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?"

Comments

The best way to bring people to open source

[nofrak]

is to constantly fight about it amongst ourselves. That'll do the trick.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[phasm42]

Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?

Found out on the next exciting episode of Desktop Drama!

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't about open source, this is about Free Software.

I will follow Stallman.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, these are serious questions that we need to ask, and because they are so important, you can't expect everyone to immediately agree. It is better that we are debating the question, rather than simply following what one man has to say (regardless of the fact that I agree with what he has to say, it is still good to debate it).

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Znork]

"is to constantly fight about it amongst ourselves."

It's called competition. And evolution.

And yes, in the long term, it actually will do the trick.

The free software community, through dissent and conflict, becomes infinitely adaptable to any and all niches. Compare with monolithic entities like Microsoft with much stronger direction; when they decide to go down a number of dead ends they end up with products like Vista, with no fallbacks, unable to fill new niches like the low-end sub $200 pc's.

I'll take dissent before cooperation for the sake of shutting up any day.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[miffo.swe]

The fighting amongst "ourselves" is the equivalent of the marketplace for commercial software. Without different opinions and views open source would just suck as bad as comercial software does. A healthy community is devided amongst different interests and world views.

The sole reason Microsoft hasnt managed to kill Linux is because of the very fractured commynity. You cant attack one vector without something else popping up in response to that. For eg. make Gnome Microsofts biotch! and people will go elsewhere, and that includes many Gnome developers and users.

I for one hope the fight will continue beacause to me its a sign of a vibrant community that will satisfy very different needs. Its also good because a fractured community demands that things interact according to some standards, like freedesktop. One entity cant take the ball and run off the payingfield.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[sumdumass]

What are serious questions? Gnome choice to support the devil incarnated itself or KDE's decision to snub it's nose as Microsoft and end up with yet another crippled office implementation that can't compete with MS office if OOXML gets pushed through?

Or am I missing the big point here. Could the serious issue be the Stallman has spoken and yet another project ignored him?

I'm seriously not trying to troll here. I just don't know what is so serious about what is on the table that there needs to be a lengthy round of infighting and more rejection from those looking to get started with free/open source software. It seems more likely that the most serious part of the story is that some sight needs to increase ad revenue so they can but their kids a Scuba Steve doll for Christmas. This is really a non issue. If Stallman isn't happing with his favorite desktop, he should find another. if he doesn't care, then why should we. IT is likely that he will stick with Gnome just so he doesn't appear to be agreeing with Linus on anything. Besides, there are more cons to both situations then pros when you try to look at them together like this. There happens to be more then KDE and Gnome out there and the are highly capable too.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[sumdumass]

Lol.. I'm not sure you made any sense.

If the strength of open source is the diversity and uniqueness of each project and clique, then why are we fighting when they do exactly that? It seems to me that a mature approach would be to simply acknowledge the differences and you what you think the best tool for the job is. And just because the support might be there doesn't mean you will have to use it.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Vexorian]

Hell yes.

If someone screws up in the Free software community people will complaint and fight against the actions and we are not dependent on them thanks to the fact that we have plenty of alternatives everywhere. So, yes, this fragmentation is a huge selling point for open source - free software.

It concerns me that GNOME didn't see this coming, they don't owe anything to MS or their Optionally-open XML format , so it just doesn't make any sense to advocate such unnecessary format that is meant to keep their monopoly, what GNOME is doing just doesn't make any sense...

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[miffo.swe]

For one there has to be open debate about things for most people to form an opinion. Its not like people sit and read mailing lists all day just to get a feel for different politics and goals for various projects.

I do not feel we should just sit tight when we have strong opinions. If you call flamewars and bickering fighting you take things way to seriously.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[sumdumass]

Surely your not going to consider open debate to be "in fighting" are you? That would pretty much water down the idea of fighting.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

It seems to me that a mature approach would be to simply acknowledge the differences and you what you think the best tool for the job is. And just because the support might be there doesn't mean you will have to use it.

It's not that simple: this is an issue of standards. When you're dealing with standards, and creating and promoting a standard, you're inherently rejecting the idea of letting people decide what the "best tool for the job" is, because you're trying to make them use a specific tool, so that they can interoperate. What good would it do me to make up my own graphics format and editing tools, for instance, if I can't use the resulting images anywhere or send them to anyone? I can use them for myself, of course, but for things like that, it's a lot more useful if I can also exchange them with others, and because it's a popular standard, they have no problem using these files.

There's a big fight right now between ODF and OOXML. People (especially large organizations) are finally seeing the value of open office format standards, and XML-based ones which they can view or edit with tools other than the word processor or spreadsheet which created them. The whole world has been suffering with MS Office's closed, proprietary, binary-only formats for many years now, and they're ready for a change to something more like PDF or JPG, which can be viewed or edited with lots of different, competing tools. (It's also very useful to have an XML-based standard so that information can be easily extracted, such as for web searches. Google could easily spider and index XML-based documents on the web, whereas doing that for MS's proprietary formats isn't so simple.) But MS doesn't want people to switch to an open standard; they'll lose their proprietary lock-in, and consequently many MS Office customers. So they've intentionally confused the issue by making up their own XML-based "standard", OOXML, which isn't open, and basically serves as an XML wrapper for closed, binary data so that competing software still can't be 100% compatible.

Diversity and uniqueness of different open-source projects is a good thing as you say, as people can pick what works the best, but they're not shut out of anything because it's all open (For instance, I use KDE normally, but I can still use GNOME programs because it's all open-source; I'm not locked out of either by choosing one). But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about an open standard vs. a closed standard. If the world chooses the closed standard, then we're right back where we were with a decade or more of MS Office dominance, and no other tool being 100% compatible, so we're all forced to use MS Office just to be compatible with everyone else. No thanks.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

You are missing the big point here: open vs. closed standards. OOXML is taking a back-seat to ODF more and more, so MS is trying to screw things up and push OOXML through ECMA, etc. (which is just a rubber-stamp agency), and all the despicable things they did with the ISO trying to get it passed as an ISO standard (which finally failed when their shenanigans were exposed).

If GNOME supports OOXML, this just muddies the waters even more. It's a blatant move by MS (using covertly-paid henchmen) to fracture the open-source community.

We already have multiple national governments adopting the ODF standard (which truly is an open standard); the last thing we need is the stooges at GNOME slowing this process.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

It's a blatant move by MS (using covertly-paid henchmen) to fracture the open-source community.

Proof? Evidence? How do you know that the GNOME isn't doing what the article summary suggested, and actually considering the format on equal terms with ODF?

Just great. McCarthian politics within software. "Oh, you don't like ODF? Why not? Your sounding like a closed-standard sympathiser and a Microsoft lackey!"

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

How do you know that the GNOME isn't doing what the article summary suggested, and actually considering the format on equal terms with ODF?

If they're considering OOXML on equal terms with ODF, then that shows they're clearly biased towards MS. Providing support as a migration path is fine, but endorsing it is another thing altogether. I don't mind OpenOffice supporting .doc and .xls files, so I can exchange those with MS Office users when I need to, but it doesn't endorse those in any way. I would expect any Free software to do the same with OOXML: provide support if necessary, in order to facilitate migration and backwards compatibility, but don't endorse closed, proprietary standards.

Just great. McCarthian politics within software. "Oh, you don't like ODF? Why not? Your sounding like a closed-standard sympathiser and a Microsoft lackey!"

I'm sorry, but it just isn't possible to be a supporter of Free software and also endorse closed, proprietary standards. The two are at odds with each other. This isn't McCarthyism, this is reality. The only reason to have closed, proprietary standards is to facilitate vendor lock-in, which is completely against the goals of Free software.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

If they're considering OOXML on equal terms with ODF, then that shows they're clearly biased towards MS.

I read that, knee-jerked, and thought "you really are biased against MS, aren't you?" I read on and saw you didn't actually do anything to correct that reaction. You really think that the simple act of comparing the MS standard to the ODF on equal terms shows a bias towards MS? If ODF were truly superior, a comparison on equal terms would come up with similar results to a biased one. I think you missed the point of the "equal" bit, which is funny because you emphasised it.

I'm sorry, but it just isn't possible to be a supporter of Free software and also endorse closed, proprietary standards.

Was it possible to be a commie and to support freedom?

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

I read that, knee-jerked, and thought "you really are biased against MS, aren't you?" I read on and saw you didn't actually do anything to correct that reaction. You really think that the simple act of comparing the MS standard to the ODF on equal terms shows a bias towards MS? If ODF were truly superior, a comparison on equal terms would come up with similar results to a biased one. I think you missed the point of the "equal" bit, which is funny because you emphasised it.

ODF = open
OOXML = closed and proprietary

How hard is this for you to understand? How you can possibly compare the two on equal terms when one isn't available for you to look at?

You seem to be a troll, and you haven't done anything to correct that reaction.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[sumdumass]

I disagree, it doesn't muddy the water at all. And It isn't about covertly paid henchmen either.

I know it is easy to just blame something underhanded when someone does something you don't like. It is easier to say they got paid off then to admit there might be another side to the argument and that someone could be attracted to that instead of their position. IT doesn't mean it is true though.

Here is an example, The Mozilla teams started getting courted by MS so they could perfect things and get firefox and thunderbird working correctly in Vista when it was released. And just after the devs went to the Redmond compound and got cozy with microsoft, they announced that Firefox 3 wouldn't support any windows below XP. and after some complaining they claim it was because of some Vista only windowing system that was going to be included in XP after a service pack or something. And this was sidestepping the issues of QT and the linux implementations that could easily cross platform and work just as well in it's place. So the question is, did firefox get bought off by MS in order to push an upgrade path for the windows 9x,ME and 2000 holdouts? or is it really that the developers lost interest in ancient operating systems. According to your covertly paid henchmen argument, it would be MS paid off the mozilla teams.

What your really doing is pulling a George W. Bush and saying either your with us or against us. There is no middle ground. When the fact is, there will be quite a few people using the standard if MS does get it pushed through some standards commity and you already admitted that it was likely to happen. And for the reference, there really wouldn't be anything wrong with it once they fix some things outside it bing propriatary. I mean it isn't like implementing this or attempting to is actually a downgrade. IT is just a fundamental element of the opensource community working as it was intended with someone filling a need when it was created. Show we run all these decisions through a commity first?

And trust me, as an avid KDE user and linux advocate, It takes a lot to look at the issue for it's merits instead of just saying "don't anyone use MS or Gnome again". And even then, it wouldn't be as tainted and jaded as what your saying. But somehow with your line of reasoning, I feel betrayed and lied to by the OSS community in itself. But that is nothing new, the entire Novell fiasco and the rush on the GPLv3 has started it a long time ago.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

How you can possibly compare the two on equal terms when one isn't available for you to look at?

Haven't MS published the specifications?

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[kryptkpr]

How you can possibly compare the two on equal terms when one isn't available for you to look at?

Huh? The OOXML standard is available for all to see at Standard ECMA-376: Office Open XML File Formats

Now, arguments can be made that the standard is not defined well enough to be implemented (due to things like "do it like word95 did"), but that's the sort of thing that should be resolved by all interested parties before finalizing.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[initialE]

They may have be thwarted at ISO, but the consequence was that they have destroyed ISO as a standards body. Not only is its credibility hit, they seem to have difficulty implementing any new standards from this time forth (due to the outstanding number of new nonvoting members). What's the point of ODF being ISO accredited if ISO has no more credit to its name? So Microsoft wins there too.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

Now, arguments can be made that the standard is not defined well enough to be implemented (due to things like "do it like word95 did"), but that's the sort of thing that should be resolved by all interested parties before finalizing.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not an openly-viewable standard when critical parts of it are closed and secret. I highly doubt this will get resolved; stuff like that is in there precisely because MS wants to maintain their vendor lock-in. How are they going to maintain lock-in if they openly document everything? Besides, these issues were raised many, many months ago when MS tried to get their "standard" accepted as one, and they still haven't done anything about them.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

No, they haven't. It's rather difficult to independently implement a standard when parts of it are deliberately kept secret.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

I know it is easy to just blame something underhanded when someone does something you don't like. It is easier to say they got paid off then to admit there might be another side to the argument and that someone could be attracted to that instead of their position. IT doesn't mean it is true though.

Saying that OOXML is a "superb standard" when major parts of it are secret is certainly underhanded. For someone who's supposedly a Free software advocate, advocating a "standard" which works to remove peoples' freedom, when another standard has gained much momentum and does work to give people freedom with their data, is blatantly dishonest. The theory that that person has been paid off is simply Occam's Razor; it's the simplest explanation which fits. The other other explanation requires assuming serious mental illness.

This has nothing to do with Mozilla deciding not to support legacy proprietary operating systems. Should Mozilla also support Win3.1, or OS/2 Warp?

When the fact is, there will be quite a few people using the standard if MS does get it pushed through some standards commity and you already admitted that it was likely to happen.

That's already happened, unless I missed something: OOXML is an ECMA standard. Then again, ECMA is just an industry association that rubber-stamps stuff, not a true standards organization. MS tried to get ISO to rubber-stamp it as well, and they went as far as to stuff the standards committee with some paid-off members, but that didn't work and ISO still rejected it. Now ISO is all screwed up because of these extra members which can't be easily removed, but aren't bothering to vote on anything.

And for the reference, there really wouldn't be anything wrong with it once they fix some things outside it bing propriatary.

Oh, is that all? There's major sections of the spec which are utterly secret; they just reference other documentation which isn't available. That's not a complete specification. Moreover, people have been complaining about this for over a year yet MS won't fix it; it's because they don't want to! They can't make OOXML a completely open specification without losing their vendor lock-in, so they're simply not going to do it.

But somehow with your line of reasoning, I feel betrayed and lied to by the OSS community in itself. But that is nothing new, the entire Novell fiasco and the rush on the GPLv3 has started it a long time ago.

This is because MS is successfully fracturing the OSS community. The Novell fiasco was completely engineered by MS, along with Novell's incompetence. The problem with OSS supporters is they keep trying to think that MS is just another company like any other, and is not willing to go to extraordinary lengths to kill OSS, the same way they've killed their other competition in the past with dirty tricks. Sorry to sound Bushian, but it really is "us or them"; that's what happens when one party has declared war on another, does everything they can to destroy their opponent, and worst of all has a history of horrendous behavior.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[tyrione]

ISO standards doesn't start and end with Microsoft's ability to gain favor. ISO will recover just fine. The media has a way of reshaping reality and does it often.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[man_of_mr_e]

Since when are deprecated flags that are actively considered illegal to even use in any new document considered a "critical part"?

Here's a suggestion. Why don't you actually READ the specification related to those items. They're not big.

Let's use C++ as an example. ISO standard C89 mentions that old style K&R function definitions are around in pre-standard code, however that style of code is deprecated. Most compilers still accept K&R style unless you tell the compiler to only accept standard, non-deprecated code. However, there is nothing critical about such functionality and a compiler that doesn't conform to K&R is perfectly legal.

This is basically the same thing. There are elements that can appear in legacy documents that have been converted to the new format that are deprecated. You don't have to support them to conform to the standard, because the standard makes them officially unsupported.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[PixelSlut]

Get a clue and do a little more research before you label people at GNOME "stooges". The work that people like Jody Goldberg of GNOME is doing is a huge benefit to everyone, but people like you are turning it into more of a political issue than it should be. Jody is actively going through the OOXML specs on behalf of free software hackers and users (that includes YOU, dumbass!) and figuring out where all the ambiguities are, what doesn't make sense, what isn't implementable as specified, etc. He's trying to make a closed standard open, rather than undertake the futile task of making it disappear.

I haven't read the specs, but that's because I don't hack of any office suite software (and I'm willing to bet money that you don't either, and that you haven't read the specs). But Jody does. And Michael Meeks does. And Miguel has (and may still to some extent, I don't know). Because of that experience they are qualified to talk about it. At least, more qualified than you are. If they say something, why don't you just listen to what they say for a moment rather than blow it off because you've already made up your mind that they're wrong? What exactly has qualified you to know more about this than them? You read a couple /. headlines and you're an expert, right?

And no, I don't really care that RMS praised KDE for this. Instead he should praise them for making a nice office suite, not for for picking a side on a stupid political issue. He should be praising Jody Goldberg for all the hard work he is doing for free software hackers and users out there, in case anyone decides in the future that they want to support OOXML. Just because Jody is doing all this work doesn't mean that GNOME is committed to using OOXML, because it isn't. That's a bullshit conspiracy theory that got started on /. and digg, which are apparently where RMS gets his news from these days. Jody's work is about clarifying the spec in case GNOME is put in a position where they feel they need to support the spec someday.

I'm not even going to start on the MS covert funding conspiracy theory bullshit.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[aichpvee]

I've been hating on gnome and miguel de icaza for microsoft kowtowing (among other stupid actions) for YEARS! So Stallman can follow me.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Windom Earle]

Should Mozilla also support Win3.1, or OS/2 Warp?

Mozilla shouldn't actively make it impossible to run a Mozilla-type browser on Windows 3.1 or OS/2 by keeping parts of the source code secret. If I am not mistaken there is at least one build of Mozilla that has been ported to OS/2. And the point is that as long as there are no secrets or hidden 'twists' in the codebase, it will always be conceivable that an enthusiast can port it to whatever ancient, offbeat, or arcane OS they choose.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[jhol13]

I think it is more interesting how Gnome (e.g. Gnumeric) will behave. Is 1900 a leap year? How CEILING() is calculated?,

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[sumdumass]

Saying that OOXML is a "superb standard" when major parts of it are secret is certainly underhanded. For someone who's supposedly a Free software advocate, advocating a "standard" which works to remove peoples' freedom, when another standard has gained much momentum and does work to give people freedom with their data, is blatantly dishonest. The theory that that person has been paid off is simply Occam's Razor; it's the simplest explanation which fits. The other other explanation requires assuming serious mental illness.

So outside part of it being secrete and you support the other standard, what isn't superb about the Standard. Well, better yet, just tell me what is really wrong with it outside your own little prejudice on open and ODF.

This is because MS is successfully fracturing the OSS community. The Novell fiasco was completely engineered by MS, along with Novell's incompetence. The problem with OSS supporters is they keep trying to think that MS is just another company like any other, and is not willing to go to extraordinary lengths to kill OSS, the same way they've killed their other competition in the past with dirty tricks. Sorry to sound Bushian, but it really is "us or them"; that's what happens when one party has declared war on another, does everything they can to destroy their opponent, and worst of all has a history of horrendous behavior.

Well, MS put the bait on the hook and trolled it through the water but the FSF bit it and swam like no fish has ever swam with it. You cannot let MS take full credit with it. The FSF was looking for a way top get support fo their failing GPLv3 project and this bread the life and support they needed to come back. They ran with it and the only reason Stallman is mentioned in this article is because he wants to see how much support he still has. I have already saw three posts claiming things like this couldn't happen under the GPLv3. But that is besides the point.

The point is, that MS isn't working very hard at destroying OSS. They are simply baiting the waters and letting the fish fight over the food. Sorry for all the fishing references but I was out crappie jigging this morning and it is fresh in my mind. The warm rain has melted most of the ice around the edges of the lake and it wasn't to hard to hack through the inch or so to get the boat out there.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Workaphobia]

I like Desperate Desktops better.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[richlv]

i previously had a theory that miguel is working like a vaccine, spitting shit in smaller dosages than larger wrongdoers could and doing that earlier, so that opensource community can react to those problems, working like the immune system.

now it seems more likely that he really, really wants to work at microsoft, bet wants to get high post there from early on.
so, simply applying didn't give him that.
now he is building/shaping some companies that are4 ms friendly and paving a road for ms takeover, in which he could get some executive post at microsoft.

this would kinda suck, as i more or less like what novell is doing with opensuse :)

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[wild_berry]

I would argue contrary to what you're saying. Miguel created GNUmeric, started the GNOME project and has continued to work toward providing Free Software that interoperates with Microsoft products. Free Software exists in a world where Microsoft is already entrenched, so de Icaza is taking the difficult but pragmatic stance of developing Free Software that works with Microsoft's proprietary stuff. He's been doing that all along, and Wikipedia claims that when interviewed to join a MS team writing a SPARC port of Internet Explorer, he implored MSIE team to free the IE codebase.

I think that Miguel needs to continue to do the work that he's doing. But there's another side to the role he's played: publicity. Make it known that he's doing what he's doing for why he's doing it, without discussion, so that people can know what's going on, make up their minds and then let him do what he does well.

The best way to bring people to open source is to get past the "if you can, do; if you can't, whine about other people doing it."

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[makomk]

But the latest version of Microsoft Office is apparently using depreciated parts of the standard that aren't documented and that can't be implemented by third parties due to Microsoft patents in new documents - specifically, VML.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[richlv]

why the hell is it in the specification at all ?
no, really why is it there ?

