Slashdot Mirror
KDE and KOffice Rebuke OOXML, GNOME Dithers
Peter writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"
is to constantly fight about it amongst ourselves. That'll do the trick.
No, he is on Novell's payroll.
Novell is on MS's payroll.
Gnome does *not* support OOXML becoming a standard. The *only* thing they are doing with it is trying to make sure that *if* and when it becomes a standard that it's good enough and open enough for Free software like Gnome apps to able to implement it. But they are *not* helping to get it passed.
Furthuremore, this crap article praises KDE for backing ODF implying that Gnome isn't. Of course Gnome backs ODF.
Finally, look for Jeff Waugh's comments in the comment section of TFA to see how it really is.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
With Linus preferring KDE, could Stallman's support put more weight behind KDE? I'm rather surprised that the GNOME Foundation's decision. They could at least have kept their mouths shut instead of praising OOXML, which severely damages their credibility in the GNU world.
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
I am reminded of Henry Kissinger's famous quote: "Even a paranoid has some real enemies."
I appreciate RMS and his views. He is a pragmatic alarmist, he is playing the chess game that is computers several moves ahead of most people. That's why so many take his statements with a grain of salt, they don't see he has been "right," consistently, for over two decades, often years before the first real signs begin to show.
GNU/Linux and F/OSS have enemies. It is an undeniable fact. There are people working against us. One need only hop over to groklaw and see the black hand of Microsoft (and greed of course) guiding that whole thing. So, maybe we are paranoid, but even paranoids have real enemies.
I am really starting to believe that GNOME is a trojan horse, or at least some aspects of it. I don't trust Miguel de Icaza, he's either incompetent of a shill and he's potentially dangerous.
...if we didn't?
Especially on an issue where it really does matter.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
IMHO, they use GNOME by default in the vain hope that commercial software developers will have easier time releasing closed-source binaries for their distros (which is quite disgusting, of course). You need to buy a QT commercial license to do that stuff (at least the payments are used to support QT development). Anyway - few people _do_ that stuff. And I think that's basically the only reason GNOME is by default.
As for "all" popular distros, the word "commercial" is missing. Or at least "commerce-oriented" (and, yes, yes, Ubuntu is one of these). PCLinuxOS, Mepis are very popular and nice KDE-based distros. PCLinuxOS is particular, I find it has a healthy, free, even "scene"-like attitude to it.
They want everyone to adopt to using their ooxml ball, but they keep giving it as a flat ball to everyone and only they can pump it up. Not sure what Microsoft wants, but they're not exactly playing with anyone.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
but their popularity doesn't match what Fedora and Ubuntu have been able to carve out in the Linux Desktop market.
Funny, when I bought my mother-in-law a $300 Wal-Mart PC, it came pre-loaded with Linspire, a KDE distro.
I promptly removed it in favor of SimplyMEPIS, another KDE distro.
Here's a $199 PC, which runs Enlightenment.
de Icaza is very entrenched in MS derived technologies: Mono, SilverLight, etc. It is perfectly understandable to want the MS technologies to be thoroughly explained and implementable. Also there are some back history to OOXML that contains file format data that could be useful for many of the projects. For the sake of interop it is necessary to glean the standards as written. I don't think he is giving too much praise to the OOXML format, whether it is better or not is not important here.
Once upon a time, KDE was lambasted for using the not-Free-enough Qt libraries. There was a project to replace Qt and create a truly free KDE; but in the end, Trolltech released Qt under the GPL. And not the mealy-mouthed LGPL, like the GNOME libraries, which allows use in Caged software; but the full-on, not-sharing-is-stealing GPL. So the leeches still had to pay to use Qt in a Caged application; but if you played fair and wrote Free software, you could use Qt with the blessing of the copyright holders. (This didn't please the Windows fans. Windows users, raised on a diet of "illegally copying the Software is my way of Sticking It to the Man, and if you don't pay me $49 for this crapplication to do something petty that Unix has had since forever that I built with my pirate copy of Visual Studio, I'll turn off saving and bring up nag screens every five minutes", bitched loudly that there was no GPL Qt for Windows -- but the only thing stopping them porting it was the fact that the average Windows user would rather drown in shit than make the effort to swim.)
