Red Hat accuses Sun of Microsoft tactics (News.com) [LWN.net]

"Open Office formats"

Posted Jun 8, 2002 18:17 UTC (Sat) by utidjian (subscriber, #444) [Link]

I don't think they are quite as "open" as you may think.

Try this (using either OOo or SO): create a document in StarWriter or OOoWriter. Don't do anything fancy... just type in "Hello World!" (or something). Do File --> Save as in the native .sxw format. Now try lessing or moreing or cating that file. You can't get anything useful out of it because it is compressed. OK... so gunzip that file... then try and look at it. Still confusing isn't it?

Now try the same thing with a recent version of Abiword. MUCH cleaner.

Dia, like SO and OOo, also uses a compressed xml format for its native format but it is still useable after extraction.

LyX uses a plain ASCII text and markup language format. They provide a commandline util for dumping to plain text with a reasonable approximation of the formatting.

IIRC this past January I needed to edit some docs that I had created using SO 6.0beta. I couldn't. The "beta" had timed out. I couldn't even buy the damn license to the full version because it hadn't been released yet. Essentially all of this data was locked up in, for all practical purposes, an essentially proprietary format. You may or may not appreciate the level of inconvenience and aggravation this caused for me. I immediately downloaded the latest release of OpenOffice.org and installed it. For that one problem I will NEVER trust my work to StarOffice again. Because Sun may decide to change the "openness" of their file formats at any time... even deactivate the product I can not afford to trust my data to their format. I will never buy or install SO on any of the machines I administer. I will only use OOo for the occasional "throw away" document (such as a single page announcement). Perhaps I will use it to unmangle the occasional MS-Word document.

All of my documents that are important to me are now created with LyX. LyX is far simpler to use and creates a far superior finished product than any other program I have ever used.

IMO anyone who uses SO is risking access to their data. For me and for many others that risk is too great. It would be foolish of me to take that risk after what happened in the above mentioned example. Do you want to take that risk? Would you advise customers to take that risk? Do you think it would be wise for RedHat to put their customers data at risk?

-DU-...etc...

"Open Office formats"

Posted Jun 8, 2002 22:28 UTC (Sat) by erat (guest, #21) [Link]

FWIW, I purchased a licensed copy of Codeweaver's Crossover Plugin for Linux a short time ago, and I've found that Microsoft's Word and Excel file viewers work surprisingly well with it. Unless you plan on editing MS Word and/or Excel files on Linux, I'd recommend just getting the plugin and snagging the free MS file viewers. They display/print MS documents very well.

Another alternative is downloading/installing doc2pdf from http://doc2pdf.sourceforge.net. I believe it requires a Windows machine somewhere on your network, but most corporate networks have at least one Windows box somewhere so this isn't that big of a deal for most folks. Basically, you email a Word document to a doc2pdf machine, and in return you'll get a .pdf file. For viewing/printing, this is a fairly good alternative.

Then, of course, there's antiword... I know of folks who have set up antiword as a pseudo mail filter so it'll work similar to doc2pdf (i.e. you email a Word document to the antiword machine and it'll send you back a text version of the Word document). Pretty cool stuff.

Just figured I'd jump in and offer alternatives. (I'll probably avoid *Office too. It's a huge chunk of software for the few scattered things I'd need it to do. There are less disk space consuming solutions...)

"Open Office formats"

Posted Jun 11, 2002 6:54 UTC (Tue) by mark (guest, #1921) [Link]

The above comment is rubbish.

First, OO is free as in speech. It's ridiculous to assert that one commercial project (abiword) is "more free" than another (openoffice) when they are both available under the same license (GPL).

Second, the OO format is straightforward to use -- if you use "unzip" and not "gunzip", that is. The OO format is a directory tree. One of the files subsequently unzipped contains the text. I have written XSLT stylesheets to transform OO documents into HTML and PDF (XML:FO). It's trivial. Just because abiword's format is putatively easier to understand does not make it better. OO does a *lot* more than AbiWord does and perhaps the file format simply reflects this.

I fail to see how a requirement to use "unzip" to read your data is "lock-in". Especially considering that you could just have downloaded OO and read your file with that.

While the OO file format may or may not be fully documented, the code is there for everyone to see. To complain that SO locks you in -- when the fully functional OO is out there, compatible, and free -- is just silly.

Ah ha!

Posted Jun 11, 2002 16:22 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

It's a detective thing...

Thanks for the clarification; I had *thought* that there was more going on there than meets the eye.

I must say, though, that I'm a touch surprised that gunzip would get *anything* out of a file that was supposed to be unpacked with unzip... they don't use the same compression, do they?

"Open Office formats"

Posted Jun 11, 2002 17:15 UTC (Tue) by utidjian (subscriber, #444) [Link]

I didn't say Abiword was "more free" than SO or OOo. It certainly appeared to me that the format for Abiword files are "more open" than for SO or OOo.

Thanks for clearing up my error in (g)unzipping the saved files.

I did download OOo to access those files.

I am just paranoid that Sun may decide to change the file format in SO and NOT pass the info to OOo. All we have from Sun is a promise. IOW I am paranoid of getting "locked in" and/or "locked out" if I use SO.

I will continue to use OOo as I see fit (and Abiword) but only for translation or the occasional throw away document. For lengthy stuff that I need to keep I will use LyX. LyX BTW, exports directly to PDF and HTML if one so chooses.

-DU-...etc...

RH Belly Aching! How Childish!