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, exactly. If you're saving in the new format, then you don't need the deprecated stuff. If you want to save in Word97 .doc or whatever, just select "save as", but that doesn't mean it should be in the same standard document as the new standard.

Does the .jpeg standard include the specifications for .gif? Of course not.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

He's trying to make a closed standard open, rather than undertake the futile task of making it disappear.

WTF? Making a closed standard open? That sounds rather futile too. The only way you can make a closed standard open is with the permission of whoever owns it. Are you fools still so naive that you think MS is a reasonable company willing to play fair? Why would MS want to do anything to help you? They want you to use MS Office and that's it.

But Jody does. And Michael Meeks does. And Miguel has (and may still to some extent, I don't know). Because of that experience they are qualified to talk about it. At least, more qualified than you are. If they say something, why don't you just listen to what they say for a moment rather than blow it off because you've already made up your mind that they're wrong? What exactly has qualified you to know more about this than them?

Miguel has proven over and over again that he's a stooge for Microsoft. That's all the qualification that I need.

I don't work in the US government, and have never been to Iraq, but that doesn't mean I can't say that George Bush is a liar and that we shouldn't be involved in the war there. Apparently most of the world agrees with me too. It's not that hard to see when people are being dishonest or have ulterior motives, but I guess it is when you're utterly naive.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

Saying that OOXML is a "superb standard" when major parts of it are secret is certainly underhanded. For someone who's supposedly a Free software advocate, advocating a "standard" which works to remove peoples' freedom, when another standard has gained much momentum and does work to give people freedom with their data, is blatantly dishonest. The theory that that person has been paid off is simply Occam's Razor; it's the simplest explanation which fits. The other other explanation requires assuming serious mental illness.

So outside part of it being secrete and you support the other standard, what isn't superb about the Standard. Well, better yet, just tell me what is really wrong with it outside your own little prejudice on open and ODF.

You're either a troll or a fucking moron. The fact that anything is secret is what makes it not superb! Idiot.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[sumdumass]

Not quite, and no, the entire spec doesn't revolve around secrecy, it allow it to be wrapped around something that might be secret. The difference is your attempting to claim the implementation in the sense of open document and the push to make sure that data is accessible would contain something secrete. It wouldn't. The parts that allow the secrete shit wouldn't conform to the open document and data requirements so an implementation using those wouldn't matter.

So as far as open document and an open format, the secrecy part doesn't count. So again, where is it not superb. Or are you just one of those people who continue to spout things people tell them and believe the ridiculous like it is fact. I would hope that given the comments you have made, that you have at least looked at the spec. But in fact, your probably the troll disguising himself as a fucking moron. BTW, did you notice the opinion I presented as fact right there? It is my opinion that your are a troll and a fucking moron but I made it look like it was fact. And now, for all intended purposed, it is fact. Just like the ramblings you have made so far.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[man_of_mr_e]

"apparently"? What makes you think that?

Office 2007 will not create new documents with those tags. Documents converted as far back as Word 2000 or Excel 2000 won't contain any of those tags. Only documents converted originally from WordPerfect and Office 95 could contain them (I don't recall, there might be an Office 97 tag in there as well, but I don't think so).

The only documents that might contain those tags are older than 10 years old that have been converted to OOXML. And it's largely safe to ignore those tags even if they're there, since they don't map to any critical functionality. If the tag is there for WordPefect line spacing, just use normal line spacing, chances are the document will look fine, but you might want to flag a conversion error anyways saying "deprecated element found, check document for accuracy".

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[man_of_mr_e]

Why are there references to K&R function signatures in ISO C89? The answer should be obvious to anyone that's even marginally objective on the subject. Legacy has to be documented, even if it's no longer officially supported.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[man_of_mr_e]

It's there for documents converted from the really old legacy documents. There are only a couple of tags that are even related to old Office, most of them are there for documents originally converted from Lotus or Wordperfect.

jpeg doesn't contain the specification for gif because jpeg is not intended as a way to losslessly represent gif files in a standardized format. OOXML *IS* intended to losslessly represent legacy documents (as well as current documents) in a standardized format.

ODF is a new format that has very little legacy concerns, OOXML is concerned with legacy because there are hundreds of federal regulations that require documents to be preserved as originally written, which means the data in the document cannot change, though the format that data is represented with can.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[Grishnakh]

This is idiotic. If you want to preserve an old .doc format, then just leave it in an old .doc format. You don't need to wrap it up in some new format. What's the point of that?

Does .zip have a way to store .arc files inside? Of course not. If you want to use an older format, just use it.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[man_of_mr_e]

The reason for not documenting .doc and moving documents to XML was so that these old documents would better interoperate with document management systems that understand XML, but don't understand binary formats.

There is a reason document formats are moving to XML, and it's not because of some vague concept of "perpetual" documents. Binary formats, like you mention, could just as easily be fully documented. However, binary documents are not the direction that document management and archiving systems are moving. It makes more sense to document old formats by converting them to an XML representation, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[richlv]

right. legacy should be documented. but not in the friggin new format !
there is no reason to include that. format specification is not a history book.

if microsoft would want to document old formats (haha), great. but do that in their own specs.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[makomk]

Apparently, Excel 2007 uses VML for comments in cells, for a start.

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[makomk]

Also, according to this Microsoft blog entry, Word 2007 still uses VML for drawings...

Re:The best way to bring people to open source

[man_of_mr_e]

What does VML have to do with the undocumented tags mentioned? VML is fully documented, though it's not an ISO standard.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[Trigun]

No, he is on Novell's payroll.

Novell is on MS's payroll.

Sigh.

[AdamWill]

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.

Re:Sigh.

[segedunum]

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.

He's heavily involved with Gnome, and on a bug report within an open source project that is Gnome related he is regurgitating a corporate policy that is totally at odds with the free and open source world?

Methinks that there are too many corporate interests here that are at odds with the open source world they purport to want to be in, and that he, and some others, don't know how to separate the two.

Re:Sigh.

[AdamWill]

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.

Re:Sigh.

[Citizen of Earth]

Assuming that Miguel is a competent software developer, why does he think that MSOXML is a good design?

Re:Sigh.

[AdamWill]

I've no idea. The point is it really doesn't matter much to this debate, as he has no control and virtually no influence over GNOME's policies on such issues.

Re:Sigh.

[IamTheRealMike]

I dunno for sure, but if I remember his rationale it was something like:

1. OOXML may specify (vaguely) tons of crappy Word bugs etc, BUT it is actually usefully large and complete, where as ODF isn't. I remember him comparing the number of spreadsheet functions defined in OOXML vs ODF. It made ODF look pretty sad. More importantly, Miguel and Jody Goldberg have actually written a real non-toy spreadsheet program (Gnumeric) that can read/write XLS files. So when Miguel says that 10 pages of documentation on spreadsheet functions aren't enough to get useful work done, I'm inclined to believe him. After all, de Icaza might have views that annoy people on Slashdot, but he does know programming and has plenty of useful code behind him to back it up.

2. OOXML specifies the behavior of 99.99% of the worlds actual Office documents. ODF doesn't. Thus, OOXML is more useful.

3. The above point has another implication - it's easier to implement for most Office programs, because they already had to be compatible with reading binary DOC/XLS/PPT files and OOXML is conceptually similar. Neither OOXML and ODF are really "neutral" - they are just XML dumps of some office suites internal state, and their structure reflects that. When writing filters for Gnumeric Jody Goldberg found it a lot easier to support OOXML than ODF. That's not really because OOXML is "better" than ODF or even that it's more specified, but rather because the work to make Gnumeric compatible with the way Office sees the world was already done.

The differences in opinion probably boil down to a pragmatic vs theoretical viewpoint. de Icaza and Novell actually work on an office suite that has to be used by, you know .... people. That means being usefully compatible with the real documents floating around. Joe Blogger or indeed Richard Stallman doesn't have to do that because they'll never write an ODF importer and find it doesn't work because the way OpenOffice implements feature XYZ isn't properly specified by the standard.

Now for my personal biases: I never wrote an Office suite, but I worked on Wine for several years. I've seen more than one armchair coder take potshots at things Microsoft has produced without knowing what the hell they're talking about. I've spent a whole ton of time figuring out the guts of Windows and whilst there's truly a lot of crap in there, too many people have the idea that feature XYZ must on Windows be worse than on Linux, just because Linux is Free.

Miguel has also spent a lot of time with both Linux and Microsoft technologies, and contrary to popular opinion that doesn't turn you into a brainwashed fanboy, it just gives you more information and experience with which to compare the two worlds. If based on his experience of writing office software, Miguel says to me that OOXML is more useful, then I believe him. Just as when I tell him why the Windows PE linkage model is better than the Linux ELF linkage model, I'd hope he'd believe me.

Re:Sigh.

[segedunum]

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.

You miss the point. He's coming out with something that is fundamentally at odds with the open source world, as well as regurgitating stuff that doesn't make sense, within something that is supposed to be an open source project. This is a problem that many open source developers have to face when they have corporate and open source interests to take care of.

It really doesn't matter whether it is his decision to make, but what it does show is that when there is a decision to be made for the wider benefit of Gnome, if it is at odds with how Nokia views things, then we know which side the toast will fall on the floor. That's not good for the well-being and integrity of any open source project. I'm surprised some people can't see that.

Re:Sigh.

[man_of_mr_e]

A small correction. OOXML is *capable* of specifying the behavior 99.99% of the worlds actual Office documents. Most of those documents are in .doc and xls format, not .docx and xlsx. I say that because you'll likely get beat up over that little detail, which is for the most part irrelevant.

Why is it irrelevant? Because OOXML is basically just a different way of expressing the binary format of Office, thus conversion from .doc or .xls to OOXML merely involves changing the structure of the data, not the interpretation of it. ODF, on the other hand, requires that documents that are converted from .doc or .xls be *TRANSLATED* as well as converted. This is a big issue, because as we all know from google translate or babelfish, translations are seldom 100% accurate.

Microsoft claims that ODF isn't capable of expressing 100% of OOXML's data. I don't know if that's true. It may be possible to do a rough translation of most of it, but there will always be a certain amount of something that gets lost in the translation. ODF is likely capable of representing 90+% of the documents accurately (even with translation) but it's that 10% that will be painful.

No, OOXML isn't an "elegant" or even "pretty" format. It's full of hacks and nastiness that only comes from decades of cruft. But the fact remains that there are billions of documents out there in legacy formats, and those documents need to (eventually) get moved to something that's fully documented and easy to utilize. It makes a lot more sense to move them to an XML'd version of the legacy binary documents than it does to move them to ODF.

If we were dropping support for legacy documents, then i'd say go with ODF 100%. Most of the people in the ODF camp don't seem to understand the importance of legacy support, or they're actively trying to distract you from considering it.

Re:Sigh.

[AdamWill]

"It really doesn't matter whether it is his decision to make, but what it does show is that when there is a decision to be made for the wider benefit of Gnome, if it is at odds with how Nokia views things, then we know which side the toast will fall on the floor."

It does not show that at all. The bug report is on Maemo, an open source project yes, but one that is controlled by Nokia, intended for Nokia devices, and not a part of GNOME in any way at all; it merely uses a lot of the same libraries. You cannot use a Maemo decision to draw any useful conclusions about GNOME.

Re:Sigh.

[juhaz]

He's heavily involved with Gnome, and on a bug report within an open source project that is Gnome related he is regurgitating a corporate policy that is totally at odds with the free and open source world? The application bug report is for is neither an open source project (or even one that, using your weasel words, is "supposed to be") nor related to gnome, what the hell are you talking about?

Old Stallman

[RandoX]

Gnu drama.

Re:Old Stallman

[Frosty Piss]

Get it right. That's GNU/Drama

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[RailGunner]

Novell is on MS's payroll.

But the default desktop for SUSE Linux (owned by Novell) is KDE... So GNOME uses de Icaza who promotes Microsoft on Novell's payroll which ships KDE as the default desktop, but Microsoft has an agreement with Novell who has de Icaza on payroll and - Oh no, now I'm dizzy!

This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[sayfawa]

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.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[adpsimpson]

I think the problem here is that people are getting justifiably twitchy about the shoulder-to-shoulder attitude that some companies in the Open Source world have taken with Microsoft.

Combine this with the fear of being bulldozered by a company which has, in the past, been known to bulldozer competitors, and you get sensationalist and unbalanced reporting of this sort.

If indeed the Gnome team are taking the "It's here to stay, let's see what we can do with it" line, there's justifiable fear that this will translate to the same level of co-operation that has been seen with cross-licensed patent agreements.

It would be interesting to know what the folk on other development teams are thinking - probably waiting for the storm to blow over while quietly working out how to best implement support for OOXML in their own products. Koffice, for example, MUST be working on a converter/importer for OOXML since, like it or not, it's going to be around for a while.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[morgan_greywolf]

Totally agree. Where in Behdad Esfahbod's response to Stallman does it say that GNOME is actively supporting OOXML standardization? All Behdad says is that the Gnome Foundation will be implementing OOXML, he doesn't say anything about Gnome actively backing OOXML in the standards process. So, from where I sit, you're 100% correct.

Finally, as for Stallman throwing his weight behind KDE, do I need to remind anybody that Gnome is officially a GNU project?

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[sayfawa]

There are so many TFA's. I had assumed by the /. title that the main one was this which I had read earlier:
KDE takes stand on OOXML; Gnome dithers.

But I still stand by my comments. And here, just to cut to the chase, is one of Jeff Waugh's comments from the article linked above:

The GNOME Foundation is not in bed with Microsoft or Novell on this issue. Our statement is very clear about our attitude towards OOXML and our participation in ECMA TC45-M. We're there to ensure that we have sufficient documentation for FLOSS project to implement it. We're not endorsing, contributing to or developing the OOXML specification or its standardisation. (In fact, it has had a positive contribution to my work against OOXML locally...) Whatever happens with ISO, it's important for FLOSS products to implement it such that users have the opportunity to embrace Software Freedom without cutting themselves off from their own documents, or collaboration with their friends and colleagues. We don't have to like OOXML, Microsoft or the Microsoft/Novell deal to implement it, and have an open and pragmatic approach to delivering Software Freedom to as many users as we possibly can. We fiercely compete with Microsoft, and we're not about to give their monopoly a leg up by boycotting their stupid format. We want *MORE* FLOSS users, not fewer. There is a complete valid disagreement about the *perception* of GNOME involvement in TC45-M and how Microsoft might use it (and we'll make it very clear to national bodies and BRM delegates what our position is and why we're involved in the ECMA group), but nothing deserving demonisation of GNOME or suggestions that it has "sold out" to any corporation. That is simply not the case, and it is unnecessarily divisive to suggest so.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[renoX]

>>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.>Of course Gnome backs ODF.

In thoughts only AFAIK: which Gnome component is going to use ODF? Do they have someone working on the standardisation board to ensure that ODF is really good?

IMHO, it's much more important to have a great ODF and a great support for ODF than Microsoft Office XML: so every efforts should be to ensure this, not to help Microsoft Office XML..

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[Bert64]

Seeing as they're planning to implement it, perhaps they can provide even greater feedback as to:

a, Whether or not msoffice 2007 actually complies with the published spec.
b, What areas of the spec are insufficient to implement the format adequately.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[morgan_greywolf]

I can't think of a higher form of "backing" a standard than an actual reimplementation So the presence of the old Microsoft Word binary format filters in OpenOffice.org should be seen as an endorsement of that format by OOo? Firefox imports Internet Explorer bookmarks. Should we now say that the Mozilla Foundation endorses that standard? The GIMP reads and writes GIF files. Should the GIMP developers be seen as endorsing the GIF format? I'm sorry, but your statement seems ridiculous to me.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[Vexorian]

Regardless of the intentions they state, this involvement in optionally-open XML standardization is used as MS as selling point for it. There is no need to do this format helping before any ISO approval, their priority should be to be vocal against the approval, and later, if it gets approved, work on it, right now they are just helping it get approved . As if GNOME gave up or they wanted to help its approval and do work on it to later use it as advantage, what would be a backstab to everyone else in the FLOSS world.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[kilgortrout]

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.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[Grishnakh]

Exactly right. GNOME needs to put out a public statement that they've severed all ties with Miguel and that he doesn't speak for them in any way. It's the only way for people to dissociate the two.

Re:This 'article' is bullshit flamebait

[aminorex]

Say what you will, but assigning Ogg Theora support to a NOK employee is pretty damning.

grow a pair!

[mseidl]

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.

Re:grow a pair!

[caluml]

why don't people have balls(women excluded)? Theirs are just inside, hidden away from view, and feet.

Doesn't anybody stand up for what they believe in anymore? Sure, I'm sure it's great being homeless with a clean conscience.
However, Miguel does seem like a major sell out. I'm glad I don't use Gnome or Novell.

Re:grow a pair!

[0racle]

Perhaps the GNOME people believe that they are not the people to decide how you use your system and therefore just provide tools to do what ever they think you might want to do.

Re:grow a pair!

[stilborne]

"I'm sure it's great being homeless with a clean conscience."

that is a false dichotomy. many people make a fine living while standing up for what we believe in. it's not magic, it's just conviction and the willingness to live in accordance with your beliefs as much as is humanly possible. we all fail at that from time to time, of course, but when not living in accordance with your beliefs becomes the prevailing pattern in one's behaviour there is a problem: either you are betraying your own self or you don't actually believe what you say you do.

making these (at times not easy) decisions does not need to, at least in the "first" world, come at the expense of an income. granted, you might make less money (though not necessarily) but you'll certainly live more fulfilled.

Re:grow a pair!

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I mean, as a community aren't we supposed to stand up for the FREE as in FREEDOM we claim that open source is?

Like the freedom to support whatever format we want?

Re:grow a pair!

[msevior]

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

Re:grow a pair!

[HiThere]

Have you used Gnome2.x? Gnome1.x did, indeed, believe that you should control your computer. Gnome2.x has gone out of the way to make it more difficult.

KDE went the other way. I used to be a fervent Gnome supporter. Not only did I prefer the Gnome desktop, I preferred the Gnome license, and the Gnome implementation language. Now... Well, it's still easier to link other languages to C than to C++. So when I write things I use Gtk rather than Qt. (Even when I'm writing C++ I don't like the non-standard annotations of Qt.) And LGPL code can be used with GPL code, so the license isn't a problem. But as an end-user I'm nearly always KDE. (I keep Gnome on my system becaus I'm running a testing system, not a stable one, and occasionally KDE breaks...it's rare that Gnome breaks at the same time.)

Re:grow a pair!

[zander]

If the KOffice guys want to not import ooxml then they're making their program less useful to their users.

This, naturally, is a red herring. I could easily turn this around by saying that if the AbiWord guys don't want to support the open and long time ISO standard doing the same thing, but for more people, they are making their program less useful to their users too. But I won't.

Why do I refer to your statement as a red herring? Because you are ignoring the fact that supporting OOXML doesn't just allow users to have some interaction with the propriatairy MS format it also validates it as being relevant. And you are doing not only your users but the rest of the world a disservice with that.

OOXML is only relevant for maintaining the MSOffice lock-in, as I, and many others, have made clear in various other places on the internet. The fact that you and other gnome people apparantly think its going to be the new standard for all office documents no matter how hard people push for a real open standard is what is wrong here.
You assume that since its an MS standard, it will be successful, and by supporting their work you are actually helping to make that a reality.

If, however, you put down the glasses of ms-standard bias you will see that a huge chunk of the world has realized the problems with MS standards and there is a real process going on to move towards ODF. This invalidates your assertion that whatever comes from MS will be successful. On top of that, the momentum that the hundreds companies and thousands of people put into ODF is only being countered by clear Microsoft backers. Until Gnome and Jeff started doing their thing.

I hope you can see how this looks from the outside and why any points stating Jeff is not actually backing OOXML sound hollow to put it mildly.

If Abiword developers believe in open source and freedom in software they will have to clearly and noisily make clear they distance themselves from OOXML and Microsoft standards in general.

Thomas Zander, core KWord developer

Re:grow a pair!

[msevior]

We support ODF. It is the default file format for our biggest deployment, the OLPC laptops. As far as I can tell it is now lossless for the OLPC implementation of AbiWord. We will continue to work to improve ou support for ODF.

We're in the business of helping our users whoever they may be.

Re:grow a pair!

[marcosdumay]

"If the KOffice guys want to not import ooxml then they're making their program less useful to their users."

Well, if they instead put all that work into something that will benefit me, they'll gain a user.

Re:grow a pair!

