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.'"

Comments

10 years without innovation

[RackNine]

10 years without innovation it's an eternity by computer standards. Who is killing innovation, I wonder

Re:10 years without innovation

[Bill_the_Engineer]

What 10 year period is Kevin Cavanaugh talking about? If he honestly believes that there hasn't been any innovation in the "office space" then I can see why some are saying that IBM is becoming more irrelevant.

Re:10 years without innovation

[Lunix Nutcase]

Sun was.

Re:10 years without innovation

[hey!]

It depends on your bar for "innovation". If you mean "change" then sure. If you mean new value that would cause customers to adopt the upgrade, it's hard to argue conclusively one way or the other. The sense I have is that upgrades are largely driven by security concerns and keeping the number of versions managed by IT down when the old versions are taken off the market.

There's probably never been a change that somebody (often in the trade press) doesn't praise, or find intriguing. But the sense I get from most people is that the upgrade treadmill is something they live with, but don't look forward to. They'd be happy with the office suite they had ten years ago if non-feature related quality (stability, speed, rendering consistency etc.) were improved.

Re:10 years without innovation

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I was thinking more in the lines of videoconferencing, mobile communications, telecommuting / remote access, collaborating software/groupware, improved GIS packages, improved laptops and portable workstations, tablets, distributed databases, outsourced office applications with IT support (aka "the cloud"), professional networking (like LinkedIn not ethernet), crowd sourcing, wireless high speed internet while traveling, wireless video conferencing, and electronic business banking solutions (aka wire transfers on demand, electronic escrow, credit card processing). These are just things off the top of my head, I'm sure one of the many "road warriors" can come up with more.

I remember when most of the stuff I mentioned where only conceivable for the wealthiest corporations, and yet now even the modest small business can take advantage of this technology. I know the progression to this current level of tech was slow in today's fast paced environment (ie "boiling the frog") but if you compare the office of 2011 with the office of 2001 the advances are startling.

So what is Cavanaugh's definition of innovation? I mean how much improvements can you make to a word processor and a spreadsheet?

Re:10 years without innovation

[Hatta]

Office suites became feature complete back in the 90s. 99% of people could get by on the features present in Office 97. There's just no market for really innovative office suites.

Re:10 years without innovation

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:10 years without innovation

[Ensign Nemo]

+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.

Re:10 years without innovation

[jon_doh2.0]

Bollocks!

Surely there are places where innovations could be implemented, like greater network enabled collaborative features, or introducing more advanced image and page manipulation capabilities, for creating more advanced multimedia documents?

Re:10 years without innovation

[Nursie]

Advanced multimedia documents?

I hope that was sarcasm, I hope I missed the joke, because.... yuck.

Re:10 years without innovation

[PCM2]

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.

Says the guy with a vested interest in agreeing with his own opinion.

I don't want to use Office 97. If I wanted that, I might as well use OpenOffice (because that's the version it resembles). I want to use Office 2010. I like the ribbon UI and I like many of the other improvements they've made since then.

I also have various workflows that I have built into Office that I find indispensable. I have an Excel template that I use for invoicing that has not been compatible with any other office suite I've tried, including OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, and Microsoft's own Office Web Apps. I have a couple VBA macros assigned to hotkeys that make the things I have to do in Word much easier, and I haven't had much luck porting those either. There are other ways that I used Office features that you may consider idiosyncratic, but now that I'm accustomed to working that way, I am reluctant to give them up. I definitely have my own 20%.

Sorry to disagree with you, though. You clearly had yourself convinced; it must just be me.

Re:10 years without innovation

[heypete]

Why not export the CV as a PDF, which will then display the same on all systems?

Re:10 years without innovation

[jon_doh2.0]

Oh, i feel so ashamed now. You have made me feel so small.

So, your hung up on the terms i used (i try to write explicitly), but perhaps you could engage your faculties and try and see past them, to the concept i was trying to invoke. Currently GIMP handles text quite badly, beyond a very basic level, and i am often trying to make flyers, which are heavily text based, but also very graphics heavy. An office suite with some more capable graphics options would be sweet.

In fairness, on rereading that sentence, it could have done without the last bit.

But, you still bring nothing relevant to the debate.

Re:10 years without innovation

[hairyfeet]

I can answer that as I've had to deal with the crap. HR uses a program that fast indexes Word docs looking for keywords and putting them in categories and the stuff will NOT work on PDF, RTF,ODF, hell I wouldn't be surprised if the crap can't parse .TXT!

So I can tell you that while "just use PDF" sounds nice in theory, IRL if you are lucky they will ask you to re submit as a .doc for their software, if you aren't lucky they will just toss your PDF and move on. I've also seen handouts at the local college for various classes and they ALL demand .doc for their anti-cheating software.

This is one of the reasons I truly and sincerely hope LO finds a source of steady funds so they can hire more developers. Right now .doc support is awful unless it is the most simple doc (try it yourself, go to the government websites and find some of their .docs, then open in LO and save back as a .doc and you'll find a mangled word salad) and while I would like nothing more than to not have to warn my customers about using LO for anything but home use after seeing friends get their grades in college dinged for trying to send LO docs I can't in good conscience not warn them.

As it is if you are just writing for yourself? or you are gonna print it? LO is just great. If you are gonna turn it in for a class, collaborate with someone using MS Office, or worse need to send in resumes? Then you would be insane to trust LO's MS Office compatibility. I really wish it weren't so but I've seen docs mangled before my very eyes by simply opening in LO and saving edits back into a .doc format. talk about a mess!

Re:10 years without innovation

[Nursie]

You may be using the wrong tools for the job. I'm not sure. You may wish to investigate the capabilities of desktop publishing/design software like Scribus or Inkscape.

It was your phrasing that made me ask if you were being sarcastic. The number of people wanting "greater network enabled collaborative features" is utterly tiny as far as I can tell, and "advanced multimedia documents" sounds like business speak for word documents with embedded animations, movies, music and other such horrific crap.

tl;dr - you set off my business-speak bullshit alarm. If you genuinely have a software need for these things then I apologise.

Re:10 years without innovation

[VortexCortex]

hell I wouldn't be surprised if the crap can't parse .TXT!

Sounds like your crappy proprietary indexing system is shit. I wouldn't blame OO/LO for incompatibilities if PDF or .TXT (UTF-8) doesn't work.

IRL if you are lucky they will ask you to re submit as a .doc for their software, if you aren't lucky they will just toss your PDF and move on. I've also seen handouts at the local college for various classes and they ALL demand .doc for their anti-cheating software.
...
try it yourself, go to the government websites and find some of their .docs, then open in LO and save back as a .doc and you'll find a mangled word salad ...
Then you would be insane to trust LO's MS Office compatibility.

Let me introduce a radical new way to save documents. HTMutherfuckingL. That's right, the format that EVERY DAMN DEVICE can render is now available to YOU (see: File -> Save As).

Seems to me you are dealing with crap "standards". It's not the document format that's at fault if a "PROFESSOR" can't open a .RTF or .HTML document... In all honesty, I would ask for my money back if they refused one of the documents I sent them. If they refused a refund I would sue in small claims court, and win -- Accepting that there is no such statement that says: "Microsoft Certified Software is REQUIRED for this course."

How can a professor profess to being proficient at opening documents if they can't open the most wide spread and open of documentation formats? Truly, heads would roll were I in charge.

You are now aware that it costs professors $0.00 to install the free and open source software that is required to open the document formats you are recommending against using. If my professor said: "DERP! I can't open this document!?!?! Ima give U an F." I would have that bastard's entrails on a silver platter for breakfast due to their incompetence.

Here's a hint: Unless I'm taking a Microsoft Certification course -- I shouldn't be REQUIRED to use Microsoft products. There is no excuse; Take it up with the next level -- Your "teachers" need to be taught a lesson.

Re:10 years without innovation

[jon_doh2.0]

Cheers, Inkscape looks great. Though, (bangs the drum) some extended graphics capabilities in an office application would be cool, perhaps an office app with 'advanced' plugin support could offer many innovative features and allow devs and users all sorts of opportunities (including the desired).

However, i believe, network enabled, collaborative document editing would have much user interest (a la Google Docs), as evidenced by the popularity of wikis.

And, partly, i was just repulsed by the idea that the office suite paradigm was somehow finished and there could never be any room for innovation or improvement. And, so i just tried to think up a couple of possible arbitrary examples to the contrary.

If i write like a verbose corporate droid, it might be that i have been up all night (its 7:10 in the morning here), or simply that i am a pompous English man.

Peace.

Re:10 years without innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to use Office 2010. I like the ribbon UI and I like many of the other improvements they've made since then.

You what! 2010 is cr*p, the ribbon takes up too much screen space and requires too many clicks to get simple (for me) things done. 2010 is all eye candy and targeted at dumb low end users.

I find as a power user it just gets in the way.

Re:10 years without innovation

[olau]

Your case is not surprising to me, MS Office is a complex beast with a lot of advanced features. But I think the GP is right in the sense that most (but not all) people have no clue those feature are there, and for them, a simpler suite would be fine.

Re:10 years without innovation

[David Gerard]

The problem with Microsoft Office for me is that it cannot be trusted to produce a file that will render identically on Microsoft Office systems.

Re:10 years without innovation

[Caesar Tjalbo]

Cheers, Inkscape looks great.

It is great but it's a drawing program. The other suggestion, Scribus, seems more fitting to me.