Now, the "freedom" to write Caged applications is a thorny issue. But I see it like this, and I'm sure RMS does too: in a nation where the ownership of slaves is forbidden, citizens tend to be freer on average than in a nation where the ownership of slaves is permitted. So KDE are actively promoting freedom, by taking a stand against OOXML. Novell and GNOME and Mono are getting rather too cosy in bed with Microsoft for comfort. It's very hard not to think about Microsoft pulling some kind of bait-and-switch operation which would put OSS users in trouble. If this happens, I think it's actually more likely that the Governments of the world would just pass Enabling Acts to annul whatever IP Microsoft are trying to abuse; but that's still a waste of taxpayers' money that doesn't have to happen, and by the time it gets to that stage the damage (in terms of unopenable public and private records) will be severe.
Not everyone is as responsible a citizen as you. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you, and just because you don't understand the importance of having access to Source Code doesn't mean it isn't every bit as big a deal, in its own right, as slavery.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It's been my experience that does not support office formats well. Mostly for images and tables. I have had many experiences where I open up a .doc only to find that the images are on top of each other. With any luck a formal spec, as convoluted and stupid as it is, would help fix this problem. I commonly recommend that people try using Open Office before they run out a buy MS Office. Half of them end up having so many problems with .docs that they have to get MS Office anyway. I am not saying that it's a good standard just that MS making an open standard at all is a benefit for Linux adaption in the long run. I'm also giving Miguel the benefit of the doubt here by saying that he might be supporting MS standards so that a switch from Windows to Linux becomes easier for people.
- GNOME (and Novell) do not support the standardisation of OOXML. They are both members of the ODF alliance, both use it as the default file format, and if it was even remotely realistic to have a decent office product without OOXML support (where the Windows desktop is unfortunately in such an insane over-dominance currently), then they would of course be all for it.
- The implementation of OOXML is all about interoperability. I don't see anyone (wrongly) trashing Samba as a project, and yet its existence and the effort to implement OOXML support is virtually identical in terms of free software.
- You like software freedom and hate the software patent system? Great, so do I. Free implementations of proprietary solutions, though, are a good thing; not a single one of my friends are going to be using Linux if they can't submit their assignments to their lecturers. We need interoperability, to ease the transition for people coming from the proprietary world.
- The KDE/Koffice developers issued a statement basically saying they didn't have the resources or the time to implement OOXML, and suddenly a lot of silly talk gets thrown at GNOME. If I volunteered to implement OOXML support in Koffice I doubt (i) that they would object, and for sure that (ii) any distribution would not include it.
- Even if you dislike Jeff Waugh, it's pretty tough to find a rational basis for criticising him based on the podcast or his approach to the problem other than (i) not getting the GNOME statement (again, which you really can't fault) out soon enough, or (ii) giving Roy the publicity he wants.
- The itwire article plays Roy as some sort of victim in the podcast talk. That is ridiculous. Unfortunately -- and to the detriment of the FLOSS community -- Roy is an incredibly prolific, poisonous person willing to do or say anything that might cook up some self-publicity, and with an irrational hatred of Novell. And in fact on the contrary, Roy skipped around every question that was directly asked to him; instead opting to just give background on Microsoft's "evil" nature and talking about how bad OOXML is (both of which we palpably know).
- Finally, even if you decide to ignore all the other above facts, please tell me why you're not also staging wide protests against OpenOffice.org or your distribution for including OOXML support, as well.
To save any comments of bias, I'm an ardent KDE aficionado.How can he 'separate the two'?
Nokia obviously does not want to support Vorbis. That's not Quim's decision to make. He can't change reality on the bug report and say "sure, Nokia will support Vorbis tomorrow, everything will be fine and dandy", because it's clearly *not going to happen*. But Nokia's policy is not GNOME's, and what Nokia does really has no implications for what GNOME does.
I really don't understand what you expect Quim to do on this bug report, or why you think it implies anything in particular about *GNOME's* policies, rather than Nokia's.
???
Life isn't _usually_ about taking your ball and going home.
Every once in a while, however, you meet a predator/bully who cannot be challenged via _any_ means except a war to the death. You do not beat diseases by negotiating with bacteria. You do not eliminate rats by trying to train them away from dumpsters. You cannot negotiate with an irrational tyrant expect positive results.
We've already been through the standards process for a document format. There's an ISO standard for documents: ODF. Anything that does not build on ODF is a subversion of that process. Worse, Microsoft's methods are extremely slimy.
