Weekly Edition
Return to the Announcements page
| |||||||||||||
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community
OpenOffice.org has announced that IBM has
joined the community and plans to assist in the development of the office software.
"IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products."
(Log in to post comments)
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 10, 2007 23:31 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Odd... I thought IBM already contributed to OpenOffice. Er, maybe it was that they used ODF in Lotus Notes. Regardless, I think it's good that they're providing contributory support like this. Somewhat related: I suppose IBM is in a really good position to promote OpenOffice given that the fast-track OOXML vote has been decided. Does anyone suppose IBM had been planning this contingent on the OOXML rejection, or do you think they instead used the rejection to make OOo part of their market strategy?
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 4:00 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] I guess it was getting hard for IBM to back ODF and not be part of that community. So, are they going to sign their modifications over to Sun? I bet they negotiated not to do that.Bruce
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 6:21 UTC (Tue) by tbm (subscriber, #7049) [Link] According to http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/ibm_joins_openoffice_org which links to http://www.openoffice.org/copyright/copyrightapproved.html#i IBM has signed Sun's Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA).
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 11, 2007 8:07 UTC (Tue) by alextingle (guest, #20593) [Link] I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. It's like a little piece of the mid 90s, right there on my desktop. They need to work on modularisation, so we can have an MS-Office clone for those who need it, but a modern office suite for the rest of us.
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 11, 2007 9:53 UTC (Tue) by miekg (subscriber, #4403) [Link] I totally agree. Abiword for instance is so much nicer than all that oo stuff. If only there was a nice powerpoint clone (for gnome).
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 11, 2007 13:05 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Ya Abiword is nicer, but it's still not comparable.
For example I got a doc format file sent to me as part of a job application. It heavily used macros to turn the doc into a sort of automated form that I had to fill out.
Now in Abiword it openned, but it was very bad (very ugly formatting) and none of the macro stuff worked. In OO.org it worked fine, at least tolerably and exporting the filled out form to PDF made sure that the other party got a readable reply (since I own no copy of MS Office to test to see if it looked ok after OO.org molested it)
(and no I didn't take the job. Are they freaking insane?)
In Linux-land this wouldn't of been done.. it would of been done using a simple PHP application on some ssl-encrypted website and it would of been much better and it wouldn't of required the purchase of a 300 dollar Office suite by the end users. It would of required significantly less technical knowledge also.
But that's the problem. 95% of the business world is Windows-land, not Linux-land. And MS Office is a transmitted disease. That's just how it is, unfortunately.
I don't think that anybody wants Abiword to match OO.org in what it can do with word documents. It would ruin it.
So I figure it's just better to let OO.org and Sun and friends take the brunt of the work of compatibility. It doesn't have to be wonderful, it doesn't have to be pretty, it doesn't have to be fast. What it needs to be is cheap and provide reliable communication with the majority of the world that uses MS Office exclusively.
Be thankful, what they are doing is absolutely critical. In the past few years it's now become obvious that Windows compatibility through things like SAMBA and OO.org, while ugly, is a very good thing for Linux.
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 11, 2007 14:29 UTC (Tue) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link] I feel exactly the same way. I've tried to get lots of people to switch,and they all do for a while, but they go back because OOo is horribly buggy, cumbersome to use, slow to load, and just flat out looks weird. I'm honestly trying as hard as I can to ditch OOo for nicer programs like KWord, but unfortunately I haven't been able to switch yet. I'd also be nice to be able to remove some around 200 megs of junk that OO takes up on my system.
It'd be very nice if Sun took the time to try to modernize OO by
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 11, 2007 18:14 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] Yes!! Sun is still concentrating on adding junk like databases and Java runtimes. Why? That is not what's holding OOo adoption back. Sun should just stop adding features for six months and just concentrate on drastically cutting the amount of code in the project. And maybe get OO to launch in a somewhat reasonable amount of time? I bet this would attract far more people than the new Java installers and report designers that they're working on.
Some usability tests would go a long way too. But bloat is the biggie.
Personally, I manage to get by with AbiWord and Gnumeric, but that's just because I have very light demands for my office software.
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 12, 2007 0:58 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] > Yes!! Sun is still concentrating on adding junk like databases and Java runtimes. Why? <*snip*>
Why?