[dominator]

Why do I refer to your statement as a red herring? Because you are ignoring the fact that supporting OOXML doesn't just allow users to have some interaction with the propriatairy MS format it also validates it as being relevant.

Actually, the millions of users with documents in that format validate that it is relevant. The market demand for inter-operability with the format validates it as relevant. AbiWord or some other program supporting the format only confirms that *other people* have deemed it relevant. That's how markets work.

If one grudgingly supports OOXML *the format*, in the interests of allowing users to inter-operate with Microsoft-using colleagues, one need not approve of MS' actions during the "standardization" process or their (you say) lousy "standard". We don't approve of their actions. At all. We do support Jody Goldberg's attempts to extract better documentation from Microsoft. It makes life that much more difficult for them, while making our implementation that much easier.

Because we do this, doesn't mean that we don't whole-heartedly support ODF. In your attempts to show a "red herring", you set up a false dichotomy. (In fact, AbiWord is shipping on the OLPC XO machines with ODF as the default file format, and we're pleased as punch about that.)

Differing, redundant file formats drive market fragmentation and promote vendor lock-in, and should thus be considered evil. However, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that Microsoft's OOXML won't get significant user uptake is (IMO) an absurd position. The pile of OOXML documents in my wife's inbox are proof enough that it already has. In this case, OOXML's success is measured by how much the community at large uses the file format, not how much you, as an implementer and free software enthusiast, like Microsoft, their actions during the standardization process, or their file format.

Disagree with the bad technical aspects of the OOXML format. Disagree with how Microsoft conducted themselves during the ISO standardization process. Shout it from the rooftops. And wholly support and promote ODF. I think that we're in total agreement on these positions.

But not (grudgingly) supporting the OOXML format hurts your potential users and your quest for openness more than it hurts Microsoft, at least at this point in time. Supporting OOXML allows your products to compete with Microsoft on ease of use, or preferred platform, or etc. It allows your would-be users to transition off of proprietary Microsoft products and "standards" and onto free-er platforms and standards. Like GNU/Linux and ODF.

Dominic Lachowicz, core AbiWord developer

More weight to KDE

[FutureDomain]

Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?

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.

Re:More weight to KDE

[Trax]

I'm tired of people making baseless and rather stupid assumptions. The GNOME Foundation is NOT, repeat NOT, endorsing OOXML! The GNOME Foundation is looking at OOXML pragmatically and working to make it more detailed and less onerous than it already is -- I don't see anything wrong with that.

Re:More weight to KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised GNOME is still allowed to use the G, which originally stood for "GNU". (GNOME no longer stands for anything.)

KDE is Free Software. True Free Software.

GNOME is free software lite. It is almost free software, just without the Four Freedoms. With KDE, you can be sure that all KDE software you use is truly Free. GNOME, on the other hand, is more than willing to bow to Microsoft. It has a great history of non-Free software. GNOME died the day it accepted Evolution with the proprietary Exchange connector.

It's time for people who truly love Free Software to stop using GNOME. It's time to move to real Free Software and not free software lite. The fact that KDE is objectively a better desktop environment is just gravy.

Re:More weight to KDE

[steveha]

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.

Who is "they"? Who is "them"?

Has an official representative of the GNOME Foundation publicly stated that it is GNOME Foundation policy to praise OOXML? Has the GNOME Foundation, as a group, taken any kind of official position on OOXML (other than "we want the specs for it so we can interoperate with OOXML users")?

Miguel de Icaza, who is not the GNOME Foundation, did call it "a superb standard". The GNOME Foundation did not endorse his comments, but it did release this statment:

http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/ecma-tc45-statement.html

Here's my favorite quote from the above statement:

While Microsoft should be applauded for releasing information about the Office document formats, their manoeuvres around the standards process demonstrate that they are not pursuing standardisation as a platform for innovation for the entire industry. Indeed, Microsoft continues to behave in the abusive manner of an unreformed, convicted monopolist with no passion for true industry collaboration in the interests of users.

If you have some examples of the GNOME Foundation praising OOXML, be sure to post them here. But at the moment I do not believe your complaints are supported by the facts.

P.S. As for Richard Stallman, he won't be completely satisfied with any desktop environment until he can get one where the whole environment is GPLv3 and there is no proprietary software available. Both GNOME and KDE have proprietary software available.

steveha

Re:More weight to KDE

[Grishnakh]

The GNOME Foundation is NOT, repeat NOT, endorsing OOXML! The GNOME Foundation is looking at OOXML pragmatically and working to make it more detailed and less onerous than it already is -- I don't see anything wrong with that.

Not exactly correct.

Miguel de Icaza, GNOME's founder, has explicitly endorsed OOXML. This was in the article summary, along with links.

Now, Miguel may not be synonymous with the GNOME Foundation, but the two are still intimately related. The GNOME Foundation needs to wake up and realize this, even if Miguel doesn't actually do much with GNOME anymore. If they want people to stop associating the two, then they need to publicly cast him out, and declare that they want nothing more to do with him and his MS-pandering ways.

Re:More weight to KDE

[Grishnakh]

I disagree with the GP as well on the Exchange connector. However,

GNOME, on the other hand, is more than willing to bow to Microsoft.

Examples, please, and not tin-foil-hat examples.

This was detailed in the article summary. Miguel de Icaza has endorsed OOXML, calling it a superb standard or somesuch. Miguel and GNOME go hand-in-hand, or at least that's the popular view. GNOME has never done anything to counter that view, so we might as well accept it as true. Therefore, since Miguel is willing to bow to Microsoft (he's done so over and over), then GNOME is too.

Re:More weight to KDE

[Grishnakh]

Miguel de Icaza, who is not the GNOME Foundation, did call it "a superb standard". The GNOME Foundation did not endorse his comments, but it did release this statment:

Wrong. Miguel speaks for the GNOME Foundation, so his endorsement of OOXML equates to an endorsement by GNOME itself.

If the GNOME Foundation doesn't like this, they need to take extra steps to distance themselves from Miguel. They haven't done this at all, so we must assume that they agree with everything Miguel says.

Re:More weight to KDE

[shaunm]

Wrong. Miguel speaks for the GNOME Foundation, so his endorsement of OOXML equates to an endorsement by GNOME itself.

If the GNOME Foundation doesn't like this, they need to take extra steps to distance themselves from Miguel. They haven't done this at all, so we must assume that they agree with everything Miguel says.

Miguel has nothing to do with the GNOME Foundation, other than being one of 370 individual members. His comments are no more associated with the Foundation than mine or those of any other member. He is not on the board of directors and has no other formal role.

For some time, Miguel was the standing President of the Foundation, which was a purely ceremonial role that meant nothing. Earlier this year, the Foundation asked Miguel to resign from this role to allow the President to be appointed from the board of directors each year.

What, exactly, would you have the Foundation do to convince you that Miguel does not speak for it? Is it even possible, or do you just enjoy spreading misinformation?

Re:More weight to KDE

[Grishnakh]

It doesn't matter what the "facts" are with regard to his official position in GNOME. What matters is peoples' perceptions. And the real fact of the matter is that people associate Miguel with GNOME. The fact that he is the former President shows why their association is not unwarranted. You don't have to believe me; just look at all the other comments on this story that show the authors believe there's a clear connection between Miguel and GNOME, or that he actually leads it.

If the Foundation wants to convince everyone that Miguel does not have a hand in GNOME any more, then they need to publicly cast him out, denounce him, and announce that he no longer has any power with GNOME any more, and does not speak for them in any way. That's how you eliminate perceptions: you publicly counter them and state what the truth is. Instead, the GNOME foundation has done nothing at all to counter this perception.

If this perception were only help by a few freaks, there wouldn't be any point to wasting time countering it. But as I said, the sheer volume of comments which show this perception on the part of many Slashdotters shows that it is not held by some tiny minority, but is a very popular perception, regardless of how true it may or may not be.

Re:More weight to KDE

[shaunm]

It doesn't matter what the "facts" are with regard to his official position in GNOME. What matters is peoples' perceptions. And the real fact of the matter is that people associate Miguel with GNOME.

And when we tell you the facts, you ignore them. You keep making your assertions, which in turn sway people's perceptions. It's a Catch-22.

If the Foundation wants to convince everyone that Miguel does not have a hand in GNOME any more, then they need to publicly cast him out, denounce him, and announce that he no longer has any power with GNOME any more, and does not speak for them in any way. That's how you eliminate perceptions: you publicly counter them and state what the truth is. Instead, the GNOME foundation has done nothing at all to counter this perception.

I am, right now, attempting to publicly counter your incorrect perceptions. Others have also done so. See, for example, Jeff Waugh's excellent blog post on the matter.

And what would we cast Miguel out of? Would you have us revoke his Foundation membership? That's ridiculous. There are a lot of Foundation members who disagree with a lot of other Foundation members on a lot of topics. That's their right.

Re:More weight to KDE

[Grishnakh]

I am, right now, attempting to publicly counter your incorrect perceptions. Others have also done so. See, for example, Jeff Waugh's excellent blog post on the matter.

And who are you? Are you an official spokesperson for the GNOME Foundation? A post on Slashdot by some random person doesn't equate to an official public pronouncement by the GNOME Foundation.

And what would we cast Miguel out of? Would you have us revoke his Foundation membership? That's ridiculous. There are a lot of Foundation members who disagree with a lot of other Foundation members on a lot of topics. That's their right.

There's other Foundation members who are paid by Microsoft to promote MS technologies and closed, proprietary formats? Just those two things should be more than sufficient to revoke his Foundation membership. That's not ridiculous at all; that's called being principled and not associating yourselves with someone being paid to work against you.

Re:More weight to KDE

[shaunm]

I am, right now, attempting to publicly counter your incorrect perceptions. Others have also done so. See, for example, Jeff Waugh's excellent blog post on the matter.

And who are you? Are you an official spokesperson for the GNOME Foundation? A post on Slashdot by some random person doesn't equate to an official public pronouncement by the GNOME Foundation.

I am Shaun McCance. I have been an active Gnome developer since 2002, and a Foundation member since 2003. You can verify my membership on the Foundation Membership List. I maintain three packages in the desktop release and one in the developer tools, and I lead the Gnome Documentation Team.

Should you just take my word for it? Of course not. But I have pointed you to concrete facts, and that should be sufficient for you to at least attempt to do some real fact-checking, rather than posting unsubstantiated drivel.

Re:More weight to KDE

[HiThere]

Well, perhaps not that much. They certainly need to clearly state that he's not speaking for them...certainly if people are assuming that he *is* speaking for them. A failure to do so is a tacit agreement to allow him to represent their position, and if so, then they deserve to be tarred with the same brush.

Re:More weight to KDE

[WebCowboy]

KDE is Free Software. True Free Software.

KDE is "True Free Software"? OMFG, how times have changed! One of the biggest single reasons I'm a GNOME user today is because back in the "dark ages" KDE depended upon the then-proprietary qt library and GNOME and the associated GTK library were "truly Free". By the time this was rectified GNOME had improved a lot, GNOME designers were more focused on usability and I was already used to the environment.

One thing that has NOT changed is the licensing for GNOME--it's still good ol' GPL and LGPL and nothing else.

GNOME is free software lite. It is almost free software, just without the Four Freedoms. With KDE, you can be sure that all KDE software you use is truly Free. GNOME, on the other hand, is more than willing to bow to Microsoft.

With GNOME, you can see the source code, make copies of the code or resulting binaries to meet any needs you have, use it for any purpose you want (fit or unfit, without any warranty, but still use it nonetheless) and of course you can share it with your friends without the BSA beating down your door. Those are pretty good freedoms, and there are four of them. Can you explain to me SPECIFICALLY where the freedoms are lacking?

Furthermore, with KDE, what exactly give you any more assurance over GNOME that the software you are using is truly free? Trolltech will happily offer an alternative, proprietary license for its code to the highest bidder. GNOME has taken a more consistent approach by putting libraries under LGPL--so commercial apps can be made that take advantage of GTK yet the libraries are sure to remain Free. Such is not the case with commercial KDE apps. You can use KDE-based software that is totally non-Free because the publishers have paid off Trolltech.

At least with GNOME everyone has to play by the same rules and the GNOME platform itself remains uncompromised. Historically KDE with qt has been quite a moving target due to different platforms having different licensing rules and with the dual licensing scheme in place.

GNOME died the day it accepted Evolution with the proprietary Exchange connector.

What have you been smoking? I suggest you stop because it's frying your brain. From the "horses mouth" (Novell's own press release):

The Evolution Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server source code can be found at http://ftp.ximian.com/ and developer information about Evolution can be found at http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution. The Connector code is now available to the public along with the rest of Evolution under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

When Novell included the connector with Evolution 2.0 it also relicensed it to GPL (FULL GPL at that; not LGPL) and it immediately made all the source code for it available the very second it licensed it under GPL. Do you know something I don't? How EXACTLY is this different from when Trolltech GPLed its libraries to allow them to be TRULY Free? Being you're such a devout fan of KDE surely you know how this is different?

The fact that KDE is objectively a better desktop environment is just gravy.

I've never once seen any OBJECTIVE evidence that one desktop is superior over the other from end users OR developers. It's ALWAYS been a matter of personal tastes, which are very SUBJECTIVE...visual layout, how things are configured, use of C++ or whatever. Again, I gladly welcome any concrete, specific areas where KDE is without a doubt superior to GNOME. I prefer GNOME over KDE myself, and I'll freely admit that I think KDE does SOME stuff better and that my overall impressions are largely my personal taste. To be more specific, I find the GNOME design has become more consistent than KDE (something that wasn't always the case, but has become true over time as GNOME has really pushed specific and consistent usability/UI standards for the desktop and ass

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[renrutal]

Not until KDE 4.1.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[RailGunner]

Since all recent popular Linux distributions other than OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, MEPIS, Knoppix, Freespire (Linspire) and Slackware, you mean?

GNOME is hardly the default, and trying to assert it as such is incorrect.

Ubuntu and Fedora use GNOME, but Fedora ships with KDE, and for the Ubuntu crowd there's Kubuntu...

RMS and the tinfoil hat

[mlwmohawk]

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.

Re:RMS and the tinfoil hat

[adpsimpson]

I am really starting to believe that GNOME is a trojan horse, or at least some aspects of it.

Whatever the motives of individuals behind the Gnome project, it has contributed one of only 4 fully fledged (only 2 free), stable and heavy-weight desktop managers around. Not only that but it has contributed a toolkit of the highest quality and literally hundreds of excellent applications.

Let's face it - just as KDE didn't die when gnome was founded in reaction to linking to non-GPL code, so Gnome won't die if some bad decisions are made.

Much more likely is that the environment will continue to be developed to an excellent level, mistakes will continue to be made and competition between the FOSS alternatives will continue to drive them ahead of the competitors.

Re:RMS and the tinfoil hat

[Trax]

Miguel De Icaza has not been active in the GNOME community for at least the last 5 years. So don't connect Miguel's actions and speech with the GNOME community.

As another post said read Jeff Waugh's comments in the previously mentioned article. Read before you assume.

Re:RMS and the tinfoil hat

[noldrin]

I think this is the best analysis of RMS I've seen on Slashdot. RMS is fighting a principled struggle, it won't necessarily make him popular, but I thank him for doing so. I know when I met him and told him that I admired his work, he made sure to admonish me for not coding myself.

I think XFCE is about to eat GNOME's lunch. I just tried it again for the first time in several years, and wow has it matured. You can keep using the same GNOME applications and have nice looking GTK, but have an interface that's easy to use, feature rich, fast and it just works better.

Re:RMS and the tinfoil hat

[christurkel]

he's either incompetent of a shill and he's potentially dangerous.

I think he is naive; I honestly believe he thinks MSOOXML is a good thing, based on his experience with .Net and Mono, but the two are very different thing with completely different agendas. MS sees value in having .Net/Mono out there to further it's adoption. MSOOXML is tool for lock in, embrace, extend extinquish. Protect the Office monopoly.

Re:RMS and the tinfoil hat

[HiThere]

Yes, but remember that much of that was done while it was a Red Hat project.

I'm nervous about Gnome rather than convinced that they've sold out. I suspect that most to all of the Gnome project members believe that they are doing the best that they can in the situation that they exist in. Unfortunately, some of those members are sponsored as employees of corporations that don't have much interest in the goals of FOSS.

Gnome was originally created because Red Hat was nervous about the QT license. After Gnome became a decent desktop, Trolltech fixed the licensing problems. Gnome became independent of Red Hat (and acquired other corporate sponsors). At this point I have more faith in KDE than in Gnome. OTOH, I do trust in the GPL, so I'm only nervous about future directions.

The Gnome foundation hasn't given cause to doubt their comitment to FOSS...except that when Miguel speaks, they don't come out and say "That's not *our* point of view.", despite knowing that many people believe that Miguel *does* speak for them. And then there the matter of a bug that isn't being fixed. (I don't really understand that one, except that it involves Noika's sponsorship and Ogg. But it makes me nervous.)

Re:RMS and the tinfoil hat

[phliar]

Which toolkit did you have in mind? (GTK+ is the GIMP toolkit.)

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[rubycodez]

really? This Kubuntu of mine doesn't look very GNOMEy.

Would it still be open source...

[SanityInAnarchy]

...if we didn't?

Especially on an issue where it really does matter.

Stallman backing KDE is a non-starter

[CodeShark]

Given that the QT libarary is now dual licensed under the GNU GPL and QPL licenses which ended the controversy over licensing with the FSF, I don't think it's a matter of throwing "his weight" at all.

The folks governing GNOME needs to either decide to be free or not free, and if they chose "not-free" there's nothing to stop one of the rest of us from forking the project, starting a new project, or whatever. So RMS gets nothing from joining the conversation at all. That said, if Richard Stallman or the FSF was to basically slap Novell upside the proverbial corporate head with a "get with the program with Gnome/Ogg/etc." cluestick (communique), I wonder if there would be movement more than if one of us tried to do the same thing...

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[adpsimpson]

Since all recent popular Linux distributions uses Gnome by default, does this really matter anymore?

The only new linux distribution to default to Gnome and exclude KDE in recent years has been Ubuntu. The overwhelming speed at which Ubuntu has grown (I'm posting from Gnome/Ubuntu now) has largely been down to the development team going the extra mile to develop a truely user-friendly interface.

However, as with all open source projects, alternatives are available - Kubuntu, for example, or simply 'apt-get install kde'. Personally I have both installed and highly value the competition and choice between them.

So yes, it does matter - it is trivially easy for individual users to switch to another desktop. All the apps they have got used to will still work (I use mostly KDE apps). The decision for the developers may take more consideration, but the users will continue to use what each feels is most appropriate. If one drifts away from being truly free, the effects will ripple back upstream.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[jadrian]

By recent popular do you mean "Ubuntu"?

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[TheNinjaroach]

Since all recent popular Linux distributions uses Gnome by default Say what?

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[ceeam]

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.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[gosand]

Since all recent popular Linux distributions uses Gnome by default, does this really matter anymore?

Kubuntu

We can only hope...

[gosand]

Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"

As a long time KDE user, I sincerely hope not.

Re:We can only hope...

[KingKiki217]

Would you like to tell us why?

Re:We can only hope...

[Bluesman]

Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of Stallman's weight, especially if it's being thrown around.

Re:We can only hope...

[KingKiki217]

*whoosh*
Thanks...

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[udippel]

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.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[varmittang]

The two most popular distros in use today are Fedora and Ubuntu(Debian) and both use GNOME by default. Yes, there are a lot of other distros that ship with KDE default, but their popularity doesn't match what Fedora and Ubuntu have been able to carve out in the Linux Desktop market. Most people go with the default when installing those distros too, so GNOME has a high probability of being the most used Linux Desktop.

Journalese

[Morosoph]

Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?

It's funny how in articles, the politics appears as primary, and policy secondary. Of course the politics is important, but surely the interesting question is that of freedom, rather than Stallman's partisanship?

It amuses me how so much journalism seeks to make the world a smaller place. There are bigger things than personalities.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[AmaDaden]

This should help. A quick bit of text from Miguel him self from the link on his endorsement of OOXML that the article refers to.

I made that comment on my blog because that reflects my personal opinion. You really need to obsess over something else. And before someone brings up the Microsoft connection, you should know that Novell official policy is to actively endorse ODF and that Novell's position on OOXML is neutral.

So it looks like Novell works on implementing Microsoft stuff but does not officially think you should use it. Miguel thinks that MS does a good job every so often and Linux should work with MS standards.

I don't agree with the good job part but think about it. If MS switches over to OOXML and Linux can support it just as well as Windows who needs Windows? The same logic works with .NET. I am aware that this is easier said then done but it has been done before

Do I have the timeline right?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. KDE was good, but not free (Free? phree?) enough.
2. Gnome was established because we couldn't accept that un-free KDE?
3. KDE fixed its problems and Gnome became Microsoft's bitch
4. ???
5. Profit!!!