Though, (bangs the drum) some extended graphics capabilities in an office application would be cool, perhaps an office app with 'advanced' plugin support could offer many innovative features and allow devs and users all sorts of opportunities (including the desired).

Makes me think of Calligra, formerly known as KOffice, but I'm not sure in what direction I'd want to look for extended graphical capabilities. Creating nice graphs based on spreadsheet or database data is enough I think. Does Krita qualify as an office-app?

However, i believe, network enabled, collaborative document editing would have much user interest (a la Google Docs), as evidenced by the popularity of wikis.

Drupal has such a collaborative modules afaik (it used to, at least). I mean, rather than looking at an office-suite I'd look at how I'd want to collaborate, so a CMS or version control system might be interesting alternatives.

And, partly, i was just repulsed by the idea that the office suite paradigm was somehow finished and there could never be any room for innovation or improvement. And, so i just tried to think up a couple of possible arbitrary examples to the contrary.

Why not mention 'the ribbon' as an example of both innovation and room for improvement? ;-)

Re:10 years without innovation

[KugelKurt]

Seriously, I lost all hope in OpenOffice/LibreOffice. In my eyes it became a mere legacy application for opening MS Office files under X11 systems.
Ever since StarOffice's 5.x source code was released and became OpenOffice.org, nobody had any interest in fundamentally renovating the code base that partially dates back to the 1980s. There was some talk two or so years ago but the "community" decided that the undertaking would be too huge for too little gain.

A while ago I had a look at Calligra (mostly Calligra Words) and damn I was blown away. For years its predecessor KOffice lived only a niche existence and was developed solely by hobbyists who hacked only every now and then on it. Then came Nokia, hired a tiny team (three people or so) and that tiny team transformed KWord / Calligra Words within a year from a 'Kinda OK-ish for a hobby project' application into into a great word processor that renders the ODT files I tried as good as LibreOffice (Calligra is still alpha, btw). Not only was ODT rendering improved and the whole layout engine was rewritten, the suite also received a touchscreen GUI.

That speaks volumes about the quality of Calligra's source code. If so much can be achieved by a handful of full-time programmers within a year, just imagine what they'll do in the time the new Apache OO crew spends its time getting rid of those "problematic" LGPL dependencies...

Re:10 years without innovation

[tehcyder]

The only time I used an office suite at home is to generate my cv. I someone a cv in 12 point font which when viewed in Microsoft Office showed up as 38 point font!

I've never had any formatting issues using LO/OO, especially with something simple like a CV. Did you have some weird font at home that confused Office?

Re:10 years without innovation

[Dog-Cow]

You're still in HS aren't you? And you recently discovered FOSS and now you want to sound rebellious. You're so cute when you get worked up.

Re:10 years without innovation

[Dog-Cow]

Kevin was obviously (from context) talking office software suites (MS Office or OO). You're not that bright, really, if you couldn't figure that out.

Re:10 years without innovation

[hairyfeet]

Riiiight. BTW how's things in "life is fucking fair" land? is the weather nice there? because when you get put in the real world you'll find the vast majority of people you come in contact with don't give a flying fuck what you want and if your little rants causes them even a few seconds more work than the others? Welcome to file 13, aka the waste basket.

Most of the schools here have plenty of folks happy to take your slot so they do not need you if you are gonna cause trouble. Businesses? Have 200 guys trying for the same jobs so they don't need you if your CV doesn't work with their software.

So please keep it up as I'm sure the guys you'll be competing against will be happy to have one less person being considered. in case you ain't noticed sparky the advantage hasn't been on the worker side since the 1960s here, it is firmly on the side of businesses/schools and they don't need you when there are hundreds willing to play along.

Re:10 years without innovation

[hairyfeet]

I'm willing to bet my last dollar it was opened in MS Office 2K7 or 2K10 as I've seen it myself. Something about the LO doc formatting turns even simple docs to word salad in the new MS Office suites. In fact that last MS Office where you could be assured a doc saved in LO would render correctly was Office 2K IMHO. In 2K3 I saw those collaborating with me using OO/LO have serious header/footer and font troubles while those same docs opened in my 2K7 on my laptop were just a garbled mess.

Sadly until LO manages to fix their compatibility (which as I noted in my original post on a monolithic design like LO I don't see that happening without a steady source of income so developers can get up to speed on the codebase) if you have to deal with businesses such as sending CVs or collaborate with those using MS Office pretty much your only choice ATM is MS Office. Despite the FUD many have repeated here I have had collaborations with multiple guys using multiple versions and not had a single error even on a multiMb proposal. In my case it was Office 2K, two had 2K3, one had 2K7 and one was on 2K4 for Mac. Not a single formatting issue but I personally had to give the one that ended up on Office 2K an extra copy I had laying at the shop because he was on OO originally and it would hose the formatting and screw the fonts.

