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IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community
Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."
One more step to not being locked into Microsoft (ie paying through the nose) for an application than can make writing look prettier, and is universally accepted \o/
which is totally what she said
OpenOffice.org itself doesn't lack assistive technologies. OOo on Windows lacks assistive technologies. OOo with GNOME or KDE integration gets the accessibility technologies of GNOME or KDE, respectively.
Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.
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IBM has its own office package: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/sma rtsuite/
Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I'm curious about the accessibility support for that helpful feature it has, where entering the password characters puts up random numbers of bullets while hieroglyphics blink randomly around the input box, apparently to distract and confuse shoulder surfers. Do they have a similar function for blind users? And how about sighted users and blind shoulder surfers? Shouldn't it make random annoying noises as well, to confuse them?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Once OOo is loaded, though, it responds very quickly on any fairly decent hardware -- at least like a 1.5 Ghz processor and have a gig of RAM depending on OS.
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This reminds me of an issue we have at work. At work, we run OpenOffice now, it gave us flexibility and yet fully functional... except for one guy, the Editor. He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.
I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that. Until we can woo this kind of person, however, I fear that OO, and any open standard wp for that matter, will never truely break into mainstream, because he is the Editor, in charge of a whole department.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
It was all good until I read : "....they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies..." Lotus Notes is EVIL and must be killed, -- I forgive you Outlook & Exchange....,
You're misinformed... OpenOffice.org has a few Java components (notabily in Base, I think) but it is not a Java application. You don't even need a JRE to run it.
I, for one, welcome our new IBM overlords.
Anybody want my mod points?
We'll get Lotus Notes into OpenOffice now - run for the Hills !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
35 American developers is a big investment in terms of money. 35 Chinese developers, is a signficantly smaller investment in terms of money. In skill, ideally, the investment would be the same though. Obviously the OP was talking about the financial investment, not the skills IBM is investing into OOo.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
What if....
...you took OO.o as it stands now, rebranded it "Microsoft Office 2009 Preview" (just the splash screen, title bar and help text should be adequate) and showed it to someone who'd made such a complaint. Tell them that "Microsoft found people were confused by the change of interface in 2007 so they changed it back again to something which looks more like Office 2000" or other such bull.
I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.
wtf.. it's nothing to do with being a superior application, it's to do with it being bundled with machines by default and then everyone being locked in because the file format is pretty much closed. When it comes to jpegs and the like, any viewer works. When it comes to text files, any viewer works. When it comes to files with *shock horror* text with different sizes, colours and styles, everyone seems to want or expect word. The only thing that I think makes Office stand out is Outlook, which I find is a pretty decent application to use, though it's not really very secure.
which is totally what she said
It's also worth pointing out here that the upcoming version of IBM's Lotus Notes product includes internal support for ODF documents (.odt, .ods and .odp). Based on what I see in the beta, it looks to me like the ODF support is provided by an embedded and tweaked version of OOo, but I think it's still worth adding Lotus Notes to the list of apps that support ODF.
Notes 8 is built on the Eclipse RCP, BTW, and runs nicely on Linux (which is my platform of choice) as well as Windows and OS X. I imagine it can run just about anywhere Java does. To be honest, I don't think the new version is hugely better than previous versions, and I've never been a big fan of Notes, but for Linux users whose companies use Notes it's really nice to have a native client rather than mucking about with Notes under WINE, or running a Windows OS on another box or in a VM. As an OOo user, it's also very nice to know that I'll soon be able to send ODF documents to my colleagues secure in the knowledge that they can read them.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but I'm not a spokesman for IBM. IBM is happy about that state of affairs, and so am I.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
if they are trying to kill OO with low quality code? I hope not, but China? Crap, I have seen the code that comes from there, and it makes their toys look positively great.
MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.
