Slashdot Mirror
IBM Donates Symphony Code To Apache Software Foundation
CWmike writes "Hoping to further sharpen OpenOffice's competitive viability against Microsoft Office, IBM is donating the code of its Symphony open source office suite to the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation. Apache could fold this code into its own open source office suite OpenOffice, on which Symphony was based. In June, Oracle donated the OpenOffice suite to Apache. 'Prior to Apache's entry, there really hasn't been enough innovation in this area over the past 10 years,' said Kevin Cavanaugh, an IBM vice president. 'It's been constrained because we haven't had a true open source community with a mature governance model.'"
...if just about every major company out there wasn't trying to sue the pants off of some other major company over some generic patents, there might be more properly-driven innovation.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
It's where all obsolete software goes after the original owner can't make any money on it and doesn't want to do maintenance any more.
All right, I'll bite. I'm curious. What exactly is it that Microsoft Office gets done? Besides lock your data into a proprietary format. I don't use it myself, so I'm sure there's *some* use for it that I'm not aware of, but here's some of the technologies I use instead.
I only use a word processor to generate blog posts, fiction, and documents where I don't care about layout too strongly, since it's sort of inherent in a word processor that they will adjust the layout somewhat before e.g. printing it. There's very little reason to save in either .docx or .doc as far as I am aware, since the former does not currently conform to the OOXML format and the latter is more akin to a memory dump of Word.
For text that I really don't care about, I use a text editor. I also use this for small notes to myself, or simple lists. I don't need my notes indexed, thank you, grep will do just fine.
For layout documents, I generally use Scribus, InDesign, Inkscape, or Illustrator, and save in svg or pdf, dependent on whether or not I want a working format or a presentation format. If I can count on being the only one to edit it, or that any collaborators will be using the same software, it makes sense to use each program's native format. For bitmaps I use GIMP and Photoshop, and generally prefer GIMP, except for the name and the text-related tools. It runs on more systems that I use, and takes far less time to download and install, and similarly uses a fraction of the disk space. I usually have the most recent version of Adobe's software on a disk.
For my own personal artwork I have found a nice balance of features in the painting program MyPaint, which runs on Linux and Windows.
I do not generate 3D images or models, or animation, or music. Neither, as far as I'm aware, does Office.
I create web pages with Netbeans or Bluefish, or a text editor. If I did not know how to write markup I suppose I might have more use for Word. Similarly, for storing and retrieving and processing data I use a database and a scripting language, or XML if I don't need a full-on database. For keeping track of financial data, an accounting program or package is useful for even small projects, and vital for any business-related endeavor.
I've used web-based email since hotmail became available. I have no idea what, given all of the above, Outlook would be useful to me for. It seems like an adequate if bloated email application, though I've never enjoyed trying to move data out of it.
That's my current toolset. I'm not particularly attached to any of them, and obviously quite used to using both the tools at hand and, when I have the luxury, the best tool for the job. Office has not to date been in the latter category in my experience. Why is Office a good tool? At what task does it uniquely excel at? What combination of features am I missing out on?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
And I'd say sadly that thanks to 'free as in beer" and the freeloader effect it is ultimately a loss for FOSS. lets be honest folks...have you LOOKED at the LO/OO code? We are talking this huge monolithic mess that would probably take someone a good year or more to get fully up to speed on. if you don't manage to keep those long term developers that were building it at Sun i'd say you're screwed as it'll take a good 3 years or more to rebuild the thing into a more modular design, which is eternity in software time.
Meanwhile you have Apple and MSFT with iWork and MS Office spending tons of money on R&D and features so to keep even partially up on features or even have functional compatibility so you can use LO as a drop in replacement is gonna take serious coding. developers of the skill required to do this? NOT cheap and this kind of monolithic project isn't something a coder can just 'pop in on the weekends" and get anything done, its just too massive.
So I truly believe that unless FOSS projects like this find a stable source of revenue things are only gonna get worse as the economy sours. The "tin cup" model of either donations or support works fine in a healthy economy but that isn't what we've got ATM and companies are gonna cut costs any way they can. if they can have your product without paying a cent why give you anything?
Sadly this is completely a case of short sighted "damn everything but the quarterly reports!" thinking because without funding LO will fall further behind. Who cares if it is free if in 3 years it can't open the MS Office 2015 Doc files, or open the latest iWork for that matter?
We've seen that the FOSS model really kicks ass on the "tiny programs piped together" style, as it is easy to maintain and upgrade without needing huge teams of developers well versed in the code. i just don't know how well FOSS is gonna work long term with such a huge monolithic code base and as someone who happily hands out LO to all his home users that does worry me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yes. It doesn't sound like much but it's better than what we've seen from the commercial realm. There are no proprietary tiling window managers. There are other desktops with a cube. There are no proprietary file managers that encompass the breadth of information that kio-slaves can access. There are no proprietary minimalist browsers. And there sure as hell isn't anything as extensible as Bioconductor.
It's true, there is nothing new under the sun. Any innovation you wish to point to, from open source or proprietary development can be traced to something that preceded it. So sure, you can glibly dismiss any list of innovations if you're predisposed to do so.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
+1
Remember when the argument was:
"But a person only uses 20% of MS Office features"
"But everybody uses a different 20%."
Bullocks. Push people on what features they actually use. Most people really do use the roughly the same 20%. The vast majority of people I've talked with and seen what they do, Office 97 is just fine.