You cannot beat Microsoft on the playing field, since MS has the money to insure there aren't any fair playing fields. That's why _we_, the angry morons, need to try and balance the field the other way.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
And the GNOME Foundation is meanwhile in the background trying to create a pump that will also inflate Microsoft's little ball. Then we can all play with it however we want.
True, the ODF ball has a lot fewer corners and edges, but that's not going to stop some people from wanting to play with the Microsoft ball, so sooner or later, we're going to need to know how to deal with it.
While you guys are busy freaking out about GNOME, maybe Linux should drop support for NTFS and FAT, and OpenOffice.org should no longer be able to open any document ending in ".doc"
Seriously. People need to chill out. This is about ensuring that we DON'T get shut out of anything. While even the paranoid have enemies, not everything is a conspiracy.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
I know it's a minor point but it then changes who you blame for the issue. Currently it's Open Office that does not work right. You can't argue it. The spec is 'work like MS office' and it does not. But OOXML has a spec. So when the MS software deviates the MS software will be provably wrong. Like with the acid 2 test. When Firefox 3 comes out IE will be the only browser that does not correctly support HTML. And when they can't pass the OOXML acid 2 test equivalent there will be extra egg on there face for having written the standard in the first place. The people who wrote the OOXML standard not being able to implement it will show just how bad it is.
It's because he's pragmatic. You know, not religious. Not a fundamentalist crazy-person.
I like Mono. It lets me write C# on Linux. Does it hurt you? Apparently it must, how I have no idea.
I want to open OOXML documents. Does this hurt you? Got me. You seem to think it does.
As an AbiWord developer all I can say is we want to support any format that our users have on their computer.
The work that Jody does helps in this regard.
If the KOffice guys want to not import ooxml then they're making their program less useful to their users.
Martin Sevior
"If MS switches over to OOXML and Linux can support it just as well as Windows who needs Windows?"
The whole point of OOXML is only Microsoft can ever fully support it as it's full of dependencies on Microsoft quirky and slightly undefinable technologies.
And, BTW, Miguel has eroded any credibility he had by, apparently, sabotaging his turf of the open software thing.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Yes. As a matter of fact supporting Microsoft's office monopoly hurts everyone with a computer, since all of the half-assed tools you use to view them are inferior to Microsoft's so everyone else just warezes Office at home and licenses it at work, perpetuating the entire cycle. Since the definition Microsoft provides is incomplete the cycle is unbreakable, because the tools will always be inferior, because the specification is insufficient for interoperation by design. Thus the Microsoft welfare system is complete.
The C# issue doesn't matter because no one cares about your hello world nonsense.
When an application breaks due to to a bad configuration file, how do you fix/troubleshoot?
rm *.conf, restart. A generic configuration is very often created when none is present.
mv foo.conf.old foo.conf. Poor man's backup.
recover, add foo.conf, restore. File level backups == application level backups.
and so on...
When an application breaks due to bad registry/GConf information?
restore whole registry?
Why does "A single API for storing configuration parameters" have to be implemented like a database? It sucked for Windows, so XML + schemas will make it work for Linux?
W-T-F.
I think a 'good' registry implementation stores data in plain text, and NOT necessarily all in the same place.
If it's XML, it might as well be binary. XML is based on some great principals, but EVERYTHING doesn't need to be so extensible OR marked up (obfuscated).
Each application's data should be easily segregated, logically, and physically.
It should be easy to take a snapshot of a single application's data. Like cp foo.conf foo.old easy.
It should be easy to test a snapshot. Apachectl configtest or testparm easy.
Decide if users should be able to edit raw backend files, or merely view them, or whether usage of an intermediate layer should be enforced.
- Then, go with either easy to read plain text, or heavily optimized binary. Plain text XML might be permissible only in the 'read only' case.
Design a GOOD intermediate layer that supports all the above concepts, with a GUI, from the command line, and by any other means current configurations are accessible by.
Support for local and global configurations. As in
Easy access controls.. public, private. Ugh.. static, whatever, just keep the learning curve low. Hey, play your backend right and guess what? (if your filesystem access controls sucked to begin with, that's a whole other problem)
This could go on forever.
You want to hear the best way to design "a single API for storing configuration parameters"?
1. Take a good, long look at what's possible the old way
2. Don't reduce the user's power. Methods may change, but maintain the same or better control (and ease of use, please).
3. Add features that having a common API enables. Data change notification, for example.
4. K.I.S.S.
Yah, it might be hard to do, most good things are.