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Michael Meeks On ODF and OOXML
biscuitfever11 writes "ZDNet has up a great interview with Michael Meeks, the distinguished Novell engineer, who's currently deeply involved in open document format and OpenOffice.org. In the interview, Meeks takes Microsoft to task on its alternative format OOXML and argues that Microsoft should adopt ODF — but says that realistically they never will. He also mentions his favorite example to explain the benefits of open source software to a nontechnical person: the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
Given half a chance the OSS world would probably have neded up patching Office with:
' remove MS cruft:
' AssistantLoad "clippy.acs"
AssistantLoad "Tux.acs"
liqbase
There is no need to change one line of code for that. My mom never could do that, nor could 3/4 of the population. That's why there is Options-Help-Don't use office asistent. Nothing is black and white. there is a lot of gray there in between and while OS is a completly good and fair option, commercial software is a completly good and fair option as well. Both have their advantages and disadventages, and OS id not the paradise, nor is commercial software the hell....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I'll put on my Executive Hat here: "So Open Source is good for removing features, gotcha." Arguing about turning off Clippy not necessarily a shining example of why OSS is good. Things like zero-day exploits, internationalization, and no per server (or VM!!!) costs are what will make people adopt OSS.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
is the one Metacity uses. The patch to remove that one is also only a few lines, but I have yet to see a non-technical person manage to do that. The great advantages of free software aren't technical, they are social. People working together for a common good because it is fun is a more efficient economic system than the one in which you do it to get a paycheck. Imagine what would happen if the rest of the world where also structured like free software communities?
Football Odds
Last time I checked you can disable Clippy in 10 seconds from the Office Options menu, without the need to find the right line, remove it, and recompile. Anyone who is not capable of clicking Tools->Options and checking off a checkmark would not be capable of editing the code either.
Not being anti-OOS in any way, and there are many instances when editing a few lines WOULD make a difference in the usefulness of software (Windows Firewall sure comes to mind), but this is not one of them. Sorry.
It looks like you're writing code to remove me!
"the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
This is also a prime example of where OSS fails too. How many basic users would be able to even compile a version with the altered code, let alone alter the codes themselves? Heck even finding a specific "no clippy" version among a variety of differently configured distributions could prove too taxing. Microsoft's approach to clippy is that if you hide it 3 times in general usage it'll present a user with an option to turn it off and it'll never appear again (provided you've a well configured server). An "if you don't like it, change it" approach simply isn't as effective as good interface usability testing when you're dealing with a userbase comprised of vastly different skill levels.
Nice try at misdirection, troll, but the squabbling is over. ODF has already been accepted as an ISO standard, and is already supported by all of the following groups:
http://www.odfalliance.org/members.php#viewall
Now perhaps you would care to answer the original question: why are two standards better than one ?
The format war is the main reason why most people stick with MS Office. And well... let's take a look at Microsoft's balance sheets.
So, "Microsoft adopting ODF"? Or even "Microsoft not sabotaging ODF plugins"? No freaking way.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Set /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources to true in gconf.
Turns off the other useless eyecandy too.
So, $60,000. For 164 person company.
We're a little over a 100 people and we spend over $500,000 a year on a single contract.
Why would Apache "fail"?
And why would anyone not directly involved in it even know what you're running?
But you said, and I quote "I make buying decisions".
Noooooo...... What is "holding OSS back" is the fact that all those companies have LARGE investments in their current systems.
It takes a LONG time for companies to migrate from something that is working TODAY that they know how to support TODAY and that has been paid for TODAY.
That depends upon what you mean by "established".
Microsoft has a MONOPOLY. Therefore, they are going to be around for a LONG time.
People will continue to buy from Microsoft because it is what they know and what they use and what works.
Free software (as in speech) will be taken up by non-US governments and such. It's easier to pitch a change there when you can show $X (or whatever the local medium of exchange is) being sent to Redmond, Washington, USofA instead of into the local economy.
As much as I'd love an injunction saying that MS must make its DOCX File format readable by other Office suites, and it must produce a plugin for OO.org to open it NOW. We are screwed. MS already has Office 2007 out in the wild, and I'm starting to get .docx files I can't open in OO.org. There's only one reason this was done, OO.org is so good at opening Docs it started to threaten Office. It doesn't matter if whether OOXML gets certified, its going to be up to OO.org to reverse engineer it as fast as possible or it will make everyone cry blood.
By the way, what do you think the result will be in a year when we start seeing Samba 4 AD? MS will attack again with even harsher resolve/.
Well, at least the OpenOffice clippy hasn't told me anything so far. It's just there, on the bottom of my screen smiling and cheerfully eating up a little bit of the memory space and graphical space. Maybe it's there to appease the user by helping him to believe it's really like MS office? It's just not working on me...
You cannot forecast when to replace PC's? And you have 160+ users?
