<flame><rant> On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Graham Lauder <yorick_(a)openoffice.org> wrote:
On Saturday 22 March 2008 10:03:48 Ian McDonald wrote:
Update on what is in this: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html
To me it looks like features Office has had for years.....
Many opensource projects innovate and I think it is time they did this rather than copy.
Many times we get these comments on the lists and because of my "position" within OOo I have to bite my lip. Here though I'll take the moment to have a good old rant.
And I'll take the chance to respond as well. My statement was short and was a generalisation but I still stand by it. It was referring to the "major" new features in OO 3 - and those features have been in MS Office for a while mostly and are almost identical.
<rant>
Frankly Ian, I expected better of you.
Why do you expect better of me? Is it because: - I have been president of WLUG? - because I have code merged in the Linux kernel and several other projects? - because I am advocating open source software (include OO) to CIOs who run around 40,000 desktops and large number of servers? And I have converted some of these already - including OO. - because I have been playing with open source office tools such as Abiword, Gnumeric, Koffice, Staroffice since the 1990s? - because I have been setting open standards by being on working groups on the IETF? So even though I am passionate about open source I should not express my opinions?
One day I'd like to count up the number of times that some one comes onto the OOo lists and _demands_ that the developers, who are in their eyes a bunch of morons for not thinking of this themselves, put in some feature because that's the way Word or Excel or Powerpoint or some other similar coded excrement does it.
Do these same people ever ask MS to include PDF export, PDF forms, a truly powerful stylist or perhaps give them a full cross platform office suite. Of course not! Because they know they'll get roundly ignored. What they want is MS Office for free because they're too damn lazy to take off their blinkers and see OOo for what it is. A better product in a lot of cases.
MS have PDF export, forms support (not PDF but in many ways better) and cross platform for the two big platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux is not yet big unfortunately...). Most of those are because users asked for them and Microsoft has been consistent about listening to user feedback and also about innovating. They may not do what people want when they want but neither do opensource projects. Yes with opensource people can do it themselves, which is a major advantage, but not many people do this.
For instance, why is it that people will spend hours generating a form in word with fields, protecting this bit and that when they can do the same in OOo in a tenth of time using PDF forms.
Because they don't understand that there are better ways to do it - both is MS Office and OO.
Business is saying "F**k innovation let me do work faster and more efficiently" and in the majority of business cases OOo will allow you to do just that. Give me any group of Office staffers for a day and I will prove it. Will they change? Some will, some won't, some believe they have to get their boss to spend thousands of licensing dollars to get a product that will do the job for them and that something for free can't be any good so they don't give it a second glance. Others want their bosses to spend thousands on them because it makes them feel valued so using a zero license cost product is a nono. Others are open to change and are amazed when they see what OOo can do for them.
And in this regards OO actually has a major advantage as there is less training going from Office 2003 to OO then from Office 2003 to Office 2007. However if you get away from looking at what is easiest for the user in the short term there are major benefits in Office 2007 or OO.
OOo 3.0 will support Office "Open" xml, point out to me, if you will, where MS Office supports ODF.
OOo 3 is a free upgrade from 2.X or even 1.X, has MS taken hold of this innovation.
Introduce to me if you will to a simple enduser who got a feature included in MS Office, I can do that easily for OOo.
Yes I do know of instances.
There is innovation all through OOo that people simply ignore. It was OOo and it's corporate partners that launched and promoted the idea of a fully open Document Format that anyone could use. It was OOo and the corporate partners that got that adopted as an ISO standard, something that MS is desperately trying to emulate (and badly I might add)
And I think Microsoft is trying to do the same with OOXML although not so well in some areas, but better in other areas. Microsoft moved down this path also due to market and technological pressures just as OO did.
X forms PDF Editor, Hybrid PDF Styles UNO Extensions and so on, there is innovation within a necessarily conservative environment.
Our biggest problem is that the constant trumpeting is about "Compatibility" OOo developers spend far too much time, as far as I'm concerned, on so called compatibility. MS is NOT required to spend ANY time on compatibility, has anyone asked? MS developers seem incapable of ODF compliance to the point of having to farm that responsibility out to third parties and yet Sun, Novell and the OOo community have developed OOXML filters. IMO All of this developer time is wasted when it could have been used on more pressing enhancements in OOo.
If you want some innovative feature create an extension. Plenty of info on how to do that at extensions.openoffice.org.
If you come up with some innovative feature and you can't code it yourself, then feel free to pay a developer to hack at the OOo source code and contribute it to the community.
And if you want to talk about the biggest innovation of all, that in itself is the greatest which so many seem happy to ignore. It is after all Open Source.
I think Open Source is a huge innovation and a better way of doing things. I do hope Microsoft will move further down this than their tentative steps. I do believe that Microsoft has innovated more than most other players though. The exception to this is probably in the areas of security, reliability and performance on the server where GNU/Linux has led the way for quite some time.
</rant>
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. :) At the Sydney LCA I talked with Joe Brockmeier about marketing OOo and he made the point that in terms of the Linux market OOo is at saturation and there is a level of negative feeling toward the "Big Kid" in the sand pit and it's true that I constantly find myself defending OOo from people in the Linux community who should be core support.
The reason for attacks on OO is that it is big and ugly and cumbersome - both in footprint and codebase. KOffice seems far more the innovator and maybe Gnome will get there as well. My feeling about OO is that it still hasn't been tidied up from it's original propiertary code base and will suffer until it does so. Mozilla had the same issue for many years with the Netscape codebase and I hope OO gets there too. I think the other reason for attacks is that people see the potential and yet despite the many $s poured in by Novell, Sun, IBM that it is yet to reap the dividends it should. I think this springs from lack of strong leadership personally - quite different from the Linux kernel, KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu etc.
We have a problem finding developers because of the sheer size of the beast and the sometimes complex relationship between the corporate partners and the larger community. (If anyone knows the Kohei's Solver Soap Opera you'll know what I mean) It is easy for a developer to disappear amongst the sheer mass of code which is why there has been such a thrust behind UNO and extension development.
We have a problem being No2, no matter how hard we try to do otherwise, we have to spend far too much developer time on unproductive compatibility issues and feature copying while the truly great enhancements get ignored.
While GNU/Linux, Firefox, Apache etc manage to cope well with this... And now others are trying to be compatiable with them e.g. IE8
This donkey work stuff gets done by the paid developers at SUN, Novell and so forth. The whole idea behind UNO and extensions development is to let the community contribute the innovation. Have a look at what is available at http://extensions.openoffice.org and you'll see what I mean, the extensions project is fairly new but some of what is coming out of there is great.
Yes and Sun, Novell and IBM end up with quite different codebases due to the code structure. Novell OO is not the same as Sun OO and IBM have bastardised it and called it Symphony.
It's no good saying that OOo doesn't innovate unless you have made an effort to do something about that, because you in fact are the community, we all are that consider ourselves part of Open Source.
Yes I have done my part - including promoting OO, bug reporting/testing OO. I also have opinions which I think are worth expressing.
Cheers GL
-- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
Regards, Ian </rant></flame> NB opionions are my own only etc -- Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4/ Blog: http://iansblog.jandi.co.nz