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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?"
As was extensively explained in various GNOME places recently, Miguel is not GNOME, and has borderline zero impact or influence on GNOME at present (hence the best 'looks-serious' tag the author could find for him was "co-founder"; Woz was the co-founder of Apple, does that mean he's running iPod codec policy?) . Quim Gil is rather more directly involved in GNOME right now, but he also works for Nokia. He also clearly does not set Nokia's corporate policy. Therefore what he's doing on that bug report is reporting a corporate policy that stinks. This is obviously an uncomfortable position for him, but has sod all to do with GNOME.
For the love of god, why don't people have balls(women excluded)? I'm getting tired of people bowing down to pressure or being bought out. Doesn't anybody stand up for what they believe in anymore? I mean, way to go KDE. But, Gnome? I mean, as a community aren't we supposed to stand up for the FREE as in FREEDOM we claim that open source is? I mean, this isn't just the Gnome community, I'm talking about the community as a whole. We need to stop OOXML. It's a big bloated piece of crap, shilled out at the last moment simply because MS saw a threat. But this rant isn't even about OOXML alone. Just now Ogg was kicked out of the HTML5 spec due to pressure from Nokia and Apple. I mean, WTF! Ogg was a great choice, good quality, free as in beer, and free as in freedom. The best of both worlds.
Anyways, I'm done talking.
No, he is on Novell's payroll.
Novell is on MS's payroll.
Which isn't all too high, look at their recent filings and layoffs.
Sure he wants to get a generous offer from them (MS), and he'll bent any direction of the windrose for it.
Let him move along. Even encourage him to move along. Gnumeric was the last great thing he did. Evolution was already corrupted, because the contributors to the Exchange plugin were asked to fork out for using it.
The earlier he arrives in Redmond, the better for the community.
This is exactly the sort of thing the GNU/Linux, F/OSS people need to be careful of. These are serious matters, and this joker wants to ad-hominem RMS in an attempt to minimize the impact of his statements. Note, no refutation of fact, merely insults, childish ones at that.
Yea, maybe RMS's appearance is, lacking a better phrase, unorthodox, but his words and actions are the issues here. Stop being a child and focus on the subject, or is it your job to distract from the subject?
You guys all know that Miguel has been distancing himself from GNOME for years now? He even had a signature at one point on his Slashdot account (since removed) asking people not to complain to him about perceived flaws in GNOME's UI.
Miguel is a Mono developer. Mono is linked to GNOME in the sense that some GNOME tools use it, but it's about as accurate to paint him as a GNOME developer as it would be to paint GCC developers the same way.
Wait, that isn't a car analogy. Hold on - it's about as accurate to paint him as a GNOME developer as it would be to paint a Goodyear tire salesman a Ford mechanic.
Yeah, yeah. That one works.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... what Miguel de Icaza's obsession with shoving Microsoft technologies in to Gnome?
Is it to try and attract Windows developers to the Linux platform? Is it to ease transition from Windows to Linux? Is it to make it easier for Microsoft to threaten the entire community with patent infringement threats..? What is it?
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
given that KOffice uses ODF natively, providing good evidence that ODF is not simply a one-project/company proprietary format being dressed up as a standard, yes it is important. it's a very compelling argument in favour of ODF that has been used quite a bit in the push towards ODF standardization; it's not uncommon to see ODF stalls at tech events showing OpenOffice one one computer and KOffice on another displaying the same document. more examples of ODF usage are appearing every day now, of course =)
and yes, a good number of people do use KOffice. certainly not as many people as use OpenOffice, but to the users of KOffice knowing that they are working with apps that use an interoperable format is indeed pretty important to them.
I don't see why anyone is defending OOXML.
No one uses it, yet. It's not a pragmatic standard, and it's definitely not an "official" standard (as in ISO).
More likely than not, if I sent out DOCX files from my business, I would be asked to send either PDF or DOC.
Until OOXML is ubiquitous, which will not happen for several years, there is no reason to not push ODF instead, particularly because ODF's got quite a bit of momentum internationally. Especially if the ODF plugin for MS Office continues to work properly; there won't be a reason to switch to DOCX at all.
It is more than remotely realistic to have an office without OOXML support. Microsoft's latest offering for the Mac doesn't have it. The vast majority of Office users in the world don't have it. Competing software doesn't have it yet.
OOXML will not become a reality for several years, and hopefully, will never become a reality.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Sure compared to KDE gnome is minimalist but that is a feature!!
Some, a lot, of us choosed GNOME on our own. Stop saying GNOME users only use it because it is the default desktop or because we want to disagree.
Saying that I have to mention that lately GNOME has been pulling features from under my feet, If they weren't adding features to compensate I would become very pissed about it.
I'm so used to GNOME, and find it so much more comfortable than KDE that it is probable that i'll stick with it for a long time.
On the other hand, KDE 4 is coming...
But... the future refused to change.