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[erikvcl]

You missed a step in there. The part about Gnome deteriorating into a bug-riddled slow unstable pile of crap. As a former Gnome user, I'm very happy I took the plunge and gave KDE a shot.

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[mdielmann]

1. KDE was good, but not free (Free? phree?) enough.
2. Gnome was established because we couldn't accept that un-free KDE?
3. KDE fixed its problems and Gnome became Microsoft's bitch
4. ???
5. Profit!!! Note that the number of steps between 3 and 5 is somewhere between 1 and infinity. I suspect that the number is closer to infinity. While I'm aware that this is a mathematical impossibility, I stand behind my statement.

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[MrDrBob]

[citation needed]

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[erikvcl]

Here's one example. Compare the performance of GTK+ 2 vs. GTK+ 1 vs. Qt vs. Win XP. One of these things doesn't belong here: can you guess which one? Ding ding ding, that's right -- we have a winner! GTK+ 2 is dog slow. Not to mention that the API is crap.

If you've used Gnome in any nontrivial capacity, then you've already experienced the stability problems. Panel, Nautilus, etc, etc, etc. They make Mac OS X look speedy and reliable.

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[MrDrBob]

Strangely enough, I wouldn't call that a reliable citation. Statistics, profiling, and hard facts might work. I've been a GNOME developer for about a year (working on Totem), and a user for about three. During that time, I can count the number of times the panel, Nautilus or any of the other "core" parts of GNOME have failed me on one hand, and most of that's repeated occurrence of a problem before I've fixed it.

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[erikvcl]

I think that's the problem with the Gnome and Firefox developers. They keep asking for profiling, hard facts, etc. but don't bother to look at reality and, therefore, continually miss the real problems. Look at any GTK+ 2 app. It's slower than the equivalent GTK+ 1 app. That's a fact. I don't need to profile it -- just use the app and you can tell the difference. There's article after article on the Internet detailing the fact that the text rendering engine in GTK+ 2 is garbage and this is the cause of much of its horrendous performance. GTK+ 2 is 10-20 times slower than GTK+ 1.

You've only been working on Gnome for three years. I've worked with GTK+/Gnome for seven years. I've written huge applications that push the envelope of the APIs and capabilities of the applications. The choice to use C for such a large system was dubious at best. The inter-dependencies between the innumerable packges are not managed well and interfaces change overnight. It's common knowledge that Gnome has problems. The fact that you don't see them proves my point: the developers don't notice/don't care and the problems don't get fixed.

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[MrDrBob]

If anything's to be fixed, then statistics on what's going wrong, where, and how are needed. If they can't be produced, then there's likely nothing wrong (although I admit this doesn't apply in all cases). Profiling and hard facts describe reality.

Comparing GTK+ 2 apps to GTK+ 1 apps is typically a faux pas, as the GTK+ 2 apps have much more functionality, as they've had years more development than the old GTK+ 1 versions. I admit that GTK+ 2 itself is probably a little slower than GTK+ 1, but again, that's due to extra functionality. I've looked around for some figures, and haven't been able to find any actual figures, but I've got an interview with Owen Taylor shortly after the release of GTK+ 2.0, and then a mailing list post about Ethereal performance a month or so later. The second one gives a more rosy view, and since optimisations and improvements have been made since (see Federico's 2005 presentation on optimising GNOME for an example), I'd be fairly confident that GTK+ 2 is OK.

You've been working with it for seven years, and yet every comment of yours on GNOME and GTK+ on Slashdot in the last year has been slagging it off quite badly. It makes one wonder why you continue to code with such a "steaming pile of crap written by developers whose egos are bigger than their brains". If by "interfaces" you mean library APIs then you're dead wrong. GTK+, Glib and all the other core libraries of GNOME have had complete API and ABI stability since the first 2.x release. We're more than happy to fix problems if they're pointed out to us, or if we find them ourselves. I personally get quite annoyed, however, when someone waves their hands in the air and says "it's common knowledge that Gnome has problems", without a scrap of proof or supporting data.

Re:Do I have the timeline right?

[erikvcl]

I don't use GTK+/Gnome anymore and haven't for some time.

The question is, where are YOUR performance numbers to prove that it's fast and that it doesn't need work? Saying that there's "more functionality" and that's the reason for the performance problems is a pathetic straw-man argument that Mac OS X fanbois use. How come Qt has tons of functionality without being slow?

Window XP much faster than GTK+ 2. Hell Java Swing is faster than GTK+ 2. Use a Java Swing app. Then use a GTK+ 2/GNOME app and compare the difference.

There are a large group of people who agree with me about GTK+/Gnome but we're not so vocal because we're always modded troll on Slashdot. So much for free speech. To be honest, I have a life and family and I don't have the time, energy or motivation to profile such crappy software as GTK+/Gnome. But even if I identified some actual problem, would you care? Would you fix it?

I'd rather spend my time working with good software.

I'm just raising the issue and hopefully it can be addressed some day. If you can offer proof that the code is stable and fast, then I'll shut up and eat my words.

Re:Idiots

[Ash-Fox]

Gosh. You guys are a bunch of angry morons. Life isn't about taking your ball and going home. It's about doing deals to gently move the status quo over to your side. Taking your ball and going home isn't going to actually SOLVE anything.

As far as I can see, the ODF ball is being given to everyone, including Microsoft. Except Microsoft doesn't want to play, which is normal.

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.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[RailGunner]

Thanks for the info; but I was really aiming for a +5, Funny moderation with the dizzy comment. :)

Re:Tune In Next Week

[mlwmohawk]

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?

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[renoX]

'By default' doesn't mean that Gnome is always used: at work we use RHE3, but a majority of users use KDE, not Gnome..

Summary is missing the last line:

[Mazin07]

Tune in next episode as exciting new revelations are unveiled!

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[ByOhTek]

except it's fairly easy to run a gtk application in KDE - and by fiarly easy, I mean as long as you have the libraries installed, it's no different than any other application.

So, to pander to the closed source devs, they'd only have to include GTK, and a set of default themes to make it look like their KDE setup.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[mhall119]

However, as with all open source projects, alternatives are available - Kubuntu, for example, or simply 'apt-get install kde'. For those interested, the way to get proper KDE support on a standard Ubuntu install is "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop". This will include not only KDE, but also the standard Kubuntu applications and artwork.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Kjella]

By recent popular you pretty much mean Ubuntu, right? I think Gnome is chosen mostly because there's fairly little standardization compared to KDE and so easier to differentiate and add value. I've tried KDE on Debian, Kunbuntu and SUSE and KDE is pretty much all the same. KDE releases become vastly more important than distro releases. While everyone talks of KDE being more like Windows, in terms of consistancy KDE with their k* apps are more like OSX with their i* apps while Gnome is the windowsish one. Run KDE/Konq/KOffice vs Gnome/Firefox/OpenOffice and you'll know what I mean.

Besides, I thinl both are stronger for it, with something as intangible choice is good and there's nothing preventing them from stealing good ideas from each other. What corporations find as a downside is that Qt requires a licensing free for closed source, but I didn't see anything closed-source on Gnome I'd want yet so it's an empty threat. KDE is still plenty popular with users - I'm surprised it's held up so well waiting for KDE4. If KDE4 can deliver through on the functionality they've promised and at the same time expand their market to Windows, I see only sunshine not dark clouds in KDEs future.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[RailGunner]

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.

RMS quoted

[cbart387]

From here

Now look from GNOME/OO.o side: We are interested in implementing it, regardless of it being a standard or not. Yes, but that doesn't mean we cannot denounce it! Everyone is getting in a tizzy (RMS included) over this. Read what RMS says above. He's not above supporting OOXML to give users a choice. His point is that KDE has publicly denounced OOXML but Gnome has not. That's all.

FYI, just because you like some stuff that he has done, doesn't mean everything he says is gold. Just a little pet peeve of mine...

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[segedunum]

Since all recent popular Linux distributions uses Gnome by default, does this really matter anymore?

The relevant question(s) here is: "Since a handful of supposedly enterprise desktop distributions have defaulted to Gnome for a while, has this actually made any difference whatsoever to anyone using free desktops at all? If this is the case, why does anyone even talk about KDE anymore?"

Could someone please explain...

[bhunachchicken]

... what Miguel de Icaza's obsession with shoving Microsoft technologies in to Gnome?

1. .NET (Mono)
2. OOXML
3. ???

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?

Re:Could someone please explain...

[katz]

don't forget GNOME's Registrar, a concept copied from the Microsoft Windows' Registry...

Re:Could someone please explain...

[pak9rabid]

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? It's to show Microsoft he's worthy of working for them after they passed him up for a job.

Re:Could someone please explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

There was Bonobo to implement a DCOM-like development model on top of CORBA. This entailed RedHat writing an entire CORBA ORB and numerous Bonobo components. That would eventually be tossed out because no one used it due to its complexity.

To be fair a lot of people tried to hitch their wagon to CORBA in those days. KDE and Fresco[1] were also CORBA whores. The former then developed KParts while I doubt the latter even exists anymore.

I think the only thing that has really had Miguel's hands on it that hasn't been some kind of turd is gnumeric. Now some might argue that Mono is great, but it's rather incomplete and suffers from mediocre performance and terrible garbage collection. It's only 'great' if you hate Java (the language) enough to ignore all of the technical inferiority of the implementation. Someday it might be worthwhile, but that's someday.

[1] This may or may not be the name of the desktop project set to replace X. My brain has clearly turned into tomato soup over the last ten years.

Re:Could someone please explain...

[raddan]

... what Miguel de Icaza's obsession with shoving Microsoft technologies in to Gnome? 4. Profit.

Re:Could someone please explain...

[miffo.swe]

5 The friggin registry in gnome, why on earth anyone would copy the worst part of windows is totally beyond my brains capacity to fathom.

I just hate it!

Re:Could someone please explain...

[Kitanin]

Actually, after working with C# for a while, I've come to realize that there's a lot to like in the CLR/CLI, from the perspective of large-scale software development. Unfortunately, the majority of the "standard" library isn't standardized, so I'm still hard-pressed to recommend it as a solution.

Now, the OOXML support, that I can't figure out. =)

Re:Could someone please explain...

[wasabii]

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.

Re:Could someone please explain...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Could someone please explain...

[kamatsu]

Mono was a brilliant idea. Like it or not, .NET has begun taking over windows desktop application development, and windows-based web development (haha). Mono provides interoperability and portability, effectively allowing developers to make cross-platform applications simply and easily without using a monstrosity like Java. If you denounce Mono because it implements a Microsoftian CLI, then you're just being idealistically stupid. You don't even have to use an MS-developed language if you don't want to. Take a look at Boo, for example. Totally open-source pythonesque language implemented for the open-source mono CLI. But hey! It works on Windows too! Great way to expand audience and attract developers to minority platforms.

Re:Could someone please explain...

[ToasterMonkey]

A single API for storing configuration parameters. What a terrible idea! No, that DOES sound like a good idea, but so does Communism.

The reason that the registry was a problem in Windows was that it was easily corrupted. That was more of a meta-problem.

It works well for multiple users Unix config files have too, for a loooong, long time now. That's a pretty basic requirement for any up-and-coming replacements.

I think the only people that complain about the concept of the registry are idiots at this point. Come on, that's a bit unfair. Help them understand the difference between ideas and implementations by telling them what a registry SHOULD do.

You can toss out your local gconf settings without hosing your system Why not global settings? Don't laugh, many applications can get by without a global conf file by using sane defaults. I do realize that many don't, but I would hope that a newfangled configuration system would fix that.

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 /etc/foo.conf, ~/.foo.conf
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.

Re:Idiots

[SCHecklerX]

It is a sucky standard. Who cares? Not me. I'd sure rather it work than everybody cry about it.

I'd rather people focus the energy on stuff that makes our software stronger and more appealing, rather than trying to implement ill-defined 'open' specs. Mono on linux, for example, is a travesty to me.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[MBGMorden]

Funny, when I bought my mother-in-law a $300 Wal-Mart PC, it came pre-loaded with Linspire, a KDE distro. Funny, I don't think he ever claimed otherwise.

Are you going to posit that Linspire even comes close to matching the installed base of Ubuntu or Fedora? The bottom line is those Wal-mart PC's are NOT a significant source of existing Linux installs. Them coming with something other then GNOME is just not an issue. It's like jumping on someone for saying most cars are powered by gasoline by saying "Funny, I just bought an electric car from Bob's Who-ja-whatzit Electric Autos. And from YARC (Yet Another Random Company): Here's a hydrogen powered car! Take that buddy!".

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[brewstate]

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.

Admitting it?

[CritterNYC]

Isn't that statement essentially an admission that KDE purposely linked GPL licensed code to the older, proprietary Qt code (thus violating copyright law)? In that case, yes, the original copyright holder can revoke their privileges under GPL 2. This is one of the things that was changed in GPL 3.

Re:Admitting it?

[stilborne]

yes, KDE purposefully linked GPL licensed code to QPLv1 code. however, it was THEIR code which means that they were fully within their rights to do so. anyone building apps on top of those libs implicitly agreed as well.

linking someone else's code would be an issue, and in the 2 cases where that happened it was rectified as soon as it was brought up; it's also useful to note that those 2 cases were small code fragments, not significant bodies of work, and as such certainly not evidence of a willfull plot or some such thing. they were oversights, and corrected in a timely manner without fuss.

and this was what, getting to be 10 years ago now? today we have nice clean GPL'd (or "better") code on every platform we support. let's find some new issues to grind over. =)

Re:Admitting it?

[squiggleslash]

Most of it was their code. Some of it wasn't. IIRC there was a PDF viewer or something similar that used third party GPL'd code.

Re:Admitting it?

[stilborne]

the link in the comment above explains exactly where the code was: a small bit of code in kmidi and an even smaller chunk (a few lines) of rather inconsequential code in kghostview. all of it was replaced as soon as it was noticed, none of it was intentional/malicious, and it certainly wasn't a substantial part of even a single application.

i'm guessing it's kghostview that you were thinking of when you wrote, "there was a PDF viewer or something similar that used third party GPL'd code". which, in light of the actuality of the problem, seems a little bit of an overstatement of the situation. =)

it's all moot at this point, however, with Qt freely available under the GPL and the FreeQt Foundation standing in as an additional guarantee.

Re:Admitting it?

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Admitting it?

[asuffield]

yes, KDE purposefully linked GPL licensed code to QPLv1 code. however, it was THEIR code which means that they were fully within their rights to do so. anyone building apps on top of those libs implicitly agreed as well.

However, nobody else had the right to do so, which effectively excluded everybody else from working on it.

Re:Admitting it?

[ScrewMaster]

So, in other words, the KDE people took care of it, Stallman was willing let the whole matter drop so long as the appropriate legal procedure was followed, and everyone took offense anyway?

Re:Admitting it?

[stilborne]

yep, just another day at the office. ;)

Re:Admitting it?

[jbolden]

There were some questions whether
1) They were the appropriate legal procedures
2) Whether there was any violation at all
3) Stallman had any standing in the issue at all
4) Whether Stallman was engaging in an unethical smear campaign against KDE

As a KDE supporter at the time my personal take was:
No there was no forgiveness needed. The copyright owner needs to declare a breach before forgiveness is needed no breach declaration occurred. The violation was very very gray, Stallman didn't have standing. I never believed in (4) OTOH I think he lacked in diplomacy during the whole Gnome / KDE fiasco and it was in many ways the last great moment of FSF. He burned a lot of credibility on his anti KDE campaign.

Re:Admitting it?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, diplomacy never was Stallman's strong suit anyway.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[miffo.swe]

If KDE4 delivers half of what it promises this could very well be what tips things in favour for KDE. Gnome has not developed much in recent releases and is in some areas stagnated (nautilus, gnome-panel and for eg. the stupid register idiocy). Dont get me wrong, i like gnome but miquel and his bending over for Microsoft, mono and Gnomes spineless aproach to MS is driving me towards ANY other desktop.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[segedunum]

Most people go with the default when installing those distros too, so GNOME has a high probability of being the most used Linux Desktop.

Alas, that doesn't actually seem to be the case, and we've had a few desktop surveys over the past few years that have gone totally against this grain - despite some peoples' best efforts ;-). Additionally, the fact that people are still talking about KDE and KDE 4 still seems to be able to generate excitement for some reason means that something isn't right..

You know what? I just find it exceptionally sad when a new user comes into the open source community to look at what free desktops he/she can use, and the only reason anyone anyone can give him/her on various forums to use Gnome is "Oh, it's the default on all these enterprise distros that few people use and on Ubuntu [which for some unearthly reason is some kind of desktop benchmark for some people], so you're stuck with it." It really doesn't say much for, or give a terribly good impression of, the quality of free/open source desktops, and I'd say it's holding things back.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Ash-Fox]

The two most popular distros in use today are Fedora and Ubuntu(Debian) and both use GNOME by default.

Distro watch shows the major distributions to be:

• Ubuntu (Gnome)
• OpenSuSE (Gnome)
• Fedora (Gnome)
• Debian (user chooses)
• Mandriva (Gnome)
• Mepis (KDE)
• Knoppix (KDE)
• Slackware (has KDE packages, no Gnome)
• Gentoo Linux (It's a trap!)

Gnome: 4 KDE: 3

I don't think the overall result is that bad for KDE.

But with Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and Fedora being right at the top, I agree that Gnome will likely be the most used Linux desktop environment in the meantime. However, with KDE 4obtaining native ports to Windows, OS X - that may end up changing things.

Take responsbility

[pembo13]

I will say yet again: I hope Miguel de Icaza takes responsibility when Microsoft's stranglehold over the open source software I like grows. Because he sure seems to be infatuated with the company and their products.

the whole thing is rather ironical

[porky_pig_jr]

considering that GNOME was RMS's baby to start with. Which is something I hold against him. There are many factors which prevent Linux from being widely acceptable, but having GNOME vs KDE business belongs to the major one.

Re:the whole thing is rather ironical

[jmac1492]

considering that GNOME was RMS's baby to start with. Which is something I hold against him. There are many factors which prevent Linux from being widely acceptable, but having GNOME vs KDE business belongs to the major one. Funny, I'd say Vi vs. Emacs would be a more major one. Or even Free Software vs. Open Source Software. Good thing Stallman had nothing to do with those.

Re:the whole thing is rather ironical

[mattpalmer1086]

Yeah, all those people fed up with Windows, thinking "I'd sure like to give Linux a try, but I just can't get my head around that KDE/Gnome choice". Come on...

Re:the whole thing is rather ironical

[porky_pig_jr]

Not, really. I still remember the announcement that Dell will be putting Ubuntu on its laptops, immediately followed by the flood of messages from KDE fans: Not Kubuntu? We won't touch that!

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[msuarezalvarez]

the stupid register idiocy

Would you please elaborate on that, I'm intrigued.

Confusion Part Two

[ajs318]

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.

Re:Confusion Part Two

[Microlith]

Your hyperbole is impressive.

Windows users, raised on a diet of [...] 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.

More like, "Linux users like me would rather dunk their heads in shit then help them move away from Windows, even if only one step at a time."

It's damn near impossible to find a Qt based program on Windows, and that's surely a roadblock to adoption, since if I can write an app that uses Qt on Windows, moving to Linux would be easier. But you'd rather just insult the Windows users instead.

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.

That's a hell of a comparison, drawing similarities between the enslavement of people and denial of human rights to... software. Completely unreasonable too, since in the end any piece of software can be reimplemented but a person denied rights cannot simply be replaced with someone that has those rights.

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.

No, it's not. There's a difference, a huge difference, between being treated like property and not being able to fiddle with the source to an application. If you can't see that then no one should ever take you seriously, because you're not arguing from a sane basis.

Re:Confusion Part Two

[Uncle_Al]

It is still impossible to write a BSD-licensed application using Qt.

No it is not

Re:Confusion Part Two

[ajs318]

It is still impossible to write a BSD-licensed application using Qt.

And what's really so bad about that, when all's said and done?

The only reason to prefer the BSD licence over the GPL (apart from all the political stuff which could and probably should have been abstracted away into an appendix, letting the terms and conditions be served up plain and dry without emotive language) is that the latter specifically forbids you to distribute binary-only applications. But if what you want to do is write Caged software, then Trolltech will allow you to licence Qt for that purpose -- for a fee, naturally. If you're writing Caged software, surely it's because you think you have the right to exert control over your work, such as withhold the Source Code? Then how can you sanely object to Trolltech exerting control over their work, by charging you for the privilege of benefitting from it? Particularly as they've already also given you the option of having access to the same work for no money, as long as you abide by the rules of the GPL. Which are, no withholding Source Code.