But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If IBM (and sun) really want to make a dent in Office, they should work on MsPM and Visio clones. In particular, if they first do the file format library (open, read, write close files), then it allows other OSS projects to move forward. Then followed up with clones/improvements. By doing these 2, they pretty much remove one of the large blocks to corporate adoption.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is pretty cool.
I was working with an engineer from IBM who had a Linux laptop setup by IBM for his work computer. It used OOo, as well as a Linux version of Lotus notes. (I know many of you hate Notes, but like the Mainframe, it'll be around forever b/c my company runs many critical apps off of Lotus notes databases)
He also had working VPN (I think it was IBM's connectivity software), so he could connect back to his office LAN from my office.
I was very impressed. He said that many of the engineers were piloting the new Linux desktops/laptops.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
In short, It works. You don't have to change anything just say it's "A new version of Office" and few people notice. The reason is that 90% of users, the only feature they use is _maybe_ change the font or font size. And File->new and File->save. That's about it for most users.
You're reading my mind. That's the first thing I thought when I read that IBM was on-board.
I used to use Word Pro ever since it was AmiPro for Windows 3.1. OpenOffice replaced Word Pro a few years ago, but I still have a lot of legacy documents that I need to access every now and then. So, when I rebuild a PC I install Word Pro just in case. (It's only about 70 MB for Word Pro 9.8, so it's not like it's a burden on my 160 GB boot drive.) Having an LWP filter for OpenOffice would be fantastic!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I don't even know if I want to read the rest of your post. When did I say bundled with Windows? I said machines. I know it's not always there by default, but it is the only option you get for buying an office application suite with a Dell PC for example. IMO it is dominant for the same reason that Windows is dominant, but I've always been happy to edit text documents using whatever I have to hand (Wordpad is fine for me, and I wrote a 13000 word essay on whatever version of Word that came with Windows 3.1 at one point). Word processing to me doesn't seem very different from when I first did it in the early 90s, there is no reason to me that people should have to pay so much for office other than pure greed and monopolism on Microsoft's part.
"And likewise, as I said, the open-ness or close-ness of the format has zero to do with why MS is dominant. They are winning because they are the superior app, and people prefer their product. But rather than compete on the basis of application superiority,"
That is a load of ass. People like it because they think that something is free *must* be worse, and also because the standard isn't open, they do end up with weird inconsistencies. Like one guy had a shadow being shown around the edge of his document (that had been created in word and he had tried to read in open office) and couldn't figure out how to remove it. The only thing that has stopped me converting the whole company to open office is that Outlook is a great email client that everyone is used to (and that I wrote the timesheet system to interact with Excel and cba to rewrite it for OpenOffice at the moment).
Actually I think the secretaries here would be happy to try a different word processor if I asked them nicely. I gave one of the girls an ancient machine with Linux on it, which she then overwrote with XP and realised how much faster Ubuntu was (rather than taking my word for it, which is fair enough really), then switched back. Most people only use MS because they don't know the fucking alternatives even exist, or there are Windows only apps that they want/need. I'm spending more and more time in Mac OS these days, though it's easier to use Windows at work just for ease of integration with the domain. Anyway, go take your flamebait elsewhere...
which is totally what she said
-1; Troll???
/. moderators would have a bit more ... oh, wait!
"Disagree" == "Troll"?
I personally don't agree with the above comment. There are other arguments for and against MS Office, these are lame - but "Troll" moderation?
I would have thought that
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
Is important that Open Office keeps getting improved and all the help from IBM is welcomed. At some point (if not already there), the dominant MS Office will have to make a revolutionary step in order to justify the price tag.
:)
Users will look at the quality/price ratio although a bit difficult if you have to divide by zero for Open Office
...
For full functionality, jdk/jre 1.4.0_02 or newer or jdk/jre 1.4.1_01 or newer is required Certain features you might or might not want require Java but it is fully possible to install (compile) and run the rest of the office suite without Java. I'm sure because I compiled it just a few months ago without Java on my system (although at this point I have installed Java).
"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." -- Mark Twain