Huh?
Huh?
Even at 100+ users, we lease our workstations and replace them every 3 years. It's a known cycle and they're under warranty. Not to mention that there aren't any surprises for Accounting for the next 3 years.
Yeah, maybe you could just answer the question, okay?
Yeah, maybe you could just answer the question, okay?
Yeah, the question, care to answer it?
How would they KNOW it was Apache? You haven't answered that question, either.
I didn't ask if it was "unfair".
I asked how Apache would "fail" and how they'd even know that it was Apache.
You have not answered either of those questions.
Seeing as how you cannot answer either of those questions and you think $60,000 is a lot of money for a business and you cannot even forecast workstation purchases
I've been deploying Linux throughout the company I work at. And no one can tell the difference. As long as the service is available, they're happy.
Here's a free clue. Hardware fails. Real professions know this and have already taken steps to mitigate such failures. If a drive dies on your Apache server, the end users should not ever know about it.
If you're claiming that they'll be complaining about running Apache when that happens
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
When you get a .docx file you can't read, you say the same thing Office 2003 users say... "I can't open DOCX files, send it in DOC". The only difference is that Office 2k3 has Office 2k7 format plugins, but really, only the people who already know about them are probably going to be finding and using them.
Furthermore, considering that OOXML is basically Office 2k3 formats converted to plaintext and zipped up, I'd have thought there would ALREADY be support in OO.org by now... at least, soon. OOXML was made to allow devs to easily generate their own or read them so I'd expect writing loading/saving functions would be quicker than the original Office 2k3 format functions...
In short: There's still hope for OO.org. :)
"the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
Or.... like every other user in the world - just turn, clippy, off.
Code changes are not always a solution.
everyone doesn't compile OSS software themselves
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
My email server (Linux + Exim4 + SpamAssassin + ClamAV + chroot'ed BIND9) has over 600 days of contiguous uptime. And it's being hit every day by crackers from all over the world.
Any competent admin can keep IIS running. Any competent admin can keep Apache running.
And NONE of the users would even KNOW what webserver was running. My users don't know that I'm running Exim4. They don't know that ClamAV blocks the viruses. They only care about the SERVICE. And they're very happy with the service.
If you have to reboot IIS to get "kudos", then you're incompetent. That is all.
Competent admins get "kudos" for helping the end users perform their jobs faster and/or easier and for fixing the "I accidentally deleted an important document" problems.
Why don't you just grow a backbone and ask them to install the ODF plugin for office and send you an ODF.
Can you tell me what company you work for? I just want to make sure I never invest in a company run by a guy who thinks like you.
If your boss will fire you because a network card failed the business is doomed.
evil is as evil does
As you say, OpenOffice.org is easy to download for Windows (and all the "easy" Linux distros have precompiled packages that you can download with a few mouse clicks; if you're using a distro where you have to compile it yourself, you probably already can handle stuff like that). But thanks to Microsoft's weaselly behaviour, it'll almost certainly never be able to render OOXML documents exactly as per MS Office. The specification is incomplete (it makes frequent references to Microsoft internal documents, with which nobody else could reasonably be expected to be familiar) and it's far from certain that Microsoft will truly adhere to the published spec with what they release. For example, they might well deliberately mung layouts in subtle ways, so someone else's generated "by-the-book" OOXML document won't look right in Word. And without forcing Microsoft to reveal their Source Code (something which, TTBOMK, no court has ever ordered anyone to do) nobody could prove beyond reasonable doubt that Microsoft were to blame.
It's in Microsoft's interest never to be able to export a document so that anyone else's software can make sense of it. Office has always had the ability to import various data formats, but exporting is something it deliberately doesn't do. If anything other than Word or Excel could open a document created using Word or Excel, then at least some people would use that in place of Word or Excel -- and Microsoft would lose their monopoly.
They might add ODF import (in fact, it makes good sense to do that), but there's no way in hell they'll ever add ODF export. Although, as I've hinted, it could be done by some third party prepared to rewrite OpenOffice.org's save routine in Office VBA macros.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There is a port of the Novell plugin for Ubuntu Feisty at Getdeb:
http://www.getdeb.net/app.php?name=OpenOffice.org+OpenXML+Translator
I have installed it and tried it out on various random .docx files I have been able to find on the web. The results have varied from total failure (nothing is imported) through poor (formatting is obviously screwed up) to excellent (results look perfect even if I haven't got the Office2007 available to compare the result).
That would have depended on the changes they proposed...
Any proposed changes would have been evaluated, and if the different vendors reached a consensus that the changes provided a valid benefit, then they would have been accepted.
Many of the garbage that microsoft put into ooxml would probably have been rejected, because it provides no benefit to end users or any vendor except microsoft. Similarly, any requirements without full implementation details would have been rejected.
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