IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community

Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."

Yay

One more step to not being locked into Microsoft (ie paying through the nose) for an application than can make writing look prettier, and is universally accepted \o/

Assistive technologies

OpenOffice.org itself doesn't lack assistive technologies. OOo on Windows lacks assistive technologies. OOo with GNOME or KDE integration gets the accessibility technologies of GNOME or KDE, respectively.

Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.

faster!!!

Ok for end users this is a good news. For monopolists not so heartening news.

Anyway what i would also like to see in Openoffice -
-It is terribly slow. Looks like a huge piece of bloat. It will be great if it can be faster.

MS Word is worse.

I would bet that this is why it is always accused of being slower thet MS Word

MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.

But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM.

Re:MS Word is worse.

MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.

How did this get modded informative? That doesn't happen at all, and you can take that from someone who just installed Office 2003. There's no trace of a service or process related to Office, and physical memory usage is the same as it was before.

Re:faster!!!

You're misinformed... OpenOffice.org has a few Java components (notabily in Base, I think) but it is not a Java application. You don't even need a JRE to run it.

Finally some non M$oft news in the oo world.

It's nice to have a big backer in the oo arena that isn't part of the whole m$oft mess. I also think IBM's timing was very well thought out here.

Huh?

and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes

That's about what, 2 lines of code? =p

WTF?

IBM has its own office package: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/sma rtsuite/ [ibm.com]
Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?

Good lord..

Any time you need interface contributions from Lotus Freaking Notes, something is badly wrong.

I'm curious about the accessibility support for that helpful feature it has, where entering the password characters puts up random numbers of bullets while hieroglyphics blink randomly around the input box, apparently to distract and confuse shoulder surfers. Do they have a similar function for blind users? And how about sighted users and blind shoulder surfers? Shouldn't it make random annoying noises as well, to confuse them?

Re:Good lord..

For those fortunate enough not to know what I'm talking about: see the last entry on this page [mac.com].

Re:Good lord..

I've used and programmed Lotus Notes on and off for the past 10 years. It's not that bad for what it does. For a networked environment the database replication was way ahead of it's time, and it still has no real competitor in that field. OK, so the field has moved on; and the interface is shit. Still, admin wise it's pretty good, and IBM has done a lot of good work with Notes.

We've rolled out a wiki in the same breath as running a huge Notes infrastructure. What I don't understand is that, as crap as the Notes interface is, it's still way ahead of any browser for editing documents. Anyway, so the Notes database is the back-end, and the web-browser is the new client. Call it a wiki, and people love it. Call it Notes database and they'll run a mile. I suppose it must say something about the whole thing.

Lotus Notes

We all now Open office is slow so lets hope We get the fast and Wonderfull Lotus notes interface on Open Office.

35 chinese developers

What's that as a level of investment? $50,000pa?
 

Oh dear God!

they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies.

Please keep those people far away from interface design! ;-)

Good news, and yet...

This reminds me of an issue we have at work. At work, we run OpenOffice now, it gave us flexibility and yet fully functional... except for one guy, the Editor. He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.

I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that. Until we can woo this kind of person, however, I fear that OO, and any open standard wp for that matter, will never truely break into mainstream, because he is the Editor, in charge of a whole department.

Re:Good news, and yet...

You bring up a good point Open Office will not cure stupidity. This is important to remember.

Re:Good news, and yet...

We "wooed" employees by saying, "this is our new company policy. all computers will be changed over to this new standard effective XXXX" 95% had no problem, the 5% that did whined big time. but we had finance on our side so in the big shirts meetings when the whiners whines got to them they got shot down by the director of finance saying, "It will cost us $180,000 to switch back to MS office, replacing that employee with someone that is professional enough to understand business means change is not only cheaper but probably a good idea anyways."

It shut all the whiners up fast when they found that replacing them is far cheaper than catering to their whining.

You unfortunately have a high level whiner. so you need to have even higher than him do the smackdown.

I'd love to see the results of a little experiment

What if....

...you took OO.o as it stands now, rebranded it "Microsoft Office 2009 Preview" (just the splash screen, title bar and help text should be adequate) and showed it to someone who'd made such a complaint. Tell them that "Microsoft found people were confused by the change of interface in 2007 so they changed it back again to something which looks more like Office 2000" or other such bull.

I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.

Notes is EVIL and must be killed

It was all good until I read : "....they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies..." Lotus Notes is EVIL and must be killed, -- I forgive you Outlook & Exchange....,

Re:Notes is EVIL and must be killed

Having used lotus notes while on assignment at IBM I can attest to it's evilness and lack of "straightforwardness." It's a bitch to setup without an IT support dude sitting at your ... wait a tick ... IBM makes money out of service contracts? No way...

Tom

This goes without saying...

I, for one, welcome our new IBM overlords.

Oh no

We'll get Lotus Notes into OpenOffice now - run for the Hills !

Because three office suites isn't enough

We use Lotus (Ami Pro/Freelance/123 etc) plus MS Office 2003 plus MS Office XP. Now we'll get OO. Gee I can hardly wait trying to open up some PM's 175 page converted Powerpoint presentation.

Lotus Notes 8 supports ODF

It's also worth pointing out here that the upcoming version of IBM's Lotus Notes product includes internal support for ODF documents (.odt, .ods and .odp). Based on what I see in the beta, it looks to me like the ODF support is provided by an embedded and tweaked version of OOo, but I think it's still worth adding Lotus Notes to the list of apps that support ODF.

Notes 8 is built on the Eclipse RCP, BTW, