Meanderings

How to offend developers, or why I'm going back to Microsoft Office

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on October 03, 2007 11:52:07 AM

Weird tangents in time ? This laptop hard-drive just couldn't be resurrected anymore (three trips to the refrigerator worked fine, but sooner than later it wasn't going to work anymore.)

I took the machine in to the shop for the guys to replace the hard-drive, they couldn't ghost the hard-drive, so they reinstalled all the base software which included Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and Microsoft Office 2003.

As some one who has dutifully been 'beta-testing' Open Office since version pre-1.0 and have recently downloaded the current 2.30 release I was just arriving at the stage to reinstall my Office Productivity Software.

I subscribe to Planet OpenOffice's News Feed and this morning caught up with some sad indicators of where Open Office is not heading.

Michael Meeks- 2007-10-02- Tuesday

Very disappointed to read Kohei's blog. Sun re-writing a contributor's code because they refuse to accept the licensing terms they give to other people: the LGPL; saddening. Sun chooses the licensing for OO.o; why choose a license they won't accept themselves ?

...

What we don't like is the insistence that all and any contributed code, shipped at OpenOffice.org must end up being owned by Sun. In this case, the solver is a nicely separated, individual shared library UNO component and completely de-coupled from OO.o. I'm personally a fan of the LGPL, and OO.o (and StarOffice) contains lots of non-Sun owned modules including several LGPL modules, in it's core: eg. Daniel Velliard's nice libxml2 library. Due to static linking, there is even pure LGPL code floating outside the 'external' project. So - why is Kohei's nicely separated, working, specified, UNO component not acceptable purely under the project's license: the LGPL ?

and then

Kohei Yoshida- History of Calc Solver

I’ve been trying to avoid writing a piece like this simply because if I wrote one, there would be a lot of bitterness involved, and I don’t like to put a blame on anybody. But when I saw a lot of confusion over the state of my Calc Solver in Barcelona (not the least of which is Louis’ announcement on Calc Solver for 3.0 during his keynote speech, which was truly a bad surprise for me), as well as this statement by Stefan Taxhet (st) in the issue page outlining Sun’s intention to duplicate the entire work I did (for free), I felt like it was time for me to explain what actually happened surrounding my effort to write an Optimization Solver for Calc.

...

But I’d love to be proven wrong. I’d love to be proven that Sun still are willing to work with us, to make OO.o truly a wonderful product as well as a project attractive to prospective code contributors. But there is nothing I, as a single insignificant mere mortal can do to influence the behemoth that is Sun. It’s impossible to make an even slightest change in how the project is run, even after countless hours of coding and more than 10,000 lines of code generation (which I received no compensation for and involved quite a lot of personal sacrifice). In the end, I made no difference at all. Sad, truly sad.

To make a long story short, OpenOffice as a project is starting to find holes in the facade of its openness.

IBM Support for OpenOffice

IBM currently ships what is almost effectively FREE Office Productivity Suite called IBM Lotus SmartSuite (being that sometimes you can get it in OEM bundles for very little.) This suite in 1999 handled tables in wordprocessing documents a lot better than OpenOffice in 2007 (that's not comforting.)

When IBM recently announced that they were going to contribute code to OpenOffice it made me smile, just like they contributed code to Lotus Notes and took the premier Messaging, Groupware product to being unknown overnight, or their contribution to Lotus 123 a fully functional spreadsheet numerical analysis tool that historians recall having somewhere hidden in the IBM hallways. There was once a competitive word-processing program at IBM DisplayWrite which as I recall was second only to WordPerfect at one time. Sadly, it now only sells for their MVS/CICS platforms?

Lotus bought the 1st Windows WordProcessor Ami Pro --> Word Pro at its time, this was a superior word processor to Microsoft's Windows Word 1.x 2.x.

IBM in PC Software is just weird, and with a very poor track record. I would not use their involvement as a great measure of success, but potential danger of causing a software system to fail. If you remember OS/2 and Tangent/PINK, they are very huge PC Software developments that lauded success and IBM can share significant blame for their failures.

Microsoft Office

The weird thing about the reinstallation of this laptop, and the disaster that is unfolding with the mechanics of servicing OpenOffice non-Sun developers, is that I was already being pushed to use Microsoft Office anyway.

OOXML and ODF is a waste of time for me, for the foreseeable future all my friends are on Microsoft Office and conversion tools are coming along to convert documents to the 'next(tm)' format.

Microsoft Word works for me, Office Write is a struggle to do what I want to do on a daily basis (inserting tables from the spreadsheet is a major dysfunctional event with Open Office.) I deplore users of Powerpoint, but have no real preference between it and OO Impress.

Firefox, Thunderbird, GTalk, WL Messenger, WL Writer are my communications packages, and they are not dependent on OO nor MSO, although 3 of 2 are dependent on MS Windows.

Conclusion

I'll most likely try out OO again when 3.0 release candidates come out, but by then I'll probably be embedded in Microsoft Office 2010 to much care.

Nomoa.com

Meanderings

Modules

How to offend developers, or why I'm going back to Microsoft Office

IBM Support for OpenOffice

Microsoft Office

Conclusion