Because people use those features on a daily basis to do their work! That's why! I know that this may become shocker, but people do use this sort of thing on a daily basis. Not nessicarially in OO.org, but definately in MS Office (due to the relative infancy of actually having a working "OO.org Base")
It's one of the major reasons why people bother to shell out 300+ dollars for the full-featured version of MS Office (rather then the crippled 'student' or other cheaper versions)
OpenOffice.org has it's own java database. But it's not something they made, it's another project that they've included. Besides that OO.org has support for Mysql as well as well as ODBC support for hooking into most any SQL database you care to throw at it. From MS Office/OO.org you can manage and build databases, create tables, import data, create relationships and build forms that execute custom sql commands.
Doing this laypeople (at least in MS Access, OO.org Base suffers from nearly complete and total lack of documentation) are able to build fairly complex form applications that tie into company databases. They can create tables and relationships for keeping data for small businesses.
They can also import data from things like websites into word documents or enter and view financial data into spreadsheets that hook into databases. Using hooks like this they can generate reports, format fancy graphs, and a whole host of other useful information technology-related floatsam and jetsam.
My father, who is VP in a very large financial institution (dealing in regular multi-million dollar transactions on a daily basis) uses spreadsheet-based programs and other macro-using features of MS Office to manage finances and reports and such. It all ties into fairly massive databases that are used by hundreds of people, each using MS Office related stuff as front ends. Of course there are lots of other lesser applications and they have customized database application built using other languages, but ultimately a hell of a lot of it ties into MS Office.
This sort of thing is normal, everyday stuff. Just basic work-a-day functionality that is expected in a Office Suite and is taken advantage of by thousands and thousands of companies.
Of course OO.org is not the only application that is used in Linux to do these sort of things. It's definitely not the best either. But it's what people expect. It's what users expect. If you want large adoption in corporate-land then this is just a hard requirement. Without this sort of thing you won't even be considered.
Once corporations start using Linux and start noticing the benefits that true software diversity that customizable open source software can bring them, then OO.org will start to be less and less important. But right now there is a very very good reason why Sun is doing what they are doing.
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 12, 2007 9:17 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] Yeah, a friend of mine makes a good living converting Access databases to web apps. But we're talking about OOo...
Do you know of anyone using its Java runtime? I don't either. Turning it off reduces OOo Writer launch times, from 12 seconds to 7 seconds (cache warm) on my laptop. Tools -> Options -> Java, uncheck "Use a Java runtime environment. That's rather dramatic! For comparison, AbiWord launches in less than a second on the same machine.
Since I don't see any reduced functionality, I have to guess that Java in OOo is pure bloat. But I'm certainly no expert in office tools.
I've never heard of anybody using OOo Base. Have you? Still, as long as it doesn't slow me down or occupy hundreds of megs of disk space, I figure I can live with it.
I'd be more interested if OO weren't so horrid. Posted Sep 13, 2007 23:58 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] Thanks for this hint; I didn't know that!
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 10:28 UTC (Tue) by danielhedblom (guest, #47307) [Link] I think OpenOffice will have much help by a big vendor like IBM putting its back behind it. OpenOffice has its place in the business world no doubt.
Personally what i would really want for Linux is a Desktop Publishing Application that is very easy to use. A cross between a word processor, a presentation app and a DTP application. That is frankly what most people use Office applications for. Simple documents with few pages that has advanced layouts.
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 12:14 UTC (Tue) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] I don't just want a simple DTP app though; I want something that can match (and preferably immitate) Quark XPress. QXP is the only piece of proprietary software I ever miss a free counterpart of (well, some more games would be nice too).
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 14:54 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] LaTeX (or LyX, if you want point-and-click) does all of the above. And many of us use it exclusively.
That's a serious answer. I don't see the point in converting Linux into a Windows clone. The "Unix way" is Linux's strength, not its weakness. No proprietary application can approach (La)TeX for math typesetting, and only the most expensive programs compare with it even for plain text typesetting.