Unless I'm missing something -- and if I am, then please put me straight -- you just sound as though you just want to eat your cake and have it.

The GPL rests on copyright law. It assumes a priori that you have the right to attach terms to something you have created. If you want to attach those terms to your code then you have to accept that other people have the freedom to attach their own terms to their own code.

The only reason why we need laws is that there are too many people who won't do the right thing unless somebody tells them to. I've seen enough of life to realise several times over that the hippy visions I used to have of people getting along, being nice to one another and sharing everything are just romantic ideals. Someone always sets out to game the system for their own benefit, it always comes at someone else's expense, and you end up with a pyramid where every layer is eating the layer below itself.

So if we can't have an ideal world because people would do bad things if there wasn't a law telling them not to, then surely the next best thing is having laws stopping people from doing undesirable things, as long as they do not impact upon anyone who is doing nothing wrong? From the point of view of the GNU project, anything that seeks to curtail the Four Freedoms is undesirable. Since in the "Brave GNU world" nobody would object to passing on the Four Freedoms, goes the reasoning, then if nothing but a law preserving the Four Freedoms will create this state of affairs, it will just have to suffice for now.

And in its own way, I suppose that's really just as much "gaming the system" as anything else.

Re:Confusion Part Two

[ajs318]

There's a difference, a huge difference, between being treated like property and not being able to fiddle with the source to an application.

It's a difference in degree only. The majority of people are not programmers, and wouldn't know what to do with Source Code. That doesn't diminish its importance in real life one bit, although it's not important to them, right now. It may turn out to be important to someone, one day.

What's the most valuable part of your computer system? It's not the hardware or the software. It's your data. Your letters, your sums, your record collection, your photos, your movies. And as long as that data is being stored in proprietary formats, it's effectively being held to ransom. Your continued access to all that is entirely at the mercy of some faceless corporation somewhere. They have the power to force you to upgrade your software -- and, if necessary, your hardware -- just to maintain access to your data. They could even withdraw your licence to use the software altogether.

To guard against this, data formats need to be Open. And a data format isn't Open unless everyone is free to create Open Source implementations of programs that read and write data in that format, so that it's possible to exchange data perfectly -- correctly in every detail -- with other applications using it. OOXML is not an Open format, because there are huge gaps in the specification. Microsoft Office can create "OOXML" files that ask for features that nobody but Microsoft know how to implement. That means right from the start that it's not necessarily possible for any competing product to handle files produced by Microsoft Office correctly. Furethermore (and this is a separate issue in its own right), there may be other legal encumbrances which indirectly prevent someone from creating an Open Source OOXML implementation.

If you want to make full use of your data in a manner that suits you, then that might well necessitate "fiddling with the source to an application". Hence why it's important. Anything else would be denying you some of your rights, or "treating you like property".

That's a hell of a comparison, drawing similarities between the enslavement of people and denial of human rights to... software. Completely unreasonable too, since in the end any piece of software can be reimplemented but a person denied rights cannot simply be replaced with someone that has those rights.

The freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour and the freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public so that the whole community benefits, are human rights. And these rights, which belong to everyone, trump the power (because that is what it is: power over others, not freedom and certainly not a right) of a minority of programmers to deny others those Four Freedoms.

Also, see above. There may be direct (poor documentation) or indirect (legal encumbrances) reasons why a piece of software cannot be reimplemented.

Re:Confusion Part Two

[Windwraith]

>It's damn near impossible to find a Qt based program on Windows, and that's surely a roadblock to adoption, since if I can write an app that uses Qt on Windows, moving to Linux would be easier. But you'd rather just insult the Windows users instead.
I know Launchy (Quicksilver-style launcher for windows) is being ported to QT, and I found many others I don't remember at the time using QT as well.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[WhiteWolf666]

*shrug*

I think many, if not most, openSuSE users use KDE. SuSE was a KDE distribution for a long time, and most of the SuSE GUI tools are still KDE-centric.

Also, the official position of the openSuSE Community is that there is no "default" desktop environment:

What is the default desktop of openSUSE - GNOME or KDE?
openSUSE supports a number of popular desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. During installation, the user is asked to choose between GNOME and KDE but no default is given. Both desktop environments are mature and feature-rich, which one a user chooses is a question of personal taste.

AFAIK, Novell/Commercial SuSE (influence of Ximian) trends towards GNOME, but openSuSE trends towards KDE. Both are pretty definitely "dual-desktop"

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[AmaDaden]

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.

Isn't it ironic?

[_narf_]

That back in the day... Gnome was championed for it's openness over the "evil" KDE for choosing to using encumbered libraries? (Anyone remember FreeQT? Or RMS Making noise about the whole thing?) My how things change over time.

Re:Isn't it ironic?

[Ilgaz]

That back in the day... Gnome was championed for it's openness over the "evil" KDE for choosing to using encumbered libraries? (Anyone remember FreeQT? Or RMS Making noise about the whole thing?)

My how things change over time. Back in the day, Novell shipped solutions which showed MS products like someone's first BASIC program. People purchased Suse Linux just because they loved their attitude and level of support, not because MS threatened them with FUD.

I got Fink here on OS X and every time a Gnome thing compiles, I see some .NET or C# references, I am glad that they are usually things like "--disable C#"

Things really change fast in IT scene. There are people who are actually afraid one day Gnome may require Mono (.NET) to compile and they would have to move to other environments. I heard some stuff already requires it but not sure, I am away from Linux for years. (guess the reason!)

The day Gnome or anything related to Gnome requires anything having something to do with MSFT fake open source stuff, I am declining to install that to my tiny, rarely used OS X Unix /sw directory.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[10Ghz]

OpenSuSE (Gnome)

The OpenSUSE FAQ says this:

"What is the default desktop of openSUSE - GNOME or KDE?
openSUSE supports a number of popular desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. During installation, the user is asked to choose between GNOME and KDE but no default is given. Both desktop environments are mature and feature-rich, which one a user chooses is a question of personal taste."

Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[apokryphos]

I'm getting pretty tired of this ongoing OOXML issue; the FUD surrounding it is astounding. The article on itwire hasn't helped anyone since it's pretty clueless, looking for buzzwords and then reaching bizarre conclusions. Let's get a few facts down here:

• 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.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[stilborne]

"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."

the difference is that the samba project is not taking a position that can be perceived as promoting those technologies as a formal international standard. and that is why, in a nutshell, there isn't the bruhaha over samba, but there is over this OOXML stuff.

it's unfortunate and not representative of the motivations of the people involved (as you note) but it is a completely predictable reaction given the political issues here. i personally don't believe the GNOME foundation is actually trying to attack freedom in general or ODF in specific through their OOXML position, but intentions alone are not always enough. in this case i fear some political naivety is resulting in a series of unfortunate public missteps. =/

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[WhiteWolf666]

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.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[Vexorian]

GNOME (and Novell) do not support the standardisation of OOXML. They are both members of the ODF alliance [odfalliance.org], 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.

Perhaps they vocally state they don't support it, but they ARE helping it. By giving MS arguments of it being "supported" by Novell and Gnome. Novell's fork for windows of OpenOffice and GNOME actively helping them in the standardization process of optionally-open XML specifically mean they are supporting it, regardless of how they tell us that they don't want to.

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.

Congratulations since Novell is the one pushing Optionally-open XML on OpenOffice and would fork it with a windows only version if necessary...

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.

Strawman much?

If OfficeOpen XML becomes an ISO standard, we will, in all likely hood, still not spend time on supporting it. The standard is enormous, very complex and to a large extent so badly specified that a full implementation is probably even harder than implementing the old Microsoft binary file formats. Add to that patent encumbrances and problems with copyrighted elements -- and our conclusion is that we prefer to concentrate on making KOffice a great set of applications that are satisfying to use and satisfying to develop.

They are not just saying they don't have resources, they are also saying they won't because of patent and copyright land mines.

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

Don't kill them messenger, I am seeing it is getting common to blame Roy of being poisonous, when he mostly just posts links to articles and statements from Novell and Icaza themselves, Novell people are the ones being poisonous ever since the deal, giving MS all that many FUD platform and doing FUD against other distros themselves.

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.

Perhaps after any approval is done we might need some support of Optionally-open XML, but not now, right now implementing it is detrimental to the purposes of FLOSS and will only aid MS in their insane attempt to make it count as an open standard - what it isn't - .

We need to focus on preventing "standardization" of this technology, because, the truth is that OOXML is only optionally open, take a look to .net and visual studio, and how visual studio pushes all the parts of .net that were not opened as ECMA standard (cough, windows forms) That's exactly what MS wants to do with documents, a pseudo-open standard, this is only going to be disadvantageous to FLOSS and anyone competing with MS, since they are the only ones who can legally and accurately implement it.

The priority right now should be

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[apokryphos]

> the difference is that the samba project is not taking a position that can be perceived as promoting those technologies as a formal international standard. and that is why, in a nutshell, there isn't the bruhaha over samba, but there is over this OOXML stuff.

On the exact same grounding and as little logic I can argue that the existence of Samba can be seen as promoting those proprietary technologies. What we should be doing in this case is not attacking them for doing something which is emphatically a good thing, but rather just get the truth out and not let FUD like this spread.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[apokryphos]

Perhaps they vocally state they don't support it, but they ARE helping it. By giving MS arguments of it being "supported" by Novell and Gnome. Novell's fork for windows of OpenOffice and GNOME actively helping them in the standardization process of optionally-open XML specifically mean they are supporting it, regardless of how they tell us that they don't want to. By implementing support for it so that it's a realistic option for people coming from Windows? Migrates from Windows are a huge chunk of Linux's potential market. We should make it as easy as possible; we should also promote free, open standards. ODF commitment here is clear; OOXML support is a stepping stone.

Congratulations since Novell is the one pushing Optionally-open XML on OpenOffice and would fork it with a windows only version if necessary... Do you have any evidence for this statement? I can't think of anything wilder, to be honest. It's pretty clear that Novell have grounded their whole future in Linux. See, for example, SUSE Linux Enterprise (the only serious desktop enterprise solution), or moving Netware all over to Open Enterprise Server. Not really what you would do if you think you might have a future with Windows, is it?

Strawman much? How curious. Which part of that is a strawman? My point was that KDE or Koffice are not "making a stand against OOXML" in any way that GNOME haven't, really. The statement from the Koffice developers basically said that they didn't have time or resources. In GNOME, a volunteer has agreed to do it. If they weren't doing it there, they'd be just like the Koffice developers probably.

Don't kill them messenger, I am seeing it is getting common to blame Roy of being poisonous, when he mostly just posts links to articles and statements from Novell I think I've read more articles from Roy than 99.9% of others out there, so please don't try to tell me something I know to be evidently untrue from experience -- that he "just posts links". He draws ridiculous conclusions from many links, speculates wildly in the negative extreme, or often posts ridiculous unsubstantiated articles/links.

Do you want one example? Roy once made a post suggesting that Novell was using "sex to sell" and claiming that "Linux was a slut" because they used a woman in this video. Is that a rational conclusion? There are hundreds of other examples, but that one sticks out most in my mind. If there's one thing that Roy doesn't "just do" it's post links.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[schestowitz]

> poisonous person willing to do or say anything that might cook up some self-publicity

What an utterly malicious accusation. Over the years I have fought /against/ flamewars and /against/ FUD. Why shoot the messenger?

> irrational hatred of Novell.

I actually like Novell. I said this many time before. I just hope it returns to being the Novell I used to know.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[stilborne]

> I can argue that the existence of Samba can
> be seen as promoting those proprietary technologies

the samba team isn't sitting on an ECMA or ECMA-like committee. that's the source of all this bruhaha.

> is not attacking them for doing something which is emphatically a good thing,

i totally agree people shouldn't be attacking them. i disagree that it's an emphatically good thing (there are other ways of achieving what they need to, btw, that don't come with the baggage).

i also think that it's a self-evident fact that they are playing the communications game very poorly right now. this article and many others just like it are the proof. =/

> but rather just get the truth out and not let FUD like this spread.

agreed.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[apokryphos]

What an utterly malicious accusation. "Poisonous" was well-defined in this case, Roy. Did you check the video? The point of the statement is to be factual in correspondence with that description, nothing more.

Over the years I have fought /against/ flamewars and /against/ FUD. You've stirred up so much FUD with regard to Novell/SUSE, and now GNOME, that it's just impossible for me to reach any other conclusion.

Why shoot the messenger? A messenger merely reports a given source, or relays information. You go further than this in interpreting sources, providing your analysis, your future predictions, and speculations. The term "messenger" is not applicable to someone matching that description, by any means.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[DragonWriter]

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.

More, any effort wasted making a F/OSS office application a second-class alternative to MSOffice 2007 by trying to implement OOXML is not being used implementing compelling features in F/OSS office applications that would give people a reason to choose the F/OSS application over MS Office.

MS Office isn't well entrenched in industry yet, so the compelling course for F/OSS competitors should be to give people a good reason to "upgrade" from Office 2003 and previous to the F/OSS offering, not providing a transition path from Office 2007.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[apokryphos]

the samba team isn't sitting on an ECMA or ECMA-like committee. that's the source of all this bruhaha. I haven't seen anyone saying they'd be happy with GNOME implementing OOXML support while not sitting on the ECMA. Even so, there's no extra use of logic in either. If a company or person is going to make a completely unsubstantiated claim from one, they can just as easily make the unsubstantiated claim from the other.

i disagree that it's an emphatically good thing (there are other ways of achieving what they need to, btw, that don't come with the baggage). What do you have in mind? Implementing something so large is not an easy process. Without milking out all the extra details to make life easier for the developers this kind of job would be a very long, very annoying pain in the neck. We really shouldn't be in positions where we put our volunteers in tight spots because we're afraid "of what they might say". Someone doing 2 minutes of actual research on Google can find out what is actually the case.

i also think that it's a self-evident fact that they are playing the communications game very poorly right now. this article and many others just like it are the proof. =/ Agreed; the statement from GNOME took -- as far as I can see -- unnecessarily long. A rumour given time spreads quickly. That said, it did come after all, and squashed any rational fears one might have.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[stilborne]

> I haven't seen anyone saying they'd be happy with GNOME implementing OOXML
> support while not sitting on the ECMA.

i have in previous conversations about this topic. so unless i'm a nobody or we're restricting the scope to just this thread, this isn't accurate =)

> Implementing something so large is not an easy process.

indeed

> Without milking out all the extra details to make life easier for the developers
> this kind of job would be a very long, very annoying pain in the neck.

this doesn't require being part of an ECMA group. it's like suggesting that to implement an html renderer effectively you need to be in the appropriate w3c working groups.

> We really shouldn't be in positions where we put our volunteers in tight
> spots because we're afraid "of what they might say".

i would agree; nothing i've said is in this spirit. this is about IOS committee machinations and the future of ODF and OOXML in those arenas, not what people on slashdot post in their comments.

all *that* said, this is way more of a molehill than the mountain it's become due to communication mismanagement by the various involved parties. =(

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[Ilgaz]

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. If you have patience and interest in such things, check Novell's financial status and their "message board" at Yahoo Finance etc.

Especially before the MSFT "alliance". As I said, you must have patience :)

Novell sold out for a good reason. They were going down.

As for Suse? Things change and I don't think any IT/Enterprise decision maker would see it as a true alternative to MSFT solutions. In fact, on IBM Land, I don't think anyone would opt-in for Suse Enterprise over AIX or Redhat.

Suse, Novell etc. are things of past. They aren't the companies/distros we all knew and respected. I think people have hard time accepting the sad facts.

Mac users will always get away because they actually buy MS Office (forget Slashdot, digg etc. comments). MS makes huge money over Mac and it will grow after the "business friendly" decisions by Apple. For example, MS actually ships UNIX software when they ship MS Office for OS X Leopard.

I have real hard time to understand the Linux/FreeBSD using people defending MS things so there must be some monetary reason for it.

It is basic. As Apple removed most of deep level Carbon bindings, anything which will work natively on OS X Leopard are basically Unix software with Cocoa (like mega-openstep) Framework bindings. If you check how MSN Messenger works for years, it is one of most Unix-like Application. GUI and Daemon are separate.

So, MS can ship: Instant messengers, complete Office packages, advanced utilities as Remote desktop running under Unix. They have expertise and know-how enough to ship Virtual PC which even runs under Leopard without any alerts.

Did they ship ANYTHING for Linux in their entire history? That should explain their stance to anyone.

Re:Tired of the Nonsense/FUD

[mvdwege]

the samba team isn't sitting on an ECMA or ECMA-like committee.

Do POSIX and the IETF count?

Mart

Re:Tune In Next Week

[MightyMartian]

Stallman may fancy himself some sort of holy man, but to be honest, he's a bit of a loon. To suggest that he's some sort of wizard whose magic touch will make all the difference is ludicrous.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[stilborne]

of course, most people using OpenSUSE actually use KDE as has been shown by surveys of their own user base. you can see the results for yourself right here.

i'd also not turn my nose up at successes like the EEE PC which ships with KDE software by default and is well on its way to making the sales targets of 3-5 million units in its first year.

it's also great to see gnome centric companies, such as Canonical, Red Hat, or even smaller ones like Userful, have so much commercial success with KDE. Userful is interesting: they had their booth with GNOME desktops, but the big vertical banner showing their highlight installation was KDE (on SUSE =). it's also substantial new installations, such as the French parliament or the school districts in the country of Georgia or....

trying to measure market viability and realities via distrowatch is a lot like trying to predict the weather by consulting the water in your bathtub.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[MightyMartian]

Let me know when anyone besides Microsoft can support an "open" standard that's filled with proprietary hooks. OOXML is a scam.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[MrDrBob]

Miguel and Mono have little to do with GNOME. GNOME has a pragmatic, rather than "spineless" approach to OOXML (face it: it's going to become the new .doc format regardless of any protest or opposition from OSS, so why waste the opportunity to at least fix the most serious problems with it, and make implementation of it in OSS easier?). I'm not even going to bother responding to your baseless claims about GNOME's functionality and design competence.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[cp.tar]

I used to like Gnome.

Back in the 1.4 times.

From 2.0 on, it's been getting on my nerves. Increasingly so.

I was never much of a KDE fan, but I think I'll switch camps.
And if KDE turns out to be so great, even better.

I have to see what I can do with E17 as well; maybe its stability has improved recently (haven't had the time to experiment with different desktops in the last year or so).

Re:Idiots

[WhiteWolf666]

???

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.

perspective

[m2943]

Yeah, de Icaza makes stupid comments about OOXML and Gil's employer has some obsession with proprietary video formats. Neither of those is a big deal to me, in particular since they are so utterly without consequences: Gnome supports ODF anyway, and lack of Ogg support on the N800 affects almost nobody and is, frankly, the least of Nokia's problems.

To me, the biggest problem in the open source world is still those stupid dual-licenses from companies like Troll Tech and Sun. I therefore take a principled stand against KDE: as long as it is based on a dual-licensed toolkit, I consider KDE evil and will not use it.

Re:perspective

[stilborne]

what, exactly, is evil about a dual licensed toolkit?

(especially when money earned goes into paying for the development of more free software ...)

i mean, you're free to feel however you wish about things, but making a statement about principles and evilness would do well with some actual substance behind it.

Re:perspective

[pembo13]

What's wrong with the dual license? You don't use MySQL either?

You forgot

[joeflies]

Silverlight

Open letter to Miguel

[seebs]

Bill's married. It will never work.

Re:KOFFICE?

[stilborne]

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.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[Almahtar]

For the sake of interop it is necessary to glean the standards as written. I think it's more vital for the sake of interop to use only open standards - Microsoft will just continue to change and break theirs to the detriment of interoperability. Writing to their standards is a short sighted act of desperation.

Re:Idiots

[Just Some Guy]

Life isn't about taking your ball and going home. It's about doing deals to gently move the status quo over to your side. Taking your ball and going home isn't going to actually SOLVE anything.

You've been beaten silly by the school bully every day for 4 years. The principal knows what's happening - he even issued a formal statement that the bully was using his size to illegally control every kind on the playground - but no one does anything about it.

Your options are:

1. Take your ball and go home,
2. Organize the other kids to whoop the crap out of the bully once and for all, or
3. Be extra-nice to the bully and hope that next time he'll pick on someone else.

Your way just gets you another beating. After a while you have to say that enough's enough.

Re:OMG... Stallman is against MS? No Way!!!

[Eco-Mono]

ISO/IEC 26300 would like a word with you outside.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[moranar]

Firefox and OpenOffice aren't exactly GNOME applications. They do use GTK to display, but the GNOME 'Official' browser is Epiphany, and GNOME Office comprises Abiword, Gnumeric and other apps, not Openoffice.