Posted Jun 8, 2002 1:02 UTC (Sat) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

I think Red Hat is complaining more about Sun's desire to create their own distribution than about StarOffice pricing.

As I see it Sun has tried to nurture an alternative office suite (and create a viable alternative set of productivity file formats) through a set of planned phases:

Buy StarDivision
Release binaries for free
Rework the sources for release
Release the sources
Fund and promote the development of OOo (OpenOffice.org) until it's usable
Promote the use of OpenOffice.org over StarOffice by returning to a fee-based licensing model.

At these prices Sun is clearly not trying to make money on this. They might make a little bit; but it seems that they're trying to minimize their ongoing expenditures while promoting the MS Office alternative (or "killer" depending on your point of view). At $76 retail and ~$10 - $20 wholesale/bundling it's going to be a long time before Sun breaks even on support and manufacturing costs and they'll probably never recoup their investment (directly).

It seems clear that Sun is trying to reduce the predominance of MS Office in the purchasing priorities of broad market segments in order to defend their server marketshare (a counter move to MS' overt attempts to use their desktop productivity suite to force their users to adopt MS server platforms). If Sun also ends up with a broadened workstation market (more engineers and programmers willing to do their word processing and spread sheets on the workstation they already have; fewer cubicles with both a SPARC and PC in them) then they'll be happy.

[If a whole lot of engineers and programmers who work on SPARC or PowerPC can eschew that "extra" PC then THEY'LL be happy, too. (Note: I'm primarily a PC user and probably always will be; but there are some people out there that really prefer other hardware platforms). Wonder how long it will be before MS discontinues IE and Office on Mac; they can't be happy about Mac OS X!]

It's hard to characterize this as a "Microsoft" tactic. Microsoft uses their market dominance to crush competition. Sun's StarOffice isn't in a position of market dominance (unless you define the "market" as Linux productivity application suites, and even that is dubious given Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, etc). A "Microsoftesque" tactic would have been for Sun to wedge the adoption of StarOffice into the use of GNOME and for them to have tried to use their influence in the GNOME APIs to block the development of Abiword --- for example. They didn't do that (and probably couldn't have even if they'd tried).

Red Hat Green With Envy

Posted Jun 10, 2002 17:40 UTC (Mon) by DeletedUser1405 ((unknown), #1405) [Link]

Red Hat is green with envy. They have done very well selling and servicing highly engineered Linux systems, but have failed to come up with a play demonstrating that open source efforts can effectively be commercialized. Which is to say that Linux alone isn't enough. The market demands far more functionality and systems integration than Red Hat provides.

Sun meanwhile is well on their way to proving that the unchartered waters of open source communities can be successfully navigated and engaged. They've done the impossible (harnessed the collaborative productivity of open source communities) to achieve the impossible (take out Microsoft). Watch out Microsoft. Watch out IBM.

Sun has devised a corporate formula combining open source communities (Java, Open Office, GNU/Linux), and open standards (file formats, interfaces, and components), with advanced systems engineering, sales and service. That such diverse interests as Red Hat, IBM, and Microsoft, are all on the attack is a sure sign that this new age formula is going to work.

It's not the meager margins from selling Star Office that impress me (or anyone else for that matter). It's that a corporate systems provider has finally figured a way to take Microsoft's iron fisted control of the desktop out of the highly connected and carefully orchestrated network systems equation. Complete "productivity" feature set, open XML file formats, and open interfaces are the first level of a "equivalency plus open standards" objective. The big enchilada is in the modular EJB ready component design sitting on desktops everywhere, waiting for the J2EE crowd to tap into the rich resources. This next step in the plan is nothing short of an all out assault on the future of Microsoft, the .NET platform. Chairman Bill had hardly got his MS Office XP - .NET component model into the hands of the shills before the Open Office interfaces and XML file formats began to reveal their EJB wrapper power. The J2EE crowd has been saved. The .NET dragon wounded.

With the newly opened Java Community (Apache today, JBoss tomorrow) and the Open Office.org community in hand, Sun the systems provider takes on the challenge of merging the Linux and Solaris API. As the driving force behind the Java and Open Office API, this puts Sun in a very unique position. A position that no other Linux/Unix systems provider can even begin to approximate. It is the position of being able to respond to corporate enterprise demands for the engineering and maintenance of extraordinarily complex and highly integrated systems. Systems that expand the corporate stack to include desktops, handhelds, and hordes of dedicated devices marshalled into the grid.

Red Hat thrives on third party contracts, like those with Oracle and IBM, that by their very nature push Red Hat services into a tight "Linux only" box. The higher level "big dollar" services of integrating the enterprise and "owning" the client relationship belongs to the partners, not Red Hat. Poor Szulik, the gravy is flowing elsewhere, and he's left with the grunt work.

Compare that to the position Sun is moving towards. Sun can provide an entire vertical system solution, and service it. Hardware, software, and the integrated systems engineering to make it work. No need for messy partnerships, those arrangements that more often than not work great in a press release, but dissolve into the endless uncertainties of feudal squabbling as the reality of system integration and business process orchestration kicks in.

Yeah, Red Hat should be worried. They only provided what was easy to package, when the marketplace of users needed so much more. If serving the demands of the market means getting jiggy with open source communities (Linux, Java, and cross-over champions Open Office.org - Mozilla), then Red Hat ought to get busy. Sitting on a three legged stool with only one leg in place is a balancing act no longer sustainable.

~ge~
garyedwards@yahoo.com