Re:10 years without innovation

[jon_doh2.0]

So, i guess the thrust of your argument is, different tools for different jobs. That is a fair argument, one 'many-tentacled' program could get a little unwieldy.

By enhanced graphics capabilities, i pretty much meant features like, transparency, layering, a thorough tools palette, stretch and scale options, and whatnot. Which would save me porting portions of things in an out of different programs to get my desired result.

Drupal appears to pretty much be a wiki, no? At least it is a browser based interface. I was thinking more along the lines of a discrete app with 'live' options for group projects.

Re:10 years without innovation

[jimnorcal]

I've been using (or trying to use) symphony for about a year now (maybe longer - don't remember) and it has so many problems that I fear to use it beyond anything but a simple text editor. Whenever I try to do anything more advanced (tables within tables for example) the thing will just crash completely and disappear from the screen along with, of course, anything I was working on.

After OOo ended up under the control of the evil Mr Burns er .. Larry, I decided I wasn't going to use any version of it after Oracle's control of it. That's when I decided to try out Symphony and use it instead but, like I said, it's a mess.

Is there any hope for FOSS office projects that have any hope of competing with MS?

Re:10 years without innovation

[hairyfeet]

FUD. If you want to bring up legitimate concerns, like how even the student edition is nearly $100? I'm there with you. But I have dealt with multiMb proposals, including one humdinger where I had myself on Office 2K, two on 2K3, one on 2K7 and one on Office 2K4 for Mac and there were ZERO problems and this thing was fricking huge, with headers and footers and tables and embedded PPTs.Compare this to opening and saving the exact same doc in OO.o and ending up with a broken mess, word salad with screwed PPTs, formatting issues, even chunks of text missing.

So as I said there are plenty of things to hate about MS Office, the price on the low end editions for one, but I have been messing with seriously funky docs for years and NEVER have seen an issue from Office 2K on up. Sure if you have a Word 6 doc from 93 you might have problems, but who in the hell is still using Word 6 anymore? I've been passing docs between Office 2K (just finally replaced my beloved Office 2K this year because my oldest had to have 2k7 for school, sniff!) and the later versions and not a single whiff of trouble, not one.

Re:10 years without innovation

[David Gerard]

Dude, it varies per printer. Microsoft Word literally changes its rendering according to your printer driver. This is widely known and well documented, and I've been burnt by it frequently. Claiming this is "FUD" is FUD.

Re:10 years without innovation

[hairyfeet]

Sadly as you can read what I wrote for Linux Insider I truly believe the answer is NO, not unless the community get behind a fundamental change in the GPL, from a "free for everyone" to "free for non commercial use'.

The reason why is simple: despite RMS and his desire for a completely free utopia the simple fact of the matter is that history has shown us the FOSS design model works on what I call the "grep pipe" principle. that is a bunch of small programs that when linked together do a bigger job. where it does NOT seem to work is in huge monolithic codebases, which is what you are talking about when you are dealing with office software.

Just to attempt to maintain (not make it better mind you, just keep up) with changes in MS Office Word you are probably gonna need a dozen guys who are intimately familiar with the Writer codebase and all its calls. If you want to improve compatibility? Add another dozen. And that is JUST for Writer. Now multiple that times the other components.

You see MSFT and Apple probably have a good 200 guys minimum working on their office suites, guys who know that code like the back of their hands, years of experience in each team. And THAT is what FOSS has to compete against. The "tin cup" model as I call it, where you survive by donations or support, simply won't work at the scale we are talking about for an individual program. Red hat can pull it off because companies hate not having someone to call when their servers go down because the servers make them money. If LO don't work? they'll just write it off as a failure and pick up a site license for MS Office.

If there was a "free for non commercial use only" clause then, even if it were only $2 a copy, those businesses that found use in LO could help pay the cost of development so that it can keep up and get better. But mark my words without IBM or Oracle or another big corp to pay those experienced developers they'll move on to where the grass is greener and volunteers are gonna take one look at the huge sprawling mess of code and run away screaming. it is simply too complex for a weekend coder to play with.

Sadly I believe in less than 5 years it will be as though Star Office never existed. The Document Foundation will try their little hearts out, they'll beg and plead for funds, but in the end they will just not get the resources to keep up. Each year their support for MS Office formats will get worse until there will be simply no way anyone can use it. The forums will be filled with "Install Wine and use MS Office" because to use LO will be like trying to work in Word 95 and deal with DocX.

I hate to see it happen, but happen it will, just mark my words. Why is it so hard for the community to understand that for huge projects like this you simply have to have a steady stream of good money to survive?

Re:10 years without innovation

[PCM2]

You what! 2010 is cr*p, the ribbon takes up too much screen space

So double click on it and minimize it. Screen space... saved!

and requires too many clicks to get simple (for me) things done.

