Glad to see Novell committing developers

Posted Jul 25, 2004 1:35 UTC (Sun) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494)
Parent article: OLS Day 3: Failed experiments, Linux-Tiny, and the Linux Standard Base (NewsForge)

Every large company which does this (and IIRC IBM has developers with an oar in this particular water as well) helps to make the project that much less reliant on Sun, which in many ways appears to be a house divided against itself right now.

If the Lotus Office support were up to scratch, I could safely say that OOo does all I expect of an office suite (people who use WordPerfect might have their own axe to grind, of course :-).

The only other feature I'd require after that is survivability, and having Novell pitch in goes a long way towards realising that in a way understood by other corporations.

I wouldn't advocate pulling developers from KOffice or Gnumeric, which each have their own strengths and each represent an important feature of Open Source: diversity. Yes, packages like Apache and OpenOffice tend to dominate their fields, but Zope and KOffice are still there to try out different ways of doing things, and to offer an instant alternative should some unforeseen disaster take down the popular "leaders" in their field. For this reason it disturbed me to see KOffice dropping their own native formats.

It also worries me that Apache has no peer. It's great software, well maintained and flexible, but it runs 2/3 of all web servers, which is a monocultural disaster waiting to happen. IIS hardly counts, it's a disaster that's already happened (still happens, in a way: I still get the odd CodeRed hit on my servers) and it's heavily subsidised by Microsoft's marketing muscle (meaning that as Microsoft loses mindshare, so will IIS).

I don't see any calls from the Apache organisation urging the Roxen and Zope developers to down tools and join them.

Glad to see Novell committing developers

Posted Jul 25, 2004 6:43 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

[...] but Zope and KOffice are still there to try out different ways of doing things, and to offer an instant alternative should some unforeseen disaster take down the popular "leaders" in their field. For this reason it disturbed me to see KOffice dropping their own native formats.

I don't quite follow. If KOffice now uses the same file format as OOo, doesn't that actually make it more plausible as a potential OOo replacement? I guess you are thinking of a SCO-type scenario where Sun goes mad and suddenly claims OOo and everything related to it is proprietary,and costs money to use, but isn't the file format documeted separately and submitted by Sun as a proposed standard? The eventual resolution of the SCO case (in particular whether their claims about ELF will fly) hopefully will mark the limits of such retroactive grabs.

Glad to see Novell committing developers

Posted Jul 26, 2004 7:10 UTC (Mon) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link]

Exactly, that's the whole point behind an open standard, that nobody has an MS Office like lock over your data, the best tool for the best task. Sometimes that's OOo, sometimes it's StarOffice, sometimes it's KOffice or AbiWord, if we all grow the market together we don't have to worry about other OSS suites stealing our userbase because we'll be taking so much out of MS Office as an ecosystem that there'll be more than enough users to go round.

Oh and btw. the new one is called the OASIS Open Office Standard as it's subtly different to the OOo 1.0 file format after general community/industry involvement and feedback over at OASIS.

Glad to see Novell committing developers

Posted Jul 26, 2004 11:23 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

(people who use WordPerfect might have their own axe to grind, of course :-)

Exactly! I hate Word - it's horribly designed, it's a nightmare to use, etc etc etc. And a lot of this stems down to the CONCEPTS behind it! Seeing as OOo is a copy of this, it is equally fundamentally broken. And because it's "broken by design", it's unfixable.

The underpinnings of WordPerfect are *different*. And if you like WP, then you're going to hate Word (and, by implication, OOo). And from my contacts with people who apparently do really know OOo, those features that make WordPerfect what it is are NOT going to be cloned into OOo, because it is too damned hard, because the fundamental design gets in the way!

My copies of WP are going to have to be prised out of my cold, dead hands, and if the only way I can run it is Wine for Windows 3.1 and interchanging documents with OOo using Word 6 .doc format, then so be it :-( but I'd rather have a nice spanking new update of WP8linux which I would be well prepared to pay for ...

Cheers,
Wol

Glad to see Novell committing developers

Posted Jul 29, 2004 0:17 UTC (Thu) by goldmoon (guest, #23537) [Link]

Ahh, but there is a viable, free alternative to Apache ... lighttpd. Check it out. Lighter, faster, better, but not cheaper since developer doesn't pay you to use it ;)