So, no cigar, sorry.

The best way to bring people to closed source

[bazald]

proprietary software is to constantly sue one another over patent infringement. Both sides are brilliant, no?

Re:Idiots

[MrDrBob]

I'll quote that to you in a few years when you find you can't open that dreadfully important OOXML file from work on your home computer. Implementing OOXML (not matter what [correct] moral outrage you have towards it) means that more people can more to open desktops more easily --- they don't have to convert all their documents, or start from scratch again. GNOME's participation in the OOXML process is merely to make sure that it's at least semi-sane for implementation in OSS, as opposed to completely opaque and mangled. If you read Jeff Waugh's comments on TFA, you'd see that GNOME is not endorsing, supporting, or pushing for adoption of OOXML; it's merely softening the blow of the (unfortunately) inevitable worldwide adoption of OOXML.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[c0p0n]

Distrowatch counts Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu, so all 4 share the first spot.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[Anomolous Cowturd]

Yeah, in the sense that Microsoft is doing everything it can to impede Linux on the desktop, we will be going through Microsoft to get to where we're going.

Re:Tune In Next Week

[IceCreamGuy]

Chill out dude, he's just making a damn Rocky and Bullwinkle joke, just go with it.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[WhiteWolf666]

(face it: it's going to become the new .doc format regardless of any protest or opposition from OSS, so why waste the opportunity to at least fix the most serious problems with it, and make implementation of it in OSS easier?)

Not in the Netherlands, at least.

Also, apparently, not in several other nations.

There will not be a better opportunity to change the world's default document format to an OSS one that when MS is bogged down in its own transition to OOXML. Once .DOCX becomes the standard, it'll stay that way. In the interim, there is confusion, and there's a decent chance that ODF could catch on.

It doesn't hurt in the least bit that ODF is an ISO standard, and has extensive support from the various Office-as-a-service vendors (IBM, Google, etc. . .).

This is a major opportunity for the OSS community, to stand united behind ODF, and building in cooperation with OOXML will be a kiss of death (things will not work properly; just like IE doesn't render "standard" pages correctly, and the MS Office version of OOXML will be the correct version, while the "standard" version will be allowed to languish).

Heaven knows there are enough "outs" in the OOXML format (like all the legacy crap) that will give MS plenty of leeway to insure that only MS Office opens documents properly. Of course, these will all be "fixed" in the indefinite future; just like Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has a terrible, terrible record as a standard bearer. It makes no sense to allow MS to watch the keys to the kingdom. We've got an opportunity to push the world towards ODF, and there's quite a bit of uptake internationally, and quite a bit of interest domestically. Let's not try and upstage that by putting OOXML into all our applications (not to mention the wasted developer hours).

The primary complaint against Linux has always been, "don't just duplicate, build something better!". Well, ODF is better than OOXML. Let's stick with it until we've had DOCX forced down our throat. DOCX will not be ubiquitous for several years because of the legacy users out there, so we've got some time to push ODF over DOCX.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[sumdumass]

What ever happened to asking the user during the install? Is mandrake/mandriva the only distro that does that? I have the option to install to install one or the other or both and bounce between them depending on who is logged in. And that doesn't begin to mention the other desktop environments you have the option to chose from.

I've never been happy with a default choice. If I wanted default stuff, I guess I would stick with MS. They seem to have a pretty decent default as far as defaults seem to go.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[brunes69]

I think if you actually took the number of Gnome users vs. the number of KDE users globally you would sing a different tune. It is probably very close to a 50/50 split, with a slight leaning toward KDE.

Linux is not like Windows, the whole "default desktop" thing is basically meaningless. If you are the kind of person who installs Linux then you're also the kind of person who can switch desktops on a whim right after install. And most PC retailers who sell PCs pre-installed with Linux use a KDE variant, Dell is the only one I know of who ships Gnome.

KDE and GPLv3

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?

Not likely, unless TrollTech (or somebody who buys them out) releases Qt under a license that's compatible with versions of the GPL greater than 2. As it stands, you can't distribute a GPLv3 KDE app, because Qt is licensed as GPLv2-only (and a proprietary licence, which is useless in this context).

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Ash-Fox]

Sorry - Hate to say it, but Mandriva uses KDE by default. You can use Gnome, but it's not as developed and integrated as KDE...

The drak tools are all written using perl and various GTK widgets - I'd say it's more connected to Gnome. The default configuration always sets Gnome as default in setup when you configure a desktop system, despite letting you choose KDE if you prefer.

You also forgot a very popular distro: PCLinuxOS. It is highly ranked at distrowatch. This one also uses KDE by default...

Whoops, I missed that one.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Ash-Fox]

Distrowatch counts Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu, so all 4 share the first spot.

Looks separate to me.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[miffo.swe]

Well for one thing, its a real pita to admin. With most other applications its a simple tour into a file with the settings both there for alteration and in most cases also some explanations for the various settings. Im one of those that never have ever seen a point of the Windows register and always have seen it as the worst part of the Windows platform.

With Gnome its very hard for an admin to administer for eg. a linux terminal server. Gconftool and gconf-editor is abysmal, both from a Windows admin perspective and from a Linux admin perspective. You can call me the worst admin in the world but setting up desktop-settings suitable for a terminal server in Gnome was no walk in the park and took me weeks of tinkering and reading source code. The gnome register is a sidestep from a tried and true way of handling settings on Linux and its just there because someone wanted to mimick what was a very bad idea from the beginning in Windows.

A simple text file in /etc for the systemwide settings and one for each user in their /~ with things deviating from it would have sufficed very well. A simple write protect on that user file would take care of mandatory settings pretty easily. Its not like /etc/skel is there for burials you know.

In short, you can never win when you copy something that sucks in the first place.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Ash-Fox]

"What is the default desktop of openSUSE - GNOME or KDE?
openSUSE supports a number of popular desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. During installation, the user is asked to choose between GNOME and KDE but no default is given. Both desktop environments are mature and feature-rich, which one a user chooses is a question of personal taste."

I admit I'm wrong here. I am a SuSE Linux user and assumed OpenSuSE was pretty much just a free equivalent to SuSE Linux, but apparently it's different in philosophy too. SuSE Linux by default uses Gnome.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Ash-Fox]

SuSE was a KDE distribution for a long time, and most of the SuSE GUI tools are still KDE-centric

I know this too well, being someone who uses SuSE (I go against the defaults and use KDE).

AFAIK, Novell/Commercial SuSE (influence of Ximian) trends towards GNOME, but openSuSE trends towards KDE. Both are pretty definitely "dual-desktop"

Sorry about that, I absolutely messed up. Being a SuSE Linux user (although I use Kubuntu on my home desktop) and knowing about OpenSuSE, I believed it copied SuSE's general philosophies including having Gnome by default.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[MrDrBob]

Compromise: Make sure OOXML is sane to implement by being on the committee for it, while also pushing ODF, and continuing to not push OOXML. If our efforts to push ODF into the mainstream work, that's good. If not, at least we will have sorted the major problems with OOXML, and it'll be easier to implement (and harder for Microsoft to diverge from) in OSS.

KDE is being relicensed to GPL 3+

[billybob2]

KDE is being re-licensed to GPL 3+ as we speak. See the draft licensing policy. Once that is near completion, it is likely that Qt will also be relicensed to GPL 3 since Trolltech has proven to be receptive to the idea.

Re:KDE is being relicensed to GPL 3+

[cralewyth]

I didn't think the end of the world was so near.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Blakey Rat]

Make sure you know of what you speak:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx

The registry is better than text files in many ways, all of which are outlined in that post.

A GNOME is fine too

[Requiem18th]

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...

Re:A GNOME is fine too

[marcosdumay]

"Some, a lot, of us choosed GNOME on our own."

That's a funny thing for a GNOME user to say.

Courage of his convictions

[22_9_3_11_25]

At least RMS has the courage of his convictions and stands up for what he believes in. RMS is a visionary genius and with all he has accomplished still takes the time to give encouragement to someone who is using Gnu/Linux for the first time. Maybe you should read the comment about growing a pair and take a stand.

Nooxml.org's take on GNOME's position

[g2devi]

Interestingly, the Nooxml.org web site, which is dedicated to finding any and all OOXML conspiracies that seem to legimate the broken OOXML format seems to side with GNOME on this issue:
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-30201/the-linux-com-chat-files:jeff-waugh-on-poop-and-pita

Personally, I think that the only way ODF can become a universal file format is if it's possible to convert *all* formats (broken or not, Microsoft format or not) into ODF. Conversion from ODF into broken formats isn't required nor is round-trip conversion (If you have to round-trip for OOXML, use DOC which has almost universal reverse engineered support). The reason is simple. People currently have a lot of legacy out there and late ODF adopters will have a lot of OOXML legacy. Imagine you're early adopters with a lot of legacy (not necessarily DOC or OOXML) or late adopters with a lot of OOXML legacy. Without a way of escaping the legacy trap, you'll have no choice but to give up their terabytes of legacy or forever pay Microsoft to access their legacy and force people to live (for at least 10 years since many financial and health documents require at least this much retention) with two system (and implement the necessary duplicate infrastructure and retraining). The cost of adopting ODF will likely be too high. If Y2K has taught us anything is that even when a clear problem is know, people won't do anything about it until the last minute unless it threatens to shut down the company.

ODF is a fantastic concept that will save you a lot of money and give you a lot of freedom and flexibility in the future. If there is no at least moderate fidelity legacy format to ODF conversion, sticking with OOXML or other legacy formats gives managers a whole lot less (company) political and (transition cost, legacy duplication) financially a whole lot less grief *in the present* (where bonuses are decided).

If, OTOH, there is a moderate fidelity legacy format to ODF conversion available for all popular legacy formats, the world open up to you. You can get rid of hundreds of incompatible systems and formats and have a more uniform system that is free from vendor lock-in. Managers can save *a lot* of money, especially since they no longer have to worry about being held hostage to one vendor that charges them whatever they can get away with and they don't have to support multiple incompatible systems.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[AvitarX]

GNOME/Firefox/OpenOffice makes as much sense as saying KDE/Firefox/OpenOffice

Why not compare GNOME/Epiphany/Abiword/Gnumeric

You could still have made the same case, but it wouldn't have been as ridiculous a comparison.

I use GNOME/Konq/K3B/Amarok and many other KDE applications. I just like the Ubuntu GNOME setup a lot more than KDE. I also like Nautilus's stretch icon ability, it is useful to leave myself notes.

I don't know if that is standard GNOME at all, but it is quite a nice desktop (decent theme, nice layout). I find most GNOME applications to be lacking though (except Abiword and Gnumeric).

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[12357bd]

Nope I've been using Mandriva for years, you have both DE, but KDE is the default, and it's far more polished than Gnome, so to be fair Mandriva should also be counted as a 'KDE' distro.

No

[Tyr_7BE]

With Linus preferring KDE, could Stallman's support put more weight behind KDE?

You have to realize that a VERY small portion of desktop users give half a rat's ass what Linus and Stallman do with their desktops.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Carewolf]

Actually the way to get a proper KDE desktop in Ubuntu AND Kubuntu is to add the Debian sources to the apt/sources.list, and pull the Debian KDE packages, which unlike Kubuntu hasn't been tampered with and ruined.

Re:Idiots

[raddan]

But that's the beauty of Open Source. The community wrote this software. Us. We don't have to compromise for shit, because this is software that everyone can use, and hack, for free.

Microsoft has proven time and again that if you give them slack, they'll hang you with it. So, fuck them. They've held up the state of computing for long enough. We now have free and open software that would have been the envy of many proprietary vendors only a few years ago. And this software isn't going to go away. Adobe can't make GIMP's version bumps produce incompatible formats. Apple can't make CentOS look for license keys and refuse to run. Microsoft can't make us embrace, extend, and extinguish an RFC. It's time we've left them behind. If they want to play in the new ball game, fine. But they'll have to play by our rules.

Calling names doesn't help, either.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[msuarezalvarez]

Ah. Just what I thought. You think that the mythical `flat text file in the usual place' works.

Re:Idiots

[BrianGKUAC]

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.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[miffo.swe]

Well most of the things in that blog talks about shortcomings of the Windows platform. I use very advanced text files all day long for very complicated setups on linux and the problems i had with ini files on Windows is not something i have ever experienced on *nix/linux. The problems with ini files on windows is something i attribute to the shortcomings of Windows itself and its developers.

If you have multiple applications writing settings all the time *coughWindows* you have a whole another problem with your platform (i make packages all day for windows, for old applications often by monitoring the registry and man is it noisy). An application should ofcourse have its own file for settings so that no matter how bad an application screws up it should not affect any other part of the system. How the windows registry slowly dies is very intriguing to watch over the lifetime of a Windows computer. Also on Linux many upgrades (not security updates) of Gnome demands you to delete ~/.gnome and get your profile recreated.

The users is what applications are made for mostly and if a developer earns a couple of seconds on the registry but the user gets a whole lot of problems, whats the point? In my view any benefit of registry based settings is quickly eaten by all the disadvantages as seen in Windows and Gnome.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[VGPowerlord]

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.

...except that Miguel was one of the founders of GNOME. Hence why people refer to him as a GNOME developer.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[mhall119]

Then just run Debian.

I read the whole thing

[fozzmeister]

And Gil did not seem to be anti-ogg at all, he merely stated that his employer is very pro-MPEG and as such actively tries to remove chances for non-MPEG codecs.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Knuckles]

What ever happened to asking the user during the install?

It caused too much maintenance and integration work and was ditched.

Re:Idiots

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'll quote that to you in a few years when you find you can't open that dreadfully important OOXML file from work on your home computer.

The point of not appearing to officially support OOXML and of refusing to implement it until ODF is fully supported is to try to prevent that from ever happening. We have a choice, either in three years we will have the same situation we do now, except with OOXML instead of .doc, or we'll have a real standard format that can be fully implemented by everyone. The moves we make make now determine how likely each of those futures is. Personally, I see nothing wrong with adamantly refusing to support OOXML until such a time as that support is invaluable. If it becomes the de facto standard, fine add support to cut our losses. Right now we should be focused on making sure it does not become a de facto standard in the first place. For the foreseeable future, Word will support .doc format and so should anyone interested in collaboration (as much as that is possible). Going forward, however, wouldn't it make more sense to do everything we can to make sure the new standard is a real open standard so things can actually get better?

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[miffo.swe]

"Ah. Just what I thought. You think that the mythical `flat text file in the usual place' works."

For everything that i have done, yes, flat text files has worked much better in the long run than any registry based solution. It may be that both Microsoft and Gnome goofed up bigtime and made a terrible mess of something wonderful, i cant be the judge of that. Documentation is a very big part of my work as an admin and printing/saving a text file beats "click clickety value click click" anytime. Backups/migrating settings are also something pretty annoying with registrys, especially when targeting specific applications and tracking what owns what key etc.

If the flat text file is a myth i suppose im a unicorn because i just damn prefer them straight out, i didnt flee the horrid windows mess of a registry to get a horrid Linux registry.

This is what FOSS is all about

[malevolentjelly]

I would agree in saying that Gnome is simply taking on the engineering challenge of paving the road for implementations for a growing standard- whether or not it becomes canon, it will be widely popular due to its use in Microsoft Office. I support gnome in continuing the spirit of open source by choosing engineering solutions and support over choosing sides and making this issue into a soap opera drama.

This will help linux to continue its growth as a viable alternative platform for home users and businesses- as a growing platform it needs to SUPPORT MORE FORMATS instead of trying to throw its limited weight around and "make the rules". This will make it easier on mixed OS environments.

Gnome is the only serious desktop environment for linux anyway. I mean, KDE is sort of *rough*.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

Prevent what from happening? As far as I can tell Office 2007 is already released. Also, as far as I can tell, the mission isn't to prevent anything from happening. It's to make our software read everything without barriers. Where did you come up with the idea that it was somehow the mission of every open source or free software advocate to destroy any and all ideas that are not ours? It's not. Hence why things like Samba exist. Why are you forcing this on us? We have a great standard. It is ODF. The effort to get OOXML working on free software is seperate from this.

Re:Idiots

[miffo.swe]

"Not sure what Microsoft wants, but they're not exactly playing with anyone."

As usual, they just play with themselves.

Re:Idiots

[MrDrBob]

You don't get my point. Microsoft is going to make the Windows-using world use OOXML, and I don't think there's anything we can do to stop them, much as we'd love to. Their market share is so great that they can quite easily push OOXML onto Office users, and as they provide a nice upgrade path from .doc format, nobody will really complain. Even if we do manage to stop them getting OOXML ratified as an ISO standard, it'll still take .doc's place as the dominant document format.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

a) I do not care about the ISO. They are not god. They do not control what software I support.
b) There is no "us". There is no "we". There are a loose collection of individuals doing WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT. Which includes implementing OOXML.
c) The mission is not to beat MS. At least my mission. My mission is to have software to be enjoyable for me. Software which cannot read documents people send me is not enjoyable.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[squiggleslash]

That's not an "except", that's an anecdote. He's not a GNOME developer, he was once, but he hasn't been involved in it for years.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

There is no "us" and there is no "our" nor "we". There are a lose collection of individuals writing software. Some of those people want to use OOXML. Buzz off.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

This may in fact be accurate. If in fact we were talking about school yard bullies beating you up. In fact we are not.

Come up with an analogy that describes the nuances of the situation. Let me put it this way. Just because YOU feel like you are being beat up on the playground by MS, does not make me feel the same way. I do not feel that way. I have not been beat up. I have no bruises. MS is not out to get me. And hence I will contribute to reading OOXML.

There is no anger here. It is a simple pragmatic decision to Get Work Done.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[CaptPungent]

And that also doesn't mean Gnome is the desktop actually used. I installed Ubuntu first, and being a long time Slack user I preferred KDE, thus installed the Kubuntu "package", and now I'm a KDE user on Ubuntu. It really isn't that hard to do, and I wager many users don't ever use the defaults unless they really like them.

Just like when I worked at a computer shop and worked on random people's computers, over half that had XP had reset the UI to look like Win2k instead of the default. Seriously, how does anything being "default" actually represent it's merits or desirability?

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

I don't really care what YOU want ME to do. Maybe you should go do something on your own? Until then, I will contribute to things *I* want to contribute to, your opinions be damned.

In fact it galls me that you think you are in some sort of position to dictate to me what I'm allowed to work on. Fuck off, asshole.

Re:Idiots

[Ash-Fox]

M$ already dominates the ball industry

Their ball doesn't quite work in most games I've noticed, it's very badly supported. It's so bad that the official game leagues are now requiring everyone use ODF balls in their official events because the ooxml balls don't work well between different players.

and the ODF guys.

ODF guys aren't a bunch of hobbyists I might add.

are trying to foist off their square ball (easily made with commonly available household items)

If it's square it is certainly better than a flat ball

that nobody of any consequence uses

From wikipedia (you can check the citations yourself):

A number of applications and programs (both free and proprietary) already support the OpenDocument format. This includes traditional office suites, web-based office suites and individual applications such as word-processors and spreadsheets. Two of the most prominent office suites supporting OpenDocument are OpenOffice.org and KOffice, both Free Software.

The OpenDocument Fellowship[11] maintains a list of software and services that support the OpenDocument format. The list also provides information on the status of support for the format.[12]

The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. and other third parties have also announced development of conversion software (including plugins and filters) to support OpenDocument on Microsoft's products.[13][14] Currently there are nine packages of conversion software.[15]

Aside from the OpenDocument Foundation's plug-in, Microsoft Office does not support OpenDocument. Microsoft has created the Open XML translator[16] project to allow the conversion of documents between Office Open XML and OpenDocument. As a result of this project Microsoft finances the ODF add-in for Word project on SourceForge. This project is an effort by several of Microsoft's partners to create a plugin for Microsoft Office that will be freely available under a BSD license. The project has released version 1.0 for Microsoft Word of this software in early 2007 and plans versions later in 2007 for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Sun Microsystems has also created a OpenDocument plugin for Microsoft Office 2000, XP, and 2003 that supports Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents.[17]

You can also add the games league to that. I don't agree with your statement that there is nobody of any consequence uses that ball, there are certainly some, and they are pretty big.

ODF is just a sore loser.

The ODF ball is getting a lot of attention and seems a lot of people want to play with it, Microsoft is free to play with it too. Microsoft wants others to play with it's ball, but it doesn't even want to pump it up for it work effectively. I don't see the ODF ball as a loser.

The only reason anyone cares is so that goverments and businesses can make noise about buying square balls to get a better deal from M$.

