Uhhhhh Microsoft's documents are a standard. They're just not open. Just because they've managed to take over the entire market doesn't mean you need to get pissy. If you don't like it, make something better. OOo is nice, but it's not better than office (Yes, I've run both extensively). If you want to kill office, write a superior program. Otherwise stop whining. Reality check: There is no such thing as a closed standard.
Just because something is widely used does NOT make it a standard. Just because Internet Explorer has a larger user base than other browsers does NOT make it standards complaint. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Even if we wanted to use Microsoft's systems as a standard we can't! They won't tell us what they are doing so we're forced to rely on imperfect algorithms that have been reverse engineered from one of Microsoft's "black boxes." Like it or not, Microsoft does not believe in standards of any kind, much less open ones. If Microsoft actually believed in standards(and they don't) all of their document formats would be completely open and it would make no difference if you used OpenOffice or Microsoft Office. All of these compatibility problems are being engineered. The tragic reality of the situation remains that adhering to open standards would cost Microsoft billions of dollars in revenue. Quite naturally, they are fighting open standards with all of their considerable influence.
The economic reality is the Microsoft IS a monopoly, which is a direct violation of Federal law. In the late 19th century Standard Oil was split into several smaller companies because it had a strangle hold on the United States' oil supply. In the mid 20th century AT&T was split into smaller companies because it had almost complete control of the United States' telephone system. The very fact that Microsoft survived its monopoly proceedings, without being split up, should have been a wakeup call. Microsoft is a very large and very powerful monopoly, and it is out of control. Monopolies stifle competition, innovation stagnates, prices soar, and the vitality of the nation's economy is damaged. Competition is what is needed to drive the innovation of new software and keep prices down. Microsoft has no real competition and Microsoft Office is a perfect example of this reality. Microsoft Office 2007 is massive, expensive, and (aside from maintaining incompatibility)hasn't fundamentally changed since 1997!!!
I know! Microsoft should start selling electronic voting machines. Their machines would be hailed as the standard for all electronic voting machines thereafter(without ever going through a standards committee), Microsoft would refuse to divulge how the machines work, no one would be upset by this lack of disclosure, Microsoft could sell elections to the highest bidder without getting caught, Microsoft would sue anyone that attempted to reverse engineer one of the machines, no one would be interested in completely free voting machines despite their developers having completely disclosed their source code because Microsoft deliberately ensured that their machines were not compatible with the free versions, and everyone would happily sell their newest grandchild to a gypsy circus so they can afford to buy the newest version of the machines, every few years, despite considerable peer-reviewed evidence that the only difference between the old and new versions is that the new version looks different and runs slower!!!
OpenOffice still doesn't have all the features. As always with this topic, you are comparing OO.org with a Word 2000 or so. But what about great Office 2004 and 2007? OO.org does NOT support al the features and therefor can't open it (even if saved as doc, and not new docx).
I like linux, I like MacOS X, but I have Office 2007 in a Parallels machine, to use all the beautiful features of Word, Groove and SharePoint 2007. OpenOffice is fine for personal use, because it as all the standard-features, but not for a good organized enterprise network.
(Btw: No need to flame, OO-fans... It's not against the product... It's an useful Office Lite and many friends use it successfully and never complain about missing a particular feature. But those users simply don't know what Office 207 can do. Same with Ubuntu and Windows, they don't care what's inside... whether a Mac OS X, whether Vista, whether XP or even a userfriendly Linux) The reason there are compatibility problems between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office is because Microsoft's document formats are closed, not because Microsoft Office is better! As I said before, word processors and spreadsheets have not fundamentally changed in the last 10 years. Features? Don't make me laugh! You do realize that a lot of corporations are still running Office 97 right? 95% of people don't even know that 95% of Microsoft Office's features exist and you don't need ANY of them to run a business. Sometimes more is just more.
1. OpenOffice sucks. Now the response to this is the obvious 'Hey Stupid! OpenOffice isn't Linux'. To which I reply, 'Hey Nutjob! Wake up to the realities of the market you are trying to get in to'. It matters not that OpenOffice is not officially a part of Linux - it is a fundamental part of Linux in a business environment. OpenOffice is not able to handle the full array of rubbish that Microsoft Word produces leading to the inevitable - 'Oh that's strange I looks fine on my computer' {scramble to reissue document using Word in Wine} 'Try that version'. That said Word 97 works great under Wine, so I use that a lot - although I do prefer AbiWord. You have that exactly backwards. OpenOffice does not suck. Microsoft Office sucks. Why? Microsoft is allegedly the industry leader and yet they are the only software distributor that does not officially support an internationally recognized document format. All of Microsoft Office's "features" be damned. Until Microsoft starts using standard document formats, it will never be an enterprise level application, despite the unfortunate reality whereby many managers spend several king's ransoms to use it in this role. You'll notice that despite ODF being a completely open standard, Microsoft is the only software distributor that can't seem to figure out how to integrate it with their products. Oh wait, that would cost them billions of dollars in revenues! Silly me...