So use the key commands, like a normal person. Unless you don't really know what it is you want to do.

Re:10 years without innovation

[PCM2]

Your argument for why people should stick with using MSOffice is that MSOffice 2010 lets you keep doing things the way you are used to doing them?

No, it was my counter-argument to the argument that Google Docs (or Emacs) gives everybody everything they need out of a word processor, "so who would ever need more?"

I use Office 2010. It lets me get my work done. Switching to something else would take me many weeks to readjust. Why bother?

Re:10 years without innovation

[RockDoctor]

It's not just Word. MS's signed graphics libraries for Vista fucked up our line drawing big style and we've still not recovered from it. Font rendering fucked up and unreliable too. Total mess. The customers complain, but they're the ones who wanted Vista compatibility in the first place.

Re:10 years without innovation

[westlake]

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.

This line of thinking reminds me of a scene from Ratatouille:

Colette: What are you doing?

Linguini: Uh... vegetables. I'm cooking the... vegetables?

Colette: No! You waste energy and time! You think cooking is a cute job, eh? Like Mommy in the kitchen? Well, Mommy never had to face the dinner rush while the orders come flooding in, and every dish is different and none are simple, and all different cooking time, but must arrive at the customer's table at exactly the same time, hot and perfect! Every second counts and you CANNOT be MOMMY!

Re:10 years without innovation

[iggymanz]

You live in a different universe than I, maybe your documents are very simple. We have terrible issues with 2003, 2007 and 2010. They print and display differently the same document

Maybe...

[kakyoin01]

...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.

Re:Maybe...

[KugelKurt]

LibreOffice is under the SUSE umbrella, not Novell. Mono was dropped because it was part of Novell and not SUSE. SUSE was (if I understood it correctly) free to hire the old Ximian team to continue Mono. SUSE chose not to, although SUSE is still legally obligated to support it for paying SUSE Enterprise customers. So they'll likely have a guy or so to maintain Mono.

Re:Hot potato!

[dougisfunny]

I don't know that I'd call MS Office well maintained. Shoehorned or jury-rigged is more appropriate when describing their maintenance.

The "Apache Software Foundation" Retirement Home

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hot potato!

[RackNine]

The myth of open source superiority has been proven false time and again.

How about WordPress? OpenSource and vastly superior to other equivalent commercial CMSs

Re:Hot potato!

[cpicon92]

How do you explain the popularity of Apache and Linux on enterprise servers, then?

Congratulations Apache and IBM!

[crutchy]

As much as "big blue" has probably the biggest software patent portfolio and they are possibly only doing out of spite for Microsoft, I applaud IBM for their continued support for the FOSS community, and the Apache Foundation being as good as any representative for it. I hope the resources of IBM are available to support Linux especially, as it continues to face off against patent trolls like Microsoft and SCO (allthough I think SCO is as good as dead). I have nothing against patents being used for what they were intended (protecting the inventor), but when patent trolls use them as an anticompetitive weapon it brings shame to the system as a whole. What would the world be like now if it weren't for the FOSS community (including Apache)? Microsoft would probably rule at least the western world with an iron fist. It would be even more of a mafia organisation than it is today. I use OpenOffice and I'm quite happy with its performance and capabilities (especially since Microsoft brought out those stupid ribbons). I'm sure sales of Microsoft Office are struggling already and would be in dire straits if not for pre-installations and the use of Windows as marketing leverage for OEMs (package deals). Last of all, thanks to Apache for their kick arse web server! I hope you are able to continue your good work till the demise of corporate greed (so till the end of time basically).

Is FOSS innovative?

[perpenso]

10 years without innovation it's an eternity by computer standards. Who is killing innovation, I wonder

Who is promoting it? I'm not sure FOSS is promoting innovation as much as many advocates would like to believe. When the most popular apps are largely described as "a FOSS reimplementation/alternative to commercial/proprietary XXXX" one could argue that FOSS, like many corporations, is not terribly innovative. Just to be clear, a worthwhile project does not necessarily need to be innovative. I've used and supported FOSS projects that I find useful. I'm just arguing that FOSS advocates are not necessarily the best people to be criticizing others for a lack of innovation.

Re:Is FOSS innovative?

[hedwards]

If you're looking at the most popular applications for innovation, then you're looking in the wrong direction. The most popular applications are rarely particularly innovative. You do get exceptions like Napster from time to time, but those are few and far between, generally they're just the biggest fish in a new market.

The really innovative stuff is stuff that most folks haven't yet heard of, and it usually comes from OSS or indie developers because there's so much less of a barrier to creating it. Hobbyists and small developers have a lot less to lose if the thing flops than large corporations do. Worst case is that a small developer goes under and has to file for bankruptcy. Not really that big of a deal for a small concern.

Re:Is FOSS innovative?