Gnome is in a tough spot caused by its founder, Miguel de Icaza. Given Icaza's incredibly stupid and harmful MS pandering over OOXML and other MS technologies, anything short of Gnome's total renunciation of OOXML is viewed with suspicion. Jeff Waugh's comments and Gnome's position seem reasonable to me but then crazy Miguel pops up somewhere spouting nonsense about what a wonderful standard OOXML is. This coupled with Gnome's participation in the standardization process understandably makes people nervous. I don't think Gnome has ever effectively distanced itself from Miguel de Icaza, although I'm sure they've tried.
The problem is that what you characterize as "infighting" isn't really. Let me draw an analogy.
Suppose you have a sports team, let's say football (it doesn't matter which type). We have a game between team A and Team B. Team A is pretty decently organized, and works fairly well together. Team B has some problems, however: one player is constantly starting fights with other players on his team, and frequently recruits others on the team to his faction to help in his fights with the other factions. Consequently, the team does very poorly in the competition because they're always "infighting". But then it's discovered that that one fight-starting player is actually being paid, under the table, by Team A just to stir up trouble on his team!!! So is it really infighting? I'd call it "sabotage" instead.
This is exactly what's happening with open-source, specifically with GNOME and Miguel de Icaza. He's really an agent for Microsoft, in some way. It's not clear yet whether he's actually being paid off by them, or if he's just a willing stooge who loves them so much that he's lost his grip on reality. It doesn't matter either way, though, because the effect is the same: it factionalizes open-source and creates problems, helping MS.
Personally, I think open-source projects need to cut him off altogether. When you have gangrene in one of your limbs, you amputate it before it spreads. If GNOME isn't willing to throw him out, then GNU needs to drop support for GNOME, and all other open-source projects do too. They need to stop the cancer before it spreads.
The one big problem with Gnome is that it embodies exactly what ordinary folk would imagine when you asked them about the meaning of "computer nerd". The image is that of a clumsy, pimply boy living somewhere in a basement, desperately trying to be anti-establishment. In a way, it wants to be a techno-hippie. Now imagine that the nerd's world was suddenly turned upside down by his views becoming mainstream, at least to a certain degree. By now, it has become kind of common to think and say that Microsoft is the devil, that the whole proprietary software crap should be buried in an unmarked grave, etc.
That's exactly the situation Icaza and his cronies are finding themselves in. They wanted to be rebels, even saviors. One sign of that is the (rather fruitless) experiment that is Gnome. In an attempt to describe it, I arrived at the following:
Or in other words: Epic fail! You want proof? Until today, Gnome has consistently failed to even grow a usable file selection dialog. I rest my case.
Ironically, denouncing the rest of the "scene" has that way become the logical way to again be different. It's a purely religious reflex: if someone threatens your perceived dominance, it is declared evil. If you think about it, deep in its absolute retardedness, it's kinda cute on that level.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Yeah, KGhostview was probably it. The amount of code certainly wasn't "inconsequential", the KDE code was little more than a front end to the (GPL'd) application. RMS's comment therefore was correct. His comments were taken offensively, but shouldn't be - RMS was essentially saying "Technically, the KDE people did violate the GPL and lost their rights to redistribute some code as a result, so the legal procedure of "forgiveness" needs to be done." But it didn't come out that way as the forgiveness thing made it sound like RMS was calling upon KDE developers to go on their needs and plead.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Look at these benchmarks:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/10/benchmarks.html
Compared to Qt, the GTK+ 2 rendering engine is sorely lacking.
Miguel may have been a founder of the GNOME project, but he is not even on the GNOME foundation board anymore. His opinion matters no more than that of anyone else who contributes code to GNOME. Though he has written some excellent software his baffling statements probably with respect to OOXML will not likely be taken seriously.
RMS is worried about compromising on principles of Free software by putting efforts into making software that reads or writes this technically and philosophically nasty format. Since when has AVOIDING interoperability furthered the spread of Free software? Linus has yielded to pragmatism many times in the past (using BitKeeper for example, and being cautious about GPL3) whereas RMS remains steadfastly rigid in his ideals at all levels. RMS' stance is admirable, but look at where the Linux kernel is...then look at how far the HURD has come in comparison. Perhaps some pragmatism isn't always a bad thing?
Now, as far as compromising "principle" with the pragmatic decision to work on making GNOME read the OOXML format, where exactly is this a more serious concern than with countless other interoperability projects? What about the work that went into making NTFS mountable in Linux? What about the Samba project? What about the ability of OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, GNUMeric, etc. to at least partially support Microsoft's legacy binary file formats already? Where do we draw the "principled" line here? Microsoft's "core dump" binary formats, NTFS file system, CIFS and the Active Directory are not proper open standards yet great effort has been made thus far to reverse-engineer and deal with them so as to break down the Microsoft lock-in. How come, all of the sudden, RMS has to chime in about OOXML and now suddenly we should all ignore it on principle?
Perhaps the KDE people should become even more principled and drop all the hooks it has with Samba to browse and be browsed on Microsoft's "network neighbourhood". Perhaps Linux-based OSes should not only all drop GNOME as the default desktop, they should also drop the ability to mount NTFS volumes too. After all, if we're gonna snub OOXML because it's crap and it's closed, then we should be consistent and do the same across the board.