Open-Xchange Launches "Open Source" Browser-Based Office Suite

alphadogg writes with news on what Open-Xchange has been doing with the OpenOffice.org developers they hired. From the article: "Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced this week. OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company." The other claim to fame is that it supports collaborative editing similar to Google Docs. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to have a Free/Open replacement for Google Docs, it's not actually fully open source: the backend is (Apache/GPL dual licensed), but the front-end code is Creative Commons BY-SA-NC, which is unequivocally non-free and notoriously difficult to define. "[Open Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna] told The H that his interpretation of Non-Commercial in the licensing was such that companies could use the software in-house, but not sell it as a service to others. Companies that want support will have to purchase the software from Open Xchange."

Comments

Their "interpretation" helps, but is insufficient.

[Svartalf]

What counts is what a court will see in all of that.

Honestly, it's a shame they didn't stick with something Open Source.

Re:Oh good

[mwvdlee]

Never mind the software. As long as you stick to an open file format like .odt, the software become irrelevant. I'd be more worried about WHERE those files are stored.

Control and vision for the project

[concealment]

It seems to me that this company hopes to make money off of this project, and in part as a result, wants to maintain control over the project and its vision.

What use is inventing something if someone will immediately fork it into another project that will both be more popular, and avoid what makes it different from the other projects out there.

I think it's a new maxim of the internet that over time, all projects eventually devolve to being social media. I wouldn't want that to happen to my open document project...

Wait what?

[Synerg1y]

Google docs is free for home AND business use.

Re:Wait what?

[danhuby]

This is free for home and business use also. The non-commercial restriction applies to the operators of the software, not the users of it.

Google docs on the other hand is completely closed source.

Oh really?

[sootman]

"OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application"

If that's true, it'll be the first time in 20 years.

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that hard, actually. If your XML parser isn't doing something wrong, what you write back out will be what you loaded in. All you need to do is keep it in the original format, and NOT try to convert anything (I'm pretty sure this is where every office suite messes up non-native documents).

Keep your hands of anything you don't know what means, and only change the things the user changes (i.e. if the user fixes a spelling mistake in the middle of a paragraph, don't change the paragraph formatting, don't break the paragraph into several paragraphs, and don't touch anything outside that paragraph.

To do this while supporting multiple document formats, you cannot have a native format. Instead you need an interface and a replaceable backend. You can still have your own format, but it needs to be just another backend.

Re:Their "interpretation" helps, but is insufficie

[Njovich]

I guess you've never tried to write an office suite in Javascript?

Re:Free Free not freeloading

[tehcyder]

the usefulness of the Google Docs suite, for my purposes, is the online storage on Google Drive

Really? For me it's the rich feature set, agile development model and lightning-fast application speed that has made it a paradigm-shifter to rival Lotus Notes or MySpace.

Wrong use

[Captain_Chaos]

Creative Commons licenses are not meant for software. They are meant for, and work much better with, artistic expressions such as music, stories, paintings, movies, etc.. The terms are a bad match for software and it will cause no end of problems.

It sucks.

[drolli]

Online text editors all suck. Forgive me the formulation. I can not say it in another way. They have capabilies somwhere between word 5.0 running from 3.5 inch floppy disk on ms-dos and ami pro running on win3.1 a 4MB 386sx 22years ago, I have actually not seen a single one which would outdo ami pro from back then, on a machine with 1/1000 of the ram and 1/1000 of the computational power.

My top ten of fuckups in the online text editos (actually some also many android office suites:

1) Formulas
2) Focus on decent style sheet support
3) Decent floatign objects
4) Decent Table of content etc. support
5) Serial letter functions?
6) Integrated thesaurus (yes, word 5.0 for dos had that)
7) Decent working in non-WYSIWIG modes
8) Equivalent of draft mode/outline mode ....