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.'"

Comments

got milk?

[yagu]

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:

No one knows for certain when OOo 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 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:

Gary explains, Microsoft's Word ML will only interoperate with its own locked stack, require customers to become complete Microsoft shops if they hope to achieve the same level of fluid information flow available through truly open SOAs.

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:

MP: Is this lock down aimed at blunting the spread of OpenOffice.org 2.0?

Interesting stuff...

A New Pseudo-Unit!

[adavies42]

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).

I only came in...

[Short Circuit]

...to joke about milk. But, after reading the other posts, that topic's already soured.

Re:My Milk Never Expires

[MyLongNickName]

Isn't your mom kind of getting tired of that?