[Hatta]

Nonsense. The most popular apps are like all the other mainstream apps because people like what they're used to. That doesn't mean there's no innovation in open source. What proprietary software shop offers anything like xmonad? compiz? uzbl? KIO-slaves? Where did we first see ad blockers? Distributed P2P? Is there any proprietary software that can do what Bioconductor can do?

Re:Is FOSS innovative?

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Is FOSS innovative?

[perpenso]

You've got your history backwards, compiz beat the rest to market by a mile on using 3d hardware for window managment.

Wiki says that Mac OS X 10.2 was using the GPU in 2002 and that compiz was first released in 2006.

A pity Framework isn't revived this way

[victor50]

Most of you will probably wonder: Framework? Framework was and in some ways still is the most superior integrated suite ever developed. Unfortunately they where slain by Wordperfect (4.2) and probably some bad marketing from Ashton Tate. It is in the obscure hands of a firm called "Selections & Functions" who really hasn't done much for it. It looks like they have abandoned it all together.

Re:A pity Framework isn't revived this way

[haruchai]

Really? They seem to have spent quite some time and effort on making it buzzwordy and still offer it for sale.

I'd be grateful is someone could translate this gobbledegook into English:
From www.framework.com

What is FRAMEWORK ?

Framework is a unified computing architecture encompassing an operating system, API, GUI, applications, interactive programmability, RTOS sensor handling and information management. It is developed and maintained as a semiconductor design with a parallel software version which runs with the help of simulation and virtualization on other operating systems. Framework's design aim is to provide full hardware based computing functionality with no additional software but it does support running x86 programs on an x86 simulator.

While maintaining backward compatibility and following the original design principles of the Ashton-Tate product Framework was rebuilt as an architectural computing concept based on linguistic principles and path based automata. The new architecture overcomes the inherent limitations of parallel processing that the inherently serial CPU-based arithmetic computing imposed. Framework's architectural building blocks are channels that handle its perceptible, inherently selectable and ordered contextual objects. The result is not only an efficiency that cannot be matched in CPU based computing but also a generic highly ergonomic interface which can be internalized with no visual support. Framework employes RAM-based state machines on operating systems such as Windows while taking advantage of massive parallelism on its FPGA based system to provide an instantaneous data handling with Big-O of one. The Big-O of one technology supports SATA based storage available to users as well as Framework's own internal content-based memory and dependency management system. This enables the Framework's inherent parallelism and its extendable interpretation available with the FRED language. Simply put, there is no practical limit on the number of uniquely named FRED functions, nor a delay penalty associated with increase in that number or with an increase in the size of data stored on hard drives.

Re:A pity Framework isn't revived this way

[marcello_dl]

The "Big-O of one" must be the goatse guy, I dunno about the rest...

Seriously (the big O and little o notation, I recall them) it is interesting, but they are not trying to compete with office/openoffice where a mail merge of a few dozen of records takes seconds (an eternity, for multighz multicore machines), and nobody really cares.

Re:A pity Framework isn't revived this way

[lennier]

I'd be grateful is someone could translate this gobbledegook into English:

Neat! Framework, like the original Lotus Symphony (not the current IBM OO.org-derived suite which is entirely unrelated) and then Lotus Notes, was a very cool idea in integrated applications which sadly, the world didn't follow. Basically, as far as I can grok that text, it's a one-tool-to-rule-the-world kind of application (of the kind that EMACS only dreams of being). I still hold out hopes that this is the direction the Web will eventually evolve into - something more like Ted Nelson's Xanadu than the multi-tier monstrosity we have today.

You have "frames" or windows representing datasets and views/transformations over that data; you link them together again and again until you get one big distributed dataspace showing all your stuff, and all your views of your stuff. Like a spreadsheet, but not limited to rows and columns. Like SQL views, but not limited to one database at a time.

An architecture like this, like Lotus Notes, might look like an "office application" but really it's something much more powerful; more of a kind of a generalised model of a computing network. As such, it would be the logical candidate for making run on parallel hardware, which I think is what they're talking about here. Since each "frame" is really a parallel function, and your application is your database is also a dataflow network, you could split chunks of your database onto separate machines, and keep doing that indefinitely. At least that's my guess.

I really, really wanted Framework to succeed in the 1980s. It was about the only "office" type program which I believed in and saw as the future of computing. But it wasn't to be, at least not then.

I would be interested to know what customers would actually buy something like this today, because it woud probably be incompatible with most ordinary databases. It would maybe have to be something very large that you would want to run on this. Governmental/military apps, maybe? Just a thought, possibly wrong.

Re:A pity Framework isn't revived this way

[Rural]

Sounds great, but many users have difficulty separating form (presentation) from content (data). Unless this separation can be done seamlessly or can be easily done incrementally, there's no chance if something powerful like this catching on. I mean, do you realize how many quite intelligent people still use word processors like a typewriter? And truthfully, sometimes that is the fastest and best approach for a one-off job.