The ONLY reason Microsoft Office dominates the market is because of vendor lock in. Microsoft has armies of people trying to figure out how to stop groups like OpenOffice from being fully compatible with their document formats. For God's sake people... Word processors and spreadsheets haven't fundamentally changed in the last 20 years... All of this ODF v. MSOOXML is complete bullshit. ODF is a standard and MSOOXML is not. Microsoft is throwing up a huge smoke screen in an attempt to maintain its monopoly and to continue charging way too much for it's second rate software. The issue is literally that simple.
P.S. The ODF plugin for Microsoft Office does not count because most people don't even know it exists. Call me when Microsoft integrates ODF support with MS Office Standard.
Oh, and OSX is nice too but if the frontend doesnt suit you (and it cant possibly, one size never fits all) then your screwed unless you replace aqua with X11, and then you may as well be running linux. The problem with OSX is that it's a violation of the EULA to run it on non-Mac hardware. Perhaps it's just me but isn't that how Apple shot themselves in the foot over 15 years ago? OSX needs to ship on new Dell/HP computers and compete with Vista. If Mac had made it's OS available on new IBM computers to start with Microsoft, as we know it, wouldn't exist today.
so you're really arguing one free stack against another when you presume that the base OS came with the machine. The last server I ordered from Dell shipped without an OS.
Everyone complains about RPM... Geeze. I like RPM. I have no doubt that the debian package system works well but to say that RPM sucks is little more than ignorance.
If you want a clunky copycat with about half the functionality, sure, go ahead and install OO.o. But the SD is smart to recommend that the students use something that will actually get the job done (assuming "the job" is anything above and beyond a plain text letter), not to mention actually prepare you for a workplace that demands Office in almost every case since OO.o doesn't cut it. Actually get the job done? You're kidding right? I get tired of rabid Pro-Microsoft wackos dumping on OpenOffice just because it's different. There's a very large difference between a software application being different and being defective. I've been deploying OpenOffice in a corporate setting for over a year with no problems and it's more than capable of "getting the job done." With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about.
The question we should be asking is exactly why the school district is wasting tax payer dollars on Microsoft Office 2007. We should be asking why they are expecting parents to purchase software that they do not need and may not be able to afford. I did a cost analysis OpenOffice v. Microsoft Office 2007 for my employer. By my calculations, even assuming that Microsoft Office required absolutely no troubleshooting, which is laughable, it would still take us approximately 6-10 years to recoup the cost of purchasing Microsoft Office 2007, by which time Microsoft would have released 2-3 newer versions of their office suite and would readily expect us to buy their damn software all over again. For what? Microsoft Office doesn't fundamentally do anything that it didn't do 10 years ago. There are many companies out there that still use Office 97! The only difference between then and now is that it's now more expensive and runs slower. Viable freely available alternatives to Microsoft Office exist and our schools should be using them. To think that our School Boards expect us to believe that they pinch pennies to save money... My taxes are high enough without this level of irresponsibility, thank you very much.
P.S. The irony in all of this is that at least half of the Pro-Microsoft arguments seem to come from people who make their living supporting Microsoft's shitty software.
As much as I like Red Hat based systems I'd switch to Debian in the blink of an eye if Red Hat signed an agreement with Microsoft, like Novell did.
Microsoft opposes everything that Linux has come to stand for. Linux is the best OS on the planet and it's completely free. If Microsoft was ever able to gain control of it those ass hats would start selling CALS for Linux servers, OEM stickers for Linux workstations, and sue your ass off if you didn't buy them. If you give Microsoft an inch they will walk all over you and they'll try to walk over you even if you don't. Just look at how hard Microsoft is trying to ramrod MSOOXML through the ISO standards committee. Do we really want Microsoft playing games with Linux? To hell with Microsoft's monopolistic games and any Linux distribution that signs with them.
Is there a backlash against Novell? Yes. The question isn't "Is there a backlash?" The question is, "Is the backlash large enough to make Novell's executives take notice."