This is being brought up in areas which aren't even connected to government funding, such as the Dutch ball congress which is built up of much smaller parties who have influence over policies which tend to do what they consider, the right thing(tm). So, I don't agree here either.

Re:Idiots

[Grishnakh]

c) The mission is not to beat MS. At least my mission. My mission is to have software to be enjoyable for me. Software which cannot read documents people send me is not enjoyable.

Then what are you doing here? All you have to do is buy a copy of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, and be happy using OOXML. That's how you can read the documents people send to you.

But you want to use Free software to read OOXML documents? Sorry, no can do. OOXML is a closed, proprietary format (the important bits are closed binary formats, wrapped up in open-looking XML). It's not feasible to get 100% compatibility with a closed, proprietary format. So if you like OOXML, then pony up the money to MS for their software, and stop complaining.

The rest of us are sick of closed, proprietary standards, and now that multiple national governments are on our side, we see a chance to finally make an open standard the primary standard for office documents internationally. Unfortunately, some people like you want to stick with the closed, proprietary stuff instead of jumping on the bandwagon.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[AmaDaden]

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.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

Doing where? Last I checked free software was not some exclusive club of people who had the same societal ideals. Mine is to use awesome software that is easy to modify that I don't have to pay for. Technically enjoyable. Am I not allowed to be here if I don't have some grande vision of society?

And yes. I can use free software to read .doc files Good Enough. I will be able to do the same with OOXML, just as well or better. Binary parts? Whatever. GOOD ENOUGH.

I'm not complaining. In fact last I checked I'm the one person here NOT complaining! I'm actually quite satisfied with the status quo! I'm only complaining about you rightous assholes who think you have the authority to tell me what I can and cannot work on. Ya'll are the ones complaining that some guys are going off on their own and working on stuff YOU don't approve of. Fuck off, asshole, don't tell me what I can and cannot do.

Re:Idiots

[Just Some Guy]

I do not feel that way. I have not been beat up. I have no bruises. MS is not out to get me. And hence I will contribute to reading OOXML.

It happens.

Re:Idiots

[Ash-Fox]

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.

I think the issue was not so much about supporting playing with ooxml as much as allowing it to become a standard.

Microsoft want to get a stamp on their ball saying it's a open office standard xml ball, when even the title is miss leading as there is a tonne of a proprietary magic to it.

Microsoft have been unwilling to open it up further by not refining the specification and the specification itself is seen as inferior as it does not address many issues that were addressed in ODF. Microsoft has stated that they are not interested in changing the current version of ooxml to fix the issues to become a standard. Yet, they try to push it as something open, superior and miss-representing it as a almost purely open XML format when there is so much.. binary kludge in it and plenty of undocumented features.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

Does this have anything to do with anything? I couldn't find it. Sure. ODF is great. Rah rah. Point?

Re:Idiots

[Ash-Fox]

You're giving them a baseball and they want to play basketball. Can't blame them for not playing either ...

Just push this button and it will become a basketball compatible ball -- The ODF ball was built after all with the input of everyone interested and has the needed features.

Re:Idiots

[Grishnakh]

You can continue to live in your delusional fantasy all you want, but the truth is that free software does not have 100% compatibility with .doc files, and it is not "Good Enough" for many people and businesses. That's why they continue to purchase MS Office. Sure, it works well enough if you just want to read a .doc document someone sent you, and you don't mind the occasional glitch, but I'm sure many others on here will testify that Free software frequently screws up many things in .doc files, especially more complicated things like tables. That's not good enough for real compatibility.

So if you want "awesome software that is easy to modify that I don't have to pay for", but you want compatibility with proprietary formats, you can't have it. It's that simple. I'm not an asshole for simply telling you the truth.

Besides, I don't think many people are complaining about what people are working on; people are complaining that GNOME seems to be (though the perception may be inaccurate) not just supporting, but endorsing OOXML. There's a big difference. OpenOffice and Koffice support .doc and .xls files currently, but they don't endorse them. They only provide them as a pathway for migration to open standards from legacy formats. But GNOME appears to be endorsing OOXML. Of course, this seems to be a flawed perception, because Miguel de Icaza has endorsed OOXML, but he doesn't actually speak for GNOME (though there's definitely a perception that the two are intimately tied together), and GNOME seems to just want to provide support for OOXML.

Re:Idiots

[Ash-Fox]

Does this have anything to do with anything? I couldn't find it. Sure. ODF is great. Rah rah. Point?

Beyond refuting the previous poster's points? No.

Re:Idiots

[Plug]

And, to paraphrase, it sounds like the GNOME team is saying "If you told us how to pump up the ball, everyone would know how to play with both of them, and that would be better for everyone".

It doesn't necessary influence which ball you choose: some people are going to stick with OOXML regardless of if it is an ISO standard or not. The argument on the other side suggests if people adopt OOXML, there's no incentive for Microsoft to adopt ODF.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Fallingcow]

I tell people to use it because it doesn't feel like it's in you way all the time like KDE does.

Personal opinion, of course, but it's the reason I don't use KDE. Every couple of years I give it another try and am promptly reminded of why I don't like it. I can usually only take it for a couple of hours before I switch back to Gnome or XFCE.

Of the three big Linux/BSD desktop environments, BeOS, Windows since 3.1, MacOS 9 and X, and Sun's CDE, the only one that came close to being as annoying and ugly from a UI perspective was CDE. I don't mean which system I'd rather use, mind you (ugh, MacOS9 sucked so much...) but just which UI I prefer. I don't know what it is, but KDE just bugs the hell out of me. I'd love to switch, because I don't really like Gnome that much, but I can't do it. I'd go back to friggin' Windowmaker before I'd use KDE.

So, my reason isn't "it's the default on a lot of distros". It's, "my god, that thing is so damned ugly (IMO)". I think it's a combination of extreme clutter, a general sense of disorganization, and some kind of "fragile" feel that I can't quite put my finger on, with a bunch of eye candy (which I normally like) thrown around haphazardly and looking very out-of-place.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

You must have been replying to a post other than the one I sent!

Not only do I not live in a delusional fantasy world, I appreciate the .doc format support! Is it perfect? No! Does it give me a blowjob? No! Is it better than nothing? Yes! You seem to think I care that it works perfectly. I do care, but not that much. It works better than nothing!

>>>So if you want "awesome software that is easy to modify that I don't have to pay for", but you want compatibility with proprietary formats, you can't have it. It's that simple. I'm not an asshole for simply telling you the truth.

I have it, right now. I do not have perfect compatibility. I have better than nothing. Please do not raise strawmen. I never claimed I wanted perfect.

Gnome is endorsing OOXML? Last I checked nobody from Gnome has issued an official statement of any sort. As far as I can tell, they are purposely SHUTTING THE FUCK UP. Why do they need to toot a trumpet? And yes, I'm sure most of the Gnome people want to provide support for OOXML in their software. I'd sure like them to.

Re:Idiots

[Ash-Fox]

And, to paraphrase, it sounds like the GNOME team is saying "If you told us how to pump up the ball, everyone would know how to play with both of them, and that would be better for everyone".

I agree. I wouldn't be slanted against OOXML if Microsoft had actually properly made it a entirely open specification. Personally, I don't like file formats that don't play well or don't at all between different software.

It doesn't necessary influence which ball you choose: some people are going to stick with OOXML regardless of if it is an ISO standard or not.

Agreed

The argument on the other side suggests if people adopt OOXML, there's no incentive for Microsoft to adopt ODF.

Of course, if governments and businesses are requiring proper open spec formats and Microsoft is unable to actually produce a proper open format, then there is incentive for them to. On the other hand, maybe they don't. Since there are ODF plugins for Microsoft Office.

Personally, I don't see the need for Microsoft to develop ODF support in Microsoft Office, it is already provided with ODF plugins (which need to be refined a little).

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

Ya know. This amazing stretch of analogies is a bit much.

MS has never punched me in the face. The most they have done is offered a shitty piece of software which I've decided not to use... and maybe gone out of their way a few times to undermine other people's software by selling their stuff lower.

None of this rises to the level of physical or emotional abuse. Unless you're a pansy or previously emotionally unstable, anyways.

Re:Idiots

[Grishnakh]

Sorry for replying to my own comment, but I thought I'd make some more comments.

100% compatibility isn't necessarily required. For instance, though PDF is an openly-documented standard, the Free software which works with it isn't 100% compatible with Adobe Reader. Some parts of the specification just aren't implemented yet, such as fillable forms. However, this is where we get into "good enough". Alternative viewers such as kpdf, FoxIt, etc. work well enough for most people. I use PDFs all the time, and the only time I bother to break out Adobe's reader is when I want to use the fillable form feature for IRS forms. The rest of the time, Free tools work just fine.

However "good enough" depends on the person or organization. I'm not a huge user of office software; I use OpenOffice.org for basic word processing and spreadsheet stuff, but I don't use advanced features much at all, if ever. So the .doc and .xls compatibily works just fine, when I use it. But for advanced users, from what I've read here and elsewhere, it isn't "good enough" because there's too many bugs with the reverse-engineered implementation of MS Office support. What's more, as well as it does work, how long has it taken to get to this state? As I recall, it was a long time before Free software had any kind of decent support for MS Office files. For a long time, all they had was some klunky tools that could do no more than dump most of the text from a .doc file, without any formatting. Reverse engineering is a very slow, tedious process. This is important because OOXML is likely to be the same way. It could be years before you get support that's anywhere near acceptable, depending on how much stuff is kept closed and proprietary, and how different it is from the older MS Office formats.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[wasabii]

Um. You realize Ubuntu's "truely user-friendly interface" is pretty much just upstream Gnome, right? Hence their success is in fact because on Gnome.

Gnome issue

[GeekDork]

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:

Gnome is like the intersection of the Apple and Microsoft design teams without the resources or the skills.

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.

Re:Gnome issue

[The Master Control P]

Whatever I may think about the rest of his rant, I agree with one thing: I can't stand Gnome's file select dialog. Most of it boils down to, "how can I change this dialog?" How can I change the way files & directories are sorted? Display them as a tree or icons instead of a flat list? Jump to the last few directories I used? KDE's file-select has a little wrench that has all the configuration options - display style, sorting, shown/not shown, etc. Where is the Gnome configuration button? I found the KDE one after a few seconds of looking (I've never had cause to use it before).

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[BronsCon]

I agree with you that the support for MS Office formats in Linux is flaky, as it the support for MS Office formats in MS Office. There, fixed that for you.

Re:Idiots

[joh]

Every once in a while, however, you meet a predator/bully who cannot be challenged via _any_ means except a war to the death.

So why challenge him at all? Just ignore him and make sure others ignore him, too.

You do not beat diseases by negotiating with bacteria.

Of course you do. It's much easier to stay healthy than to fight a desease. In fact *avoiding* diseases is very much like negotiating.

You do not eliminate rats by trying to train them away from dumpsters.

Of course you do. Avoid food being dumped, that will train them away from dumpsters.

Re:Idiots

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Prevent what from happening?

Prevent anyone from needing to open a "very important" OOXML file from work at home.

As far as I can tell Office 2007 is already released.

Yeah it is. Try sending an OOXML file to 99% of the populace and they'll ask you to resend it in a different format because it is not yet a de facto standard.

Where did you come up with the idea that it was somehow the mission of every open source or free software advocate to destroy any and all ideas that are not ours?

Destroy ideas? We're not talking about ideas. We're discussing standards. You might as well ask when it became every mechanical engineer's mission to "destroy" the idea of using a new kind of bolt that isn't quite metric, but is similar, but the size and wrenches that can use them are patented and cannot be made freely by tool makers unless they license it, oh and some of it is secret and there is no easy way to find that part out. When the "idea" I want to destroy is, "hey let's make it hard for everyone else to create good products by intentionally breaking their interoperability with ours," then yeah I think it is the mission of free software advocates to oppose it.

Hence why things like Samba exist.

You know why Samba exists? It isn't because MS had a good, new idea. They took an already existing idea and standards (LDAP & Kereberos) that others were already using, and then intentionally broke parts of it to make their version (SMB) incompatible. It introduced no new functionality, it was the same damn thing except broken so it would not work with things other than Windows, and it is broken in secret ways. The Samba project is an attempt to reverse engineer the secret, broken parts so that other products can interoperate, but it would be better for everyone and the wold as a whole if MS had simply adhered to the LDAP standard so there would be no need for Samba to even exist. Ask any member of the Samba team if they could go back in time and stop MS from creating SMB and instead get them to use LDAP, if they would do so. Samba is a hack trying to solve a problem that only exists in the first place because MS created said problem intentionally. MS is trying to do the same thing with OOXML. Nothing is stopping them from implementing ODF, but they refuse to do so because they want interoperability to be broken because it makes them money.

Why are you forcing this on us? We have a great standard. It is ODF. The effort to get OOXML working on free software is seperate from this.

Forcing something on you? Do you mean OOXML is separate from ODF, just like SMB is separate from LDAP? It is a deliberate attempt to undermine standards and a blatant attempt to lie to the world by claiming to be "open" when in fact it is a closed, proprietary format. OOXML exists only to break things, which is why I think anyone interested in things working well, should try to discourage its adoption.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[HiThere]

"Standard"? OOXML? Which contains statements like "Format it the same way MSWord95 did on MSWind95"(paraphrase)?

MSOOXML may be anointed a standard, that won't make it one. It will, instead, render the idea of the ISO as a standards organization absurd. At best you will be able to say "Some ISO approved standards are reasonable standards.". (Well, perhaps "ISO standards before Dec. 2007 appear to be reasonable standards.".)

There's an old riddle that goes "How many legs does a horse have if you call it's tail a leg?"
You're supposed to realize that calling the tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Quitter

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You don't get my point. Microsoft is going to make the Windows-using world use OOXML, and I don't think there's anything we can do to stop them, much as we'd love to.

Now is the time to try to stop them and there is no harm in trying. Projects don't need OOXML support right now because basically no one is using it yet and everyone using it needs to interoperate with people who have not migrated.

Their market share is so great that they can quite easily push OOXML onto Office users, and as they provide a nice upgrade path from .doc format, nobody will really complain.

Ahh, but not until they can get most users to upgrade to Office 2008, which will take a lot of time, if it ever happens. And people are already complaining. Municipalities and governments and large companies are passing laws and regulations requiring the use of ODF. More will do so if pressured and if OOXML is not wrongly seen as a viable alternative with the same benefits.

Even if we do manage to stop them getting OOXML ratified as an ISO standard, it'll still take .doc's place as the dominant document format.

Sort of like Vista has taken WinXP's place as the dominant OS? MS is competing on two fronts here, with their own .doc which has better interoperability and lower cost right now and with ODF which also has lower cost and which brings new benefits. Giving up on one front right now benefits us not at all since no one needs OOXML yet. Why not push for ODF all the way as the new standard and if it loses to OOXML in the long run, at least OOXML will have been weakened and it can be implemented at a later date with no loss of revenue.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[HiThere]

That's a very bad idea.
I've broken Ubuntu installs by adding Debian repositories. Ubuntu distros is based on a snapshot of Debian taken at one particular time and developed from there. The development is not guaranteed to be compatible with the development path that Debian takes. Or with Debian stable.

That said, the approach will often work. But it will break without warning, and without either distro caring to fix your problem.

Re:Idiots

[raddan]

Write it, then. The point I was making is that most of us don't care about solving your little status quo problem. Other people can use whatever POS software they want to use. If you need OOXML support, contribute it, or pay someone to implement it, but don't complain when the rest of us don't give a rat's ass.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[innocent_white_lamb]

they use GNOME by default in the vain hope that commercial software developers will have easier time releasing closed-source binaries for their distros
 
That, in a nutshell, is my personal concern/problem with KDE. I have difficulty with the concept that a single company (Trolltech) has the potential to become the "toll collector" for commercial software development on Linux.
 
Even on Microsoft platforms, you can purchase compilers from third parties that can talk to the Windows API and use them without having to pay anything extra to Microsoft.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[sumdumass]

I'll have to tell the mandrake/mandriva boys that. They are still doing it when evidently there is an easier way. Thanks, For the info. However, i Didn't realize that laziness and the easy way out was a sign of community progress.

Really

[Billly Gates]

Then which format does Gnumeric use to save files? Ooxml or ODF? What about Miguel's quotes? Yes he is in charge of Gnome.

What about his support for .NET and disapproval for Java? Silverlight support?

What about Miguels comments about how after visiting a trip to MS to see COM and ActiveX is what inspired him to create Gnome as an alternative to KDE?

Do any gnome apps support ODF?

And now another gnome member bashes the free Ogg format that his employer labeled proprietary because it doesn't support DRM.

  I think I am going to use Kubuntu and not ubuntu. Sorry but this just scares me and looks very suspicious. I love C# on the windows platform but all these activities smell like a trap that I do not want to contribute too. I can't find any logical reasoning for these biases and decisions at the Gnome camp.

We all rejected SCO Unixware and the ReiserFS and Gnome should end the same way. KDE 4.x looks very good!

Re:Really

[man_of_mr_e]

Do you not really see how much of a hypocrite you're being?

Let me spell it out for you.

Argument 1:

OOXML isn't an ISO standard, there already exists one called ODF. Microsoft should use that, because it's an ISO standard.

Argument 2:

Miguel sucks for supporting mono because it comes from Microsoft. (Strange, no comment on the fact that Mono is an implementation of an ISO standard, while Java is not).

Why is it that ODF rules because it's an ISO standard, but Java rules despite not being one, and the real ISO standard is bashed?

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

Alright. One by one. Because I was bated.

My entire Office runs 2007 now. Within 2 months of release. I doubt we are alone. I think 99% is optimistic.

It is not an engineers job to destroy non metric screws. That's why we have Robertson, and a few dozen other kinds. Regardless what the screw standards body says, people do whatever they want anyways.

Samba has nothing to do with LDAP. You have your history wrong. Samba was original an SMB/CIFS implementation, which came around LONG before MS started to use Kerberos and LDAP. Windows 95 uses SMB. Windows 3.1 does. It has only been since Windows 2000 that Active Directory (that involves stuff like Kerberos and LDAP) has come onto the scene.

MS did not create a problem. MS created a solution. Called SMB. We can argue until we're blue in the face whether theres was teh first such thing around. I'm sure it wasn't. FTP was around. NFS was around. Both were unsuitable for the job.

Similarily, they created OOXML because ODF *SUCKS BALLS* to implement for MS Office type use cases. Definition of *SUCKS BALLS* varies depending who you are.

Re:Idiots

[wasabii]

Hmm. Actually, I'm complaining that the rest of you *DO* give a rats ass. Do in fact read the article, where people are MAD at other people for implementing OOXML.

OOXML is being implemented just fine. It's all the fuck tards that are calling these people 'evil' for doing so which are the problem.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[rbanffy]

"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.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[IamTheRealMike]

Right, because ODF will never change and thus cause interop problems. Oh, wait. It'll change the moment OpenOffice release a new version, and if the standard lags behind, they'll stick the new features into another namespace and we're back to square one.

A standard like this is a way for two parties to communicate. Microsoft isn't going to switch to ODF, just like OpenOffice isn't going to switch to OOXML. The only thing that matters then is what format the next random office document you get emailed is using. It's not going to be ODF is it? It's going to either be a binary Office file, or maybe (just maybe) an OOXML file.

The KOffice people can take a "principled stand against OOXML" because hardly anyone actually uses KOffice, and the people who do aren't the type who are interacting with Windows-based organisations all day, and even if they were the KOffice team don't have any particular need to implement hard/annoying feature requests anyway.

Now I agree that dumb attempts to cheat at ISO don't help anyone, but on a purely technical level, any office suite that cares about actual interop instead of academic interop, will need to support OOXML just like they need to support the binary formats today.

Face it

[fjhb]

OOXML is never becoming a standard. If it were ever near becoming one, MS would ditch it because as a standard it serves no purpose. It's only useful as a PR artifact.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[segedunum]

I tell people to use it because it doesn't feel like it's in you way all the time like KDE does.

Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda. Can you quantify that please, or is this just the usual meaningless tripe? What do you tell them when they outgrow it, when they want to configure a screensaver, run an application as a different user, system administrators want to support their users etc. etc. These, by the way, are features Windows and Mac OS X have.

This ordinary 'user thing' is an extremely virilant disease.

So, my reason isn't "it's the default on a lot of distros". It's, "my god, that thing is so damned ugly (IMO)". I think it's a combination of extreme clutter, a general sense of disorganization, and some kind of "fragile" feel that I can't quite put my finger on

Unless you can quantify any of this then I'm afraid you've proved my point. In reality, telling people that it is a default on a few distros is probably better reasoning. At least you can quantify that in terms people can understand and can use to compare. In reality, all you're telling users is "I know Gnome is extremely limited if you from the OS X and Windows worlds, but hey, it's clean, simple, features confuse you anyway and it's better than that KDE thing that has clutter......and various other things that will confuse you."

