I agree on the fact that the GNU project has not created any hi-quality WordProcessor yet, and I belive that the point is that with free efforts people want to write applications they are interested in and they use, rather than applications the corporate market would enjoy (thus we have very good scientific and programming tools; fairly good image processing systems, but not-so good spreadsheets... well... I don't use spreadsheets, but I use maxima for integration and symbolic calculus). Corporate committement is, of course, welcome: Wp8 and StarOffice (as well as a port of M$ Office) should be welcome because they are broadening the area of use and of interest concerning linux. My issue is that these products do address an `immediate need' but are dangerous on the long term: M$ has been trying to enforce its standards in quite a sneaky way: by just making its products the most widely used and then by slowly changing the format the data are stored in a non-backwards compatilbe way. Office for linux would just be a way for keeping people using a proprietary format (the.doc format, not even the.rtf one!!) versus the creation of a new ``open standard'', and this, to tell the truth I don't like. Maybe it is paranoia, maybe they are, as somebody has written "childish political issues", but I am much more afraid of ``proprietary undocumented document formats'' than of `closed' software... and I don't like very much closed software as well (even if I occasionally use it and for my work I look just as the tools that suit better a given job... still I prefer the GPL if the functionalities are the same)
My greatest issue against Microsoft programs is not that they are crappy & unstable, nor that they are not "open source", but mostly that they use propertary formats for storing data that could be recorded in a more effective, compact and open way... I just would like to be able to read a word document with more (actually I sometimes do that: first I filter it with strings and then pipe it to more...). When the EC or national governmets start asking you to submit your reports in a M$ format -instead of pdf, ascii or Tex- I feel like something very wrong is going on. From this point of view even a "free M$-Office" for Linux is quite a dangerous threat and I really hope that people will realize the risk of having all their documents not only written with proprietary tools but even stored in proprietary format... Does not the recent issue on the serial number inserted in all the outgoing documents produced by a Win98 box suggest you something? I usually like to know what MY computer is doing, and what is written exactly in a file, rather than stare at a thousand of different incompatilbe formats (word 1.x/2.x/word for MAC... etc.), all, for practical purposes, equivalent! Moreover I have not seen any version of Office with support for Hyerogliphics -that I like to have and TeX has- and I think this is a huge misfeature (at least for me!).
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I agree on the fact that the GNU project has not created any hi-quality WordProcessor yet, and I belive that the point is that .doc format, not even the .rtf one!!) versus the creation of a new ``open standard'', and this, to tell the truth I don't like. Maybe it is paranoia, maybe they are, as somebody has written "childish political issues", but I am much more afraid of ``proprietary undocumented document formats'' than
with free efforts people want to write applications they are interested in and they use, rather than applications the corporate market would
enjoy (thus we have very good scientific and programming tools; fairly good image processing systems, but not-so good spreadsheets... well... I don't use
spreadsheets, but I use maxima for integration and symbolic calculus). Corporate committement is, of course, welcome: Wp8 and StarOffice (as well as a port of M$ Office) should be welcome because they are broadening the area of use
and of interest concerning linux. My issue is that these products do address an `immediate need' but are dangerous on the long term:
M$ has been trying to enforce its standards in quite a sneaky way: by just making its products the most widely used and then by slowly changing the format the data
are stored in a non-backwards compatilbe way. Office for linux would just be a way for keeping people
using a proprietary format (the
of `closed' software... and I don't like very much closed software as well (even if I occasionally use it and for my work I look just as the tools
that suit better a given job... still I prefer the GPL if the functionalities are the same)
My greatest issue against Microsoft programs is not
that they are crappy & unstable, nor that they are
not "open source", but mostly that they use propertary
formats for storing data that could be recorded in a
more effective, compact and open way... I just would
like to be able to read a word document with more
(actually I sometimes do that: first I filter it with
strings and then pipe it to more...). When the EC
or national governmets start asking you to submit your reports in a M$ format -instead of pdf, ascii or Tex- I feel like something very wrong is going on. From this point of view even a "free M$-Office" for Linux is
quite a dangerous threat and I really hope that people will realize the risk of having all their documents not only written with proprietary tools but even stored in proprietary format... Does not the recent issue on the serial number inserted in all the outgoing documents produced by a Win98 box suggest you something? I usually like to know what MY computer is doing, and what is written exactly in a file, rather than stare at a thousand of different incompatilbe formats (word 1.x/2.x/word for MAC... etc.), all, for practical purposes, equivalent! Moreover I have not seen any version of Office with support for Hyerogliphics -that I like to have and TeX has- and I think this is a huge misfeature (at least for me!).