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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."
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.
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!
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.
The post you replied to made no mention of the average user customizing that stuff. He said large businesses. Most large businesses put their own images on computers with specific combinations of software and modify/skin commercial software when applicable frequently write their own tools to do things like migrate users to a new computer without losing personal data or deploy images and software. A build of open office or any other OSS app compiled with their preferred flags to configure or their preferred skin/theme on an app is well within the realm of reality at these places.
For example, years ago when I worked for Best Buy, the techs used a fairly standard trouble ticket and inventory app (I'll be damned if I can remember the name), but it was rebranded as "STAR" by best buy and integrated with the POS software to a certain extent. I later worked at Capital One where they used the exact same application by it's normal name, but highly modified the interface to their needs (which Best Buy also almost surely did). We had a scripted tool built around some user migration tools MS provides to move user data from one computer to another. At the place I work now we use a modified Bugzilla and we're far from a large company. And as already mentioned, pretty much every large company has their own custom images for computers with software packages and versions that have been tested and verified to work together.