Alas, this kind of reasoning is just going to come unstuck, and if Gnome is the face of desktop Linux as some people believe, then small wonder free desktops haven't got anywhere. You can't sell desktops to people based on a lie. If it hasn't got the features then it hasn't got the features people have in Windows and OS X. You can't butter this up in some sort of clean, simple and clutter lie.

KDE in GNU

[wikinerd]

I would really like to see KDE or a similar system becoming an official GNU project. It is really awkward to have GNOME in GNU while RMS is recommending them to make an announcement against Microsoft's OOXML. I mean... GNU projects are supposed to be the ones with utmost respect of freedom, openness, etc... what the hell do pseudostandards like OOXML have in free software and especially within GNU projects? Yea, I know it's a historial artefact resulting from the Qt licensing issue... but this is past, isn't it? I personally do have some issues with Qt other than licensing, but I think that GNU could accept KDE or a similar desktop project within its ranks. I think RMS should invite KDE to join the GNU project officially as an alternative to GNOME.

Hopefuly....

[asm2750]

....this will give Canonical a reason to put more focus on Kubuntu. Honestly, people behind GNOME has been pulling some stupid moves recently, I remember when GNOME was only for free standards, now all they want to do is just keep backing M$ it seems.

" ... This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease ... Please, just tell people to use KDE." -- Linus Torvalds

Re:Idiots

[Abreu]

Every once in a while, however, you meet a predator/bully who cannot be challenged via _any_ means except a war to the death It worked for Ender, but it doesn't mean it will work for you!

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Fallingcow]

"I know Gnome is extremely limited if you from the OS X and Windows worlds, but hey, it's clean, simple, features confuse you anyway and it's better than that KDE thing that has clutter......and various other things that will confuse you."

Everyone always says that about Gnome, but I've never had a problem doing what I want to. It's there when I need it to be, and out of the way when I want it to be, unlike KDE, which seems to try to grab ahold of the user and shake them until they're dead. I'm sure it's a personal preference thing, but KDE feels downright stifling to me, in a way that nearly no other GUI desktop ever has. I've never not been able to do something in Gnome that I've wanted to. I don't know, maybe there's a bunch of stuff that I do from the command line that KDE users can do from the GUI, so I just don't notice. That could be it.

I'm aware that it's an aesthetic rather than technical problem that I have with KDE, but aesthetics matter, and KDE and CDE are the only environments I've used that seemed to be trying to piss me off from an aesthetics/usability perspective. I'd be embarrassed to introduce someone to Linux starting with KDE, for much the same reason that I'd be embarrassed for The Gimp to be the first program that they see while using it (oh, god, there goes another flamewar entirely...)

As for running a program as a different user: does gksu (and "apps->system tools->run as different user") not do this? I thought that it did (currently booted to XP on my gaming rig, or I'd check)

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[udippel]

Except that you believe in Easter Bunny.
OOXML has a spec, like, behave something that we don't have the specs for and won't get the details. Recursion to the unknown. Read up a bit on it and you'll find out. [Yes, you as well, you the moderator who thinks this as 'insightful']
'Provably' means that you have the specs, and 'provably' means that MS implements the specs. Neither will be the case, since you don't have them, and they will not be implemented (at least not all 6000+b pages), you're screwed. Egg in your face, for believing those grandma's stories.
Plus, they recently shifted the maintenance back from ISO to ECMA. That is, to a puppet of theirs. "ECMA, am I doing right ?" "Microsoft, you are doing wonderfully !"

Poor GTK+ 2 performance: proof

[erikvcl]

Look at these benchmarks:

http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/10/benchmarks.html

Compared to Qt, the GTK+ 2 rendering engine is sorely lacking.

Re:Poor GTK+ 2 performance: proof

[MrDrBob]

That's good to hear -- statistics are good -- and I know that Carl Worth did quite a bit of work on speeding Cairo up after this was published. It would be nice to see the tests run against the latest releases of both frameworks again, and see if Cairo's narrowed the gap.

Don't forget the "getting hysterical" part.

[WebCowboy]

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.

Re:Don't forget the "getting hysterical" part.

[ClamIAm]

What the fuck are you talking about? You imply "pragmatism" means "sacrificing your ideals", yet this is not what the Linux devs have done. For example, see the fucking driver ABI. On the other side of your false dichotomy, ultimately controlled by the big, bad, FSF, is GTK. Which has a much more permissive license than, uhm, Qt.

I could go on, but I hope this is enough for others to note your blatant contradictions and add you to their killfile.

Re:Don't forget the "getting hysterical" part.

[marcosdumay]

"Linus has yielded to pragmatism many times in the past (using BitKeeper for example..."

Yes, we all learned a lot about "pragmatism" from that BitKeeper episode.

Re:Don't forget the "getting hysterical" part.

[WebCowboy]

You imply "pragmatism" means "sacrificing your ideals", yet this is not what the Linux devs have done.

Well, "pragmatism" is literally an antonym of "idealism", so yes...speaking in terms of literal definitions, when you are acting pragmatically you are sacrificing ideals in the face of reality. Keep in mind that I did not mean to say Linux devs were sacrificing THER OWN ideals, it's just that their set of values is more practical than those of RMS. It's kinda like Castro believing in Communism after a fashion, and acting pretty consistently in fact, however Castro's ideals are tempered by a considerable amount of pragmatism, to the point that Castro's communism is quite a pale shade of "Karl Marx Red" (and no, I'm not implying Free software is communist any more than software is an automobile--it's just an analogy)

If we are looking at things through RMS' ideals though, then yes, the Linux devs have absolutely, certainly sacrificed some of those ideals on a few occasions. RMS would've never used BitKeeper in the first place--he'd spend weeks or months or years making a "truly Free" solution that worked perfectly. Linus' hand was forced when he made Git and dropped BitKeeper, and it did in fact cause a period of slowdown. RMS would strongly disagree with your assertion that Linus and the Linux kernel developers have not sacrificed the ideals of Free software (as RMS sees them) in the interests of practicality. RMS famously decreed that "if you value Freedom don't follow Linus".

For example, see the fucking driver ABI.

Many "Free software purists" of RMS' stripe say the Linux driver ABI does indeed sacrifice Free software ideals by more easily enabling the "binary blob" driver practice that we've dealt with on the graphics front for years. Nonetheless, even though the Linux devs would love to see binary drivers go away they are putting effort into a stable ABI. It is in fact a very good example IN SUPPORT of my argument that just because you don't like something doesn't mean you must not accommodate it. Can you explain to me how the "f***ing driver ABI" is somehow "less evil" than the GNOME folks working on an OOXML parser/filter? What makes OOXML more evil than an NVidia driver?

On the other side of your false dichotomy, ultimately controlled by the big, bad, FSF, is GTK. Which has a much more permissive license than, uhm, Qt.

Indeed it does--another example of pragmatism over idealism. GTK can be used on multiple platforms with Free and restricted/closed applications alike, but it preserves ehough ideals to insist that EVERYONE who uses the library preserves the freedom of that library. I just find it puzzling that the KDE team would suddenly take a "principled stand" on OOXML when KDE is built upon a library that is actually "less principled" in terms of licensing than GTK. GTK might have a more permissive license, put at least its consistent. The choice of a more strict license for qt was not done out of principle at all; it was done in order to preserve a revenue stream for Trolltech. GTK defines its ideals up front. With qt, those ideals are for sale to the highest bidder.

That is partly why I still maintain a preference for GNOME and GTK even after qt was GPLed. They might not live up to each and every Free software ideal, but at least they are consistent.

Re:Don't forget the "getting hysterical" part.

[novakyu]

You are forgetting that OOXML is not even a "de facto standard" yet. Vast majority of office suite users still have old versions of MS Office that doesn't recognize OOXML documents. Why should Free Software roll over to support it ... when we have real chance of finally getting people not to use .docx for anything but for private uses? Why must we assume that everything MS does will succeed? Vista was a disaster, and maybe the whole new Office format will be a disaster, too!

But ... in the end, if OOXML does become prevalent and we can't convince braindead secretaries not to send .docx attachments, then there is a real need for OOXML support in free software---and somebody will do that, when the time comes. Somebody will "do it right" (i.e. in a MS Office compatible way, since MS Office itself does not implement the full OOXML spec). But until then, there is no rational (idealistic or pragmatic) for trying to support a format that only lives in Imaginationland (i.e. fully standards-compliant OOXML).

Because ... you see, there's a huge gap between a pragmatist and sycophantic yes-man. I hope you see it.

P.S. The HURD vs. Linux comparison is so unfair, if that's what's being used as idealist vs. pragmatist. The only difference between HURD and Linux is that Linux made the right initial design decisions (monolithic kernel that turned out to be easier to debug than a microkernel + userspace daemons). If you really want to compare success of idealism vs. pragmatism in that oversimplified way, compare the whole GNU project with Linux. Would you be happier with your system minus the Linux kernel (essentially BSD with GNU tools), or would you be happier with your Linux kernel but no GNU userspace tools (essentially the rest of the GNU/Linux OS), that would be ... like, oh, Solaris with its kernel replaced by Linux or something.

I'll stand behind OOXML

[WhiteWolf666]

When MS decides to natively support ODF in MS Office.

Microsoft often talks about dual, equal standards, but it obviously bullshit unless MS Office, with the vast resources behind it, can support the same formats as the relatively resource poor OO.org, or KOffice, or Wordperfect.

I'm certain that the world would drop its objections to OOXML if MS decided to support ODF, without an addon plugin. Instead, by making it an us (ooxml) or them(odf) decision, they've invited hostility.

The shocking thing is the syncophants in the OSS community would eat Microsoft's propaganda/excrement while being slapped in the face.

Why should we support two new formats, when they only support one? Especially since OOXML is not yet used by most organizations; and if it is a real "open" standard, we can implement it "when customers demand it".

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[msuarezalvarez]

The comparaison of gconf and the windows registry is so shallow it does not survive the lightest scrutiny, and it is based on nothing more deep than the fact that an application, essentially unrelated to gconf, gconf-editor, presents the settings stored in gconf as a tree.

A few observations:

• gconf entries are namespaced, and the settings for an app MyApplication should be under /apps/MyApplication in the gconf tree; if you have an app that puts its private settings elsewhere, then complain to the application author.

• You can trivially get settings for an app saying things like

  gconftool-2 --dump /apps/gnome-terminal

  which can be reloaded later and/or elsewhere with the corresponding --load option.

• Absolutely everything in gconf can be scripted.

• If there are gconf keys which do not have an attached documentation (in fact, they are supposed to have two different pieces of documentation) then you have to complain to the author of the corresponding application. For a properly documented application you can query the documentation saying

  gconftool-2 --long-docs /apps/gnome-terminal/global/active_encodings

  and there is the --short-docs variant to get the other docstring.

• By default, gconf provides a simple way to set up mandatory, default and per-user settings, and with a little more work you can set up more classes of settings, so as to provide, for example, different default settings for different groups of users.

• I have not removed my ~/.gconf tree since I installed GNOME an age ago, and that tree has survived, in order, a complete change of distro (from slackware to fedora) and back, it was used with gnome-cvs updated dayly for a couple for years, including the period of time in which gconf actually changed the way it stores data, then a distro change again, again to fedora, and 5 fedora released. If you've had to kill your ~/.gconf tree because of an update, please complain to whoever it is that is packaging gnome for you.

• etc

I'm not mentioning the things that are broken with what you call the true and tried flat text file thing, nor the many things that are made possible because of having infrastructure like gconf available.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[aminorex]

It is common practice in government contracting to write a specification so that no one else can conform to it, and then pass it to the government which issues it as an RFP, upon which you subsequently bid. The government even has designated shill bidders who made bids that are doomed to fail, to create the appearance of competitive process. OOXML is a lot like that. Parts are sufficiently ill-defined as to admit incompatible implementations. Other parts are defined in contradictory terms, so that reinterpretation of the terms is required to construct a consistent implementation, which is very unlikely to be interoperable with another self-consistent implementation which uses a different self-consistent reinterpretation scheme.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[aminorex]

Given a choice, I'd rather paint a Goodyear tire salesman any day. Every Ford mechanic I've ever known would cold-cock you if you touched him with a wet paint brush. But hey, whatever works for you.

Re:Idiots

[Risen888]

[Life is] about doing deals to gently move the status quo over to your side.

The hell it is.

There can be only one...

[lnxpilot]

Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"

I sure hope so.

Gnome sucks. Their UI is inconsistent and awkward.

While competition is usually a good thing, in desktop UI, we / GNU-Linux would be way better off with a single standard and KDE is far superior to Gnome.

I have no affiliation with either Gnome or KDE.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Knuckles]

I haven't tried Mandriva, but as far as I read, the Gnome version is much less polished and integrated. The same is true for Kubuntu compared to Ubuntu. With Suse it at least was the case that the Gnome variant was worse, dunno how it is today.

Bottom-line: it's a lot of work to polish a desktop, and polishing two doubles this work. With limited resources, why not concentrate on one (at least officially) and make it really shine? I don't think laziness enters into it.

Re:Idiots

[Tony]

Both M. de Icaza and J. Waugh (director of the GNOME foundation) have made statements essentially endorsing OOXML. So, yes, official statements have been made in support of OOXML.

As far as support goes, people will support it to the extent legally possible. That's one of the major issues-- Microsoft hasn't pledged not to squash, via legal means, non-licensed implementations of OOXML. It's not just an issue of technical compatibility (which will never be 100% as long as Microsoft refuses to co-operate with the rest of the computer industry), but of legal impediments.

As customers, as community members, and as geeks, our best interest is to squash OOXML and pressure Microsoft into supporting ODF. Key members of the Gnome foundation are undermining our best interests by publicly supporting OOXML.

That's why folks are a bit het up over the issue.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[Almahtar]

Right, because ODF will never change and thus cause interop problems. Not intentionally, and that is a very important distinction.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[zander]

I'd love to hear your opinion about the oxygen style (to be finalized before the kde4.0 release). :)

Re:sounds like Novell is running the show now

[makomk]

Of course, now there's a GNU project that's purposely linking QT's GPL2 code to their now-GPL3 application (Gnash), which has the same legal issues...

Re:sounds like Novell is running the show now

[jbolden]

KDE never linked QT to their code. QT was dynamic the end user did the linking. Debian had questions about whether they could legally redistribute KDE and QT there was never any question whether KDE could legally distribute its own code.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[Fallingcow]

I'll definitely be giving it a shot when the 4.0 release comes out; as I said, I don't have any particular attachment to Gnome, but the last time I found KDE to be a better solution for me was several years ago, when Gnome was having some serious stability issues and KDE was not. I'm looking forward to giving it another shot (as I do with nearly every major release)

If the aesthetics are more pleasing to me, then my only remaining concern is that I have my own preferences of applications for most things (I like Openoffice over Koffice--though admittedly I've not tried Koffice in a while--, I love Geany as a text editor and am not likely to change, I've never liked Konqueror as a browser, preferring Firefox or Opera, VLC and a light MP3 player are all I need for media, not Amarok and the like, etc.) and I'm afraid that I'll miss out on some of the integration that draws a lot of people to KDE. If nearly all of the apps I'm going to be running will be non-QT, non-KDE apps, it seems like the only things left to judge the DE on are speed and appearance, and I'd imagine that the speed will be at least no better than Gnome's (and probably a tiny bit worse) as many of my preferred apps are GTK.

Come to think of it, the last QT app that I really preferred over the alternatives was K3B, which was at one time light-years ahead of its competition. Damned thing was the only reason I needed to compile KDE-libs back when I used Gentoo :) These days, I'm not even sure what I use. It's whatever's the default in Ubuntu. Several others have caught up with K3B, so I no longer bother to install it, though I'd probably use it again if I switched to KDE. I can't think of a single other case where I'd be likely to keep the KDE default, and unlike with Gnome, I always feel (rightly or wrongly) like I'm in uncertain territory using non-default stuff in KDE...

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[marcosdumay]

Nobody can fully support OOXML. Not even Microsoft, but they get the advantaje of being the de facto reference system.

If anybody try to compete on those bases, it will fail.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[sumdumass]

I haven't seen the differences between the two. However, I don't see the fanboyism of Ubuntu or Gentoo and distros like them. I have never saw anything in them that was polished above anything I haven't already seen So it could be that I am just missing that one little thing that ruins it for everyone.

I like mandriva far various reasons. But if they can present both desktops, I think anyone should. As far as laziness is concerned, yea it would be lazy to drop support for a popular item and focus on one specific thing. I tell you what, Get everyone to think that way and I will find someone to offer lots of money to any distro that support enlightenment out of the box. I would seriously be more concerned with people dropping support in some area. Before you know it, you could have the MS of OSS.

KDE vs Gnome/ Ogg Vorbis

[bronsinbound]

Does Stallman weight enough to make a difference?

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[zander]

I'm looking forward to giving it another shot (as I do with nearly every major release)

Great :)

Just make sure you don't base your opinions for the next couple of years on a first (or even second) release. KDE4.0 is a platform, not meant to be the end-all for the user. That will grow better and better of the lifetime of the 4 series.

Re:Idiots

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Alright. One by one. Because I was bated[sic]. My entire Office runs 2007 now. Within 2 months of release. I doubt we are alone. I think 99% is optimistic.

And your office doesn't have to exchange files with any other offices, companies, or government agencies that don't support the xdoc format?

It is not an engineers job to destroy non metric screws.

No, it is, however, 100% an engineer's job to recommend against buying and using them in products they design, especially when they have so many drawbacks and no advantages yet. We're talking about whether we should include OOXML in OSS products being built and in so doing encourage their use in products that want to interoperate.

Samba has nothing to do with LDAP.

Umm, okay. Sure. Why do I bother trying to educate the uneducated?

Samba was original an SMB/CIFS implementation, which came around LONG before MS started to use Kerberos and LDAP.

Yeah, and no one had ever heard of it until it morphed into an attempt to reverse engineer compatibility with MS's broken recreations of the standards. Samba is a reverse engineering project and has been for a long, long time.

It has only been since Windows 2000 that Active Directory (that involves stuff like Kerberos and LDAP) has come onto the scene.

Sigh, what MS calls their crap doesn't matter. It doesn't change what it is.

Similarily, they created OOXML because ODF *SUCKS BALLS* to implement for MS Office type use cases. Definition of *SUCKS BALLS* varies depending who you are.

Please. Have you read the specs? OOXML is not even implementable by anyone else. It isn't a "standard" at all in the normal sense of the term. Every single function is specifically designed to reproduce either exactly how MS Office does things, instead of generically define a function, or exactly reproduce how one other existing vendor implements something that MS Office can't do. It is terrible and unusable.

You claim ODF sucks in comparison to OOXML, but there are already ODF plug-ins for MS Office from more than one source and they conform to the spec. Aside from MSOffice 2007, there are zero OOXML implementations that conform to that spec because it is impossible to implement as pointed out in the hundreds of comments from different countries and organizations that reviewed it for approval as a standard.

I really hope you're being paid to astroturf, because otherwise you've just lowered the bar, even for MS fanboys.

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[Ilgaz]

Except that you believe in Easter Bunny.
OOXML has a spec, like, behave something that we don't have the specs for and won't get the details. Recursion to the unknown. Read up a bit on it and you'll find out. [Yes, you as well, you the moderator who thinks this as 'insightful']
'Provably' means that you have the specs, and 'provably' means that MS implements the specs. Neither will be the case, since you don't have them, and they will not be implemented (at least not all 6000+b pages), you're screwed. Egg in your face, for believing those grandma's stories.
Plus, they recently shifted the maintenance back from ISO to ECMA. That is, to a puppet of theirs. "ECMA, am I doing right ?" "Microsoft, you are doing wonderfully !" If you listen to MS and people on MS payroll, Windows Media is also an "open spec". I am glad the industry (especially TV/Satellite) is not buying it and they are keeping with true open/documented standards such as MPEG.

Look to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, MS VC-1 managed to get into them while there is perfectly suited and designed for this purpose (scalability) H264. Please note that "Sony" giant which is absolutely God on professional video is fighting with MSFT Gang (Hd-Dvd) risking billions but somehow they accept VC-1 to be part of Blu-Ray standard they built themselves.

MS figures they will lose .doc monopoly/dictatorship and they are in panic. For the "open" VC-1 standard, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1#Encoding_software . Encoding in the "open standard" requires Windows while OS X and Linux are very serious players in professional video scene.

MS is still not taken serious on professional video/audio but things are very different on Office. If that fake open standard manages to get validated somehow, industry will keep freezing another decade.