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 17:12 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] LaTeX is far better at providing good results and is a much better practice than word processors. On the other hand, it's very difficult to get useful information other than beautifully formatted text out of LaTeX, because it's a library for a Turing-complete language, not a data format. Furthermore, there's (so far as I know) no way of securely rendering a potentially-malicious LaTeX document, which makes it somewhat less feasible as a format for business users.
Now, if there were a declarative, inert format based on LaTeX, that could easily take over the world, but LaTeX as designed and implemented (as a macro language and library) is fundamentally incapable of doing some important things that word-processing formats do badly, but can at least do at all. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyone working on making a good combination of these things, because LaTeX works for the people who know about it, and nobody (except maybe Knuth) knows how TeX actually works inside.
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 20:33 UTC (Tue) by socket (guest, #43) [Link] I humbly dispute the claim that nobody but Knuth understands how TeX works. However, you are correct that there are things that {La,}TeX simply can't do.
Suppose you're trying to make a publication (like a newspaper) that uses a story to fill n inches of one column on the first page, then the text "See page m," with the remaining text of the story placed appropriately on page m.
This is something even old versions of Pagemaker, back in its pre-Adobe days, could handle. TeX's boxes, springs, and glue model is very elegant and works well for a lot of things, but it needs at least one more fundamental component (spanning regions? Is there a better name?) to handle this. As it is, TeX *can't* do this, and I'm disappointed.
TeX still has beauty, but it sadly looks its age.
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community Posted Sep 11, 2007 21:02 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] There are a lot of people who are good at making TeX do what they want it to, but it's not trivial to find the rendering engine in the TeX source, let alone understand how this engine could be separated from the particular macro language. (And things get even more convoluted with LaTeX, where there are a number of auxiliary files processed by code in the macro language that provide input back through the macro language to the rendering engine.)
The reason I thing that {La,}TeX is fundamentally flawed is that it would be pretty much hopeless to try to make a web site like LWN, except where the comments are submitted in TeX, despite the fact that it would be a perfect format for writing comments (and articles), if only the site could process the input sanely.
Wouldn't it be nice if... Posted Sep 11, 2007 15:25 UTC (Tue) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] IBM helped get OOo into such shape that they could replace MSOffice throughout the corporation. Now that would be a step in the right direction.I can dream, can't I?
Wouldn't it be nice if... Posted Sep 13, 2007 2:56 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] Well if we're going down that road, wouldn't it be nice if IBM ported Smartsuite to POSIX and FLTK and liberated it?
Wouldn't it be nice if... Posted Sep 13, 2007 8:45 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link] Well, Novell did it!
Seriously, we are using OpenOffice on Linux throughout the
corporation, and it works well enough. So, OpenOffice is already good enough for a large corporation. That said, thanks IBM for joining in this effort!
This is my understanding... Posted Sep 13, 2007 10:16 UTC (Thu) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link] IBM seem to be quite lax, as far as traditional locking down of devices goes - lots of their staff are running betas of upcoming IBM products. For instance, many staff had upgraded to the Notes R8 betas just after they came out - so were running the IBM Productivity Editors (based on OO.org 1.x).
I also know that IBM are very interested in reducing the number of licenses that they have for tools like Office. So I'd imagine that if you can run on OO.org, they'd be happy to allow you to - so long as you let them know that it's one less license to renew next year! ;-)
Long term, I'm sure that they're now thinking of getting everyone that can make do with Productivity Editors/OO.org onto those products, and might even begin a drive towards that in the near future.
Back in the nineties, IBM had a set of ads for OS/2 featuring a juggling, dancing elephant. They intended to show that OS/2 could do many things at once. Pundits instantly took it up to beat IBM with - "Elephants can't dance", they said, mocking IBM's large size and rigid structure.
Given the ongoing IBM support for a variety of OSS projects (Apache, Eclipse, Cloudscape/Derby, and others), and how quickly and thoroughly they've managed to commit to them and work with the community, I have to say that I might just be convinced that the elephant can, in fact, dance.
I think that within a year, they'll have 50% or more of their staff off Office. Possibly more. Given how many staff IBM employ (355,000+), that's pretty impressive - but quite achievable, given the position they're now in.
So for their own corporation, your dream may come true. Then others just need to read the case study they'll put out, look at their license costs, and utter the inevitable "WTF?" before they start planning... ;-)
|
|||||||||||||