Many are going to scoff at this, but I speak from experience, so I don't care - it is NOT impossible to write a huge application in assembler, never mind C, that can "go for years without a segfault". It's not even hard. It simply takes people who know what they're doing, and who haven't been brainwashed into thinking it can't be done. Mod me insane, but I find the opposite to be true, i.e. the higher level the language, the less basic understanding is required, and the more idiocy is perpetrated with it. Scoff at it? Quite the opposite. Programmers that never leave their high level environments live a very sheltered existence and never gain even a basic understanding of the underlying hardware. If you ask the average programmer what a stack frame is he'll look at you like you're speaking in Manderine Chinese. Add to that that you're at the complete mercy of the authors of your interpreter and I would venture to say that if you are MORE likely to crash using a high level language than you are with a low level language if only because there are more more things that can and do go wrong.
This is a failing of C/C++ which makes it inappropriate for most software development.
That's right. Blame the language for the programmer's ineptitude. That's like saying the Linux bash shell is critically flawed because it doesn't protect them from their own stupidity when they are logged in as root... Do you even realize that the languages you're trumpeting use pointers on some level, just like C++? The only difference is that they are accessed through an abstraction that prevents the programmer from ganking himself. Ironically, the odds are that the implementation of that abstraction was written in C++!!! So you're basically saying that the solution to the problems with C++ is a language that's implemented in C++... What!?!!?
I've personally written C++ classes for handling associative arrays, large numbers(in the thousands of bits), typeless datatypes, and automatic pointer deallocation. The problem isn't the language. The problem is that no one bothers to learn how to use it.
If you can't keep track of your pointers write some template classes to do it for you. To lazy to do that? No worries!!! Boost.org has a complete library of smart pointers freely available for download!!!!
P.S.
Please don't respond with something like, "C++ can't to this: " That is a complaint about libraries and not the language itself. Complaining that a platform dependent API is not part of the standard C++ library is little more than ignorance. If you need such an API, go find one and install it.
Please don't respond with, "It's hard to do stuff with C++!" No it isn't. I get so tired of that one. It's like listening to an 9th grader saying that math is too hard for mere mortals but, when asked, he hasn't done his homework in 2 months.
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Just because something is widely used does NOT make it a standard. Just because Internet Explorer has a larger user base than other browsers does NOT make it standards complaint. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Even if we wanted to use Microsoft's systems as a standard we can't! They won't tell us what they are doing so we're forced to rely on imperfect algorithms that have been reverse engineered from one of Microsoft's "black boxes." Like it or not, Microsoft does not believe in standards of any kind, much less open ones. If Microsoft actually believed in standards(and they don't) all of their document formats would be completely open and it would make no difference if you used OpenOffice or Microsoft Office. All of these compatibility problems are being engineered. The tragic reality of the situation remains that adhering to open standards would cost Microsoft billions of dollars in revenue. Quite naturally, they are fighting open standards with all of their considerable influence.
The economic reality is the Microsoft IS a monopoly, which is a direct violation of Federal law. In the late 19th century Standard Oil was split into several smaller companies because it had a strangle hold on the United States' oil supply. In the mid 20th century AT&T was split into smaller companies because it had almost complete control of the United States' telephone system. The very fact that Microsoft survived its monopoly proceedings, without being split up, should have been a wakeup call. Microsoft is a very large and very powerful monopoly, and it is out of control. Monopolies stifle competition, innovation stagnates, prices soar, and the vitality of the nation's economy is damaged. Competition is what is needed to drive the innovation of new software and keep prices down. Microsoft has no real competition and Microsoft Office is a perfect example of this reality. Microsoft Office 2007 is massive, expensive, and (aside from maintaining incompatibility)hasn't fundamentally changed since 1997!!!
I know! Microsoft should start selling electronic voting machines. Their machines would be hailed as the standard for all electronic voting machines thereafter(without ever going through a standards committee), Microsoft would refuse to divulge how the machines work, no one would be upset by this lack of disclosure, Microsoft could sell elections to the highest bidder without getting caught, Microsoft would sue anyone that attempted to reverse engineer one of the machines, no one would be interested in completely free voting machines despite their developers having completely disclosed their source code because Microsoft deliberately ensured that their machines were not compatible with the free versions, and everyone would happily sell their newest grandchild to a gypsy circus so they can afford to buy the newest version of the machines, every few years, despite considerable peer-reviewed evidence that the only difference between the old and new versions is that the new version looks different and runs slower!!!
