago. And I was working at a Fortune 500 company who's Executive VP (pre-CIO days) insisted on immediately upgrading half the company to Office 97 to "standardize". That was 3,000+ desktops on one version and 3,000+ on the older version. It was a damn nightmare for almost a year and that experience stuck with me.
It also stuck with Microsoft, because the Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003 formats are the same and didn't change. Yes, they introduced XML capabilities in 2003 but the default format was the 97/2000/XP one.
Now they're going to change again, this time to XML, and are making the same promises they did in 1997.
Since they are changing, now is the perfect time to try and force an open document solution. Better now than before getting locked into the next cycle.
But in practice, very few people moan about incompatibility issues.
Look harder. Google is your friend.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1631430,00.a
http://office-watch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v
"...neurobiologist seeking data from the Viking probes sent by the United States to Mars in the mid-1970s was told by the US space agency that software to read the 25-year-old computer tapes no longer existed, and "the programmers who knew it had died," according to the scientist."
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=3902
And to top it off, Office 2003 has no less that six(!) different versions, of which only the top-end 2 can create XML formats. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/23/deviant.html
People don't care about philosophy until it happens to them. Most are apathetic with the attitude "yeah, but what are the odds of that happening to me?" That attitude can NOT be let to rule the day.
Hell, my dad still has the disks he wrote his first book on. TRS-80 Model III, 5 1/4" floppies. And no earthly idea how to get the data off them, much less what format it is in.
Some manufacturing equipment is still controlled by software on OS/9000-based machines. Yes, they can read and write DOS-format floppies now. Of course, the driver for that is $2,500 per node-locked machine...
Sorry for the rant, but this is an important subject I've been burned by before.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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"!!!