World without FOSS?

[perpenso]

... What would the world be like now if it weren't for the FOSS community (including Apache)? ...

It would probably be pretty much the same as it is now, we'd have to pay a little more for workstations and servers as they would still be coming from Sun, SGI and other traditional Unix vendors. It wasn't Microsoft that killed these platforms, it was Linux. Maybe Mac OS X would have caught on a little faster?

Re:World without FOSS?

[JAlexoi]

If it weren't for FOSS, the development tools would have still been expensive. And with expensive dev tools, you get little innovation and/or small number of applications.

Re:World without FOSS?

[perpenso]

Yes, the BSD-based Mac OSX would have caught on faster without OSS.

Note that the GP hypothesized a world without FOSS, had FOSS never occurred Apple would have simply gone down a different path. They nearly went down such a path and used a proprietary kernel even with BSD being available. The current FOSS based kernel, Darwin, does not really contribute to the end user experience that makes Mac OS X the user friendly GUI that it is. All the important code is proprietary, as many FOSS advocates complain.

I'm thrilled there's a BSD console and tools available but my opinion represents such a small minority it wouldn't really affect sales.

Re:World without FOSS?

[perpenso]

If it weren't for FOSS, the development tools would have still been expensive. And with expensive dev tools, you get little innovation and/or small number of applications.

That's not true. Linux and other FOSS software did not only displace the traditional unix vendors, they also displaced a lot of consumer and small/home office oriented software. For example we had inexpensive development suites like TurboPascal and TurboC under MS-DOS.

Re:World without FOSS?

[perpenso]

For example we had inexpensive development suites like TurboPascal and TurboC under MS-DOS. Which were on their way out because Borland couldn't compete with Microsoft (and Visual Studio).

No. You are confusing the Windows 9x era with the MS-DOS era. From the mid 1980s to very early 90s Borland was inexpensive and dominated. Also the early versions of Visual Studio were not expensive, MS was encouraging a migration from DOS to Windows 3.x.

Re:World without FOSS?

[crutchy]

Microsoft has a long history of "encouragement".

Re:World without FOSS?

[JAlexoi]

What were the cheap dev tools for Unix prior to GCC? Or did they come with dev tools by default? I'm not that old.
However, me starting with Pascal in late 90ies there were definitely no free dev tools and $200 was the yearly tuition for a University in my country... Moving onto Java in 1999, cheap IDE's didn't exist(essentially)

Re:World without FOSS?

[perpenso]

What were the cheap dev tools for Unix prior to GCC? Or did they come with dev tools by default? I'm not that old.

I am not 100% sure but I think console based C, Pascal and Fortran compilers were standard (cc, f77, pc).

Donating open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apache could fold this code into its own open source office suite OpenOffice

Can't they do that anyway? I thought that was the whole point of "open source".

Re:Donating open source?

[Kjella]

Can't they do that anyway? I thought that was the whole point of "open source".

Lotus Symphony is not open source, it's a proprietary fork from an early version of OpenOffice with a license that permitted this. IBM has been offering it as freeware, so by offering this code to the Apache foundation they're looking to mend the old fork between OpenOffice and Symphony. It still would not mend the fork between OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but as far as IBM is concerned their Symphony code can now be used in both versions under the Apache license. This is a direct consequence of Oracle giving OpenOffice to Apache, IBM wasn't willing to give Symphony to Sun or Oracle, but they are willing to share it as an Apache project. So good move by IBM, another open source contribution from them.

Re:Donating open source?

[dakameleon]

Depends on the licence.

Re:Donating open source?

[Nursie]

Oh hell yes!

It's not got any of that old code in it, it's simply the name. It's (as previously mentioned) an OO.o fork ported to the eclipse framework.

Compared to mainline OO.o or Libre Office I'm really not a fan. It seems slow and heavyweight. But apparently it does bring some good stuff to the table, specifically there are supposed to have been a lot of improvements on the way it imports and exports various file formats.

Re:Donating open source?

[makomk]

Of course, this does mean that someone has to do the hard work of actually merging the two... and it probably is going to be very hard work. Even IBM's attempts at actual upstream contributions to OO.org seem to have been more or less unmergable for some reason

Re:Hot potato!

[westlake]

How do you explain the popularity of Apache and Linux on enterprise servers, then?

The server room is managed by an IT pro.

The office suite is the domain of the 9 to 5 clerical worker, who has a very different set of skills, needs and expectations.

Re:Hot potato!

[h4rr4r]

Please tell me you are joking. Linux is huge on enterprise servers. Normally there are windows boxes in the server room as well, but linux is very common in the server room. Do you think oracle is uncommon? What do you think those oracle servers are running on?