The reason there are compatibility problems between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office is because Microsoft's document formats are closed, not because Microsoft Office is better! As I said before, word processors and spreadsheets have not fundamentally changed in the last 10 years. Features? Don't make me laugh! You do realize that a lot of corporations are still running Office 97 right? 95% of people don't even know that 95% of Microsoft Office's features exist and you don't need ANY of them to run a business. Sometimes more is just more.
Oh, they have to pay Microsoft... Silly me, I should have know.
The ONLY reason Microsoft Office dominates the market is because of vendor lock in. Microsoft has armies of people trying to figure out how to stop groups like OpenOffice from being fully compatible with their document formats. For God's sake people... Word processors and spreadsheets haven't fundamentally changed in the last 20 years... All of this ODF v. MSOOXML is complete bullshit. ODF is a standard and MSOOXML is not. Microsoft is throwing up a huge smoke screen in an attempt to maintain its monopoly and to continue charging way too much for it's second rate software. The issue is literally that simple.
P.S. The ODF plugin for Microsoft Office does not count because most people don't even know it exists. Call me when Microsoft integrates ODF support with MS Office Standard.
They don't work with Microsoft to create drivers?
Everyone complains about RPM... Geeze. I like RPM. I have no doubt that the debian package system works well but to say that RPM sucks is little more than ignorance.
The question we should be asking is exactly why the school district is wasting tax payer dollars on Microsoft Office 2007. We should be asking why they are expecting parents to purchase software that they do not need and may not be able to afford. I did a cost analysis OpenOffice v. Microsoft Office 2007 for my employer. By my calculations, even assuming that Microsoft Office required absolutely no troubleshooting, which is laughable, it would still take us approximately 6-10 years to recoup the cost of purchasing Microsoft Office 2007, by which time Microsoft would have released 2-3 newer versions of their office suite and would readily expect us to buy their damn software all over again. For what? Microsoft Office doesn't fundamentally do anything that it didn't do 10 years ago. There are many companies out there that still use Office 97! The only difference between then and now is that it's now more expensive and runs slower. Viable freely available alternatives to Microsoft Office exist and our schools should be using them. To think that our School Boards expect us to believe that they pinch pennies to save money... My taxes are high enough without this level of irresponsibility, thank you very much.
P.S.
The irony in all of this is that at least half of the Pro-Microsoft arguments seem to come from people who make their living supporting Microsoft's shitty software.
As much as I like Red Hat based systems I'd switch to Debian in the blink of an eye if Red Hat signed an agreement with Microsoft, like Novell did.
Microsoft opposes everything that Linux has come to stand for. Linux is the best OS on the planet and it's completely free. If Microsoft was ever able to gain control of it those ass hats would start selling CALS for Linux servers, OEM stickers for Linux workstations, and sue your ass off if you didn't buy them. If you give Microsoft an inch they will walk all over you and they'll try to walk over you even if you don't. Just look at how hard Microsoft is trying to ramrod MSOOXML through the ISO standards committee. Do we really want Microsoft playing games with Linux? To hell with Microsoft's monopolistic games and any Linux distribution that signs with them.
Is there a backlash against Novell? Yes. The question isn't "Is there a backlash?" The question is, "Is the backlash large enough to make Novell's executives take notice."
That's right. Blame the language for the programmer's ineptitude. That's like saying the Linux bash shell is critically flawed because it doesn't protect them from their own stupidity when they are logged in as root... Do you even realize that the languages you're trumpeting use pointers on some level, just like C++? The only difference is that they are accessed through an abstraction that prevents the programmer from ganking himself. Ironically, the odds are that the implementation of that abstraction was written in C++!!! So you're basically saying that the solution to the problems with C++ is a language that's implemented in C++... What!?!!?
I've personally written C++ classes for handling associative arrays, large numbers(in the thousands of bits), typeless datatypes, and automatic pointer deallocation. The problem isn't the language. The problem is that no one bothers to learn how to use it.
If you can't keep track of your pointers write some template classes to do it for you. To lazy to do that? No worries!!! Boost.org has a complete library of smart pointers freely available for download!!!!
http://boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/smart_ptr.htm
P.S.
Please don't respond with something like, "C++ can't to this: " That is a complaint about libraries and not the language itself. Complaining that a platform dependent API is not part of the standard C++ library is little more than ignorance. If you need such an API, go find one and install it.
Please don't respond with, "It's hard to do stuff with C++!" No it isn't. I get so tired of that one. It's like listening to an 9th grader saying that math is too hard for mere mortals but, when asked, he hasn't done his homework in 2 months.
http://www.boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/smart_ptr.htm