They don't want to pay

[improfane]

They don't want to pay to maintain software. They would rather give it away as open source and let some unpaid people maintain it indefinitely into the future, something that no company can really afford.

It's a win for the open source community but it's win-win for businesses. Afterall, they benefit from the project when it's open source. They can deallocate resources to it too.

I am not sure how it makes me feel. All software seems to be derived from some open source code somewhere. The web? TCP/IP stacks? KHTML? Linux? Netscape/Firebird?

Sudden digression regarding patents: Patents? Yeah they need to go. Will IBM donate patents to go along with OpenSymphony? I wonder how many existing patents are preceded by openly available code?

Innovation and Polishing

[improfane]

Freely available code, be it open source or academic are the original innovators. They seed ideas. They are not constrained by funding or time.

Businesses adopt these ideas, invest into them and produce viable and profitable software. They create products, not innovations. They are restricted by time and profits.

It would have been hard for the internet to be what it is today without freely available code.

Re:Hot potato!

[Lunix Nutcase]

What do you think those oracle servers are running on?

Solaris.

Re:Hot potato!

[hedwards]

Larry's ego?

What Uses Does Microsoft Office Have?

[Tenebrousedge]

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?

Re:What Uses Does Microsoft Office Have?

[Dog-Cow]

Word is a good word processor. That you don't need one doesn't make it less so. Excel is hands-down the best spreadsheet program ever written. I have no use for PP, and Outlook is OK, but nothing to write home about. I only use it at work.

And the number of people using Word that do not care about its file format approaches 100% asymptotically.

Innovation? Really.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using OpenOffice for years and it very capably fulfills all of my needs. That alone is a mark of success. What more innovation could anyone want?

OpenOffice should fulfill the needs of the majority of users. If it does not, then the blame is on the ineptitude and naivete of the common business user and not on any lack of innovation of the software.

Re:sweet

[dakameleon]

The meme you're looking for is "yo dawg", as in "yo dawg, I heard you like IBM Ads..."

Too bad its horrible

[crosstalk]

to bad symphony is a horrible product that is worse than its base, I speak from having been forced to use it for the past 5 years, at least 3.0 is a step up. I would use open office if it and symphony would display files the same. symphony likes to do crazy things with open format files

Re:Hot potato!

[WorBlux]

And if you want to access it ten years from now? Twenty? Fifty? If you don't know how the document was made, how are you supposed to access the data inside?

Re:Hot potato!

[jon_doh2.0]

Haha, very good, the king of irony.

Oh wait, that's me.

Don't think it's valuable

[Methuselar]

Don't think it's valuable, there is not too much new feature and improvements in Symphony. OOo is forked hard and I think LibreOffice devs are not interested in Symphony

Re:The "Apache Software Foundation" Retirement Hom

[mdm42]

I don't understand why Apache are being so undiscriminating about accepting projects. It looks to me like Apache has just become a dumping ground for dead software, and ASF seem quite happy to go with that. There are now so many top-level projects that it's become pretty-much like Sourceforge - any rubbish is acceptable, and the poor sucker looking for a solution to a specific problem has to spend ages "evaluating" a bunch of ego-riddled crapware. Used to be that Apache was a mark of quality and some level of engineering and design. Not lately.

What apache should do with it

[j1976]

If there is any value left in either the oracle code base or the IBM code base, the only sane thing for apache to do would be to commit it to the LibreOffice code tree. That's where the development is happening at the moment, and I don't see why Apache would be interested in maintaining a lesser competing product when there already is a blooming open source one around.

Re:Kill LibreOffice?

[KugelKurt]

Now SUSE took Novell's part in LibreOffice

Re:Hot potato!

[Dog-Cow]

Except for the odd legacy box here and there, Ford Motor runs Oracle exclusively on Linux and Windows. Solaris itself is legacy outside of Engineering.

Re:Hot potato!

[h4rr4r]

Not anymore. I just interviewed for a job running Oracle on OEL on some pretty big Sun hardware.

Solaris is not really being used anymore for that, except legacy installations.

Good news but...

[brim4brim]

There is a reason IBM's developers have been given to work on the project too. To ensure IBM gets heavy influence on what is merged and probably because it will be difficult like other said

I imagine IBM want to get so involved, nobody else will want to with Open Office of the big corporates. Not a bad thing really as long as IBM don't muck it up. At the moment, I don't really see the point of Libre Office until IBM begin to screw up Open Office as it is essentially a similar code base and they are working toward mostly similar goals.

Re:Hot potato!

[RackNine]

WordPress? You mean that crappy blog software that can barely handle even a modest load without erroring out?

Yeah, the one that has just surpassed 50 million installations worldwide and to whose "crappy" platform Microsoft migrated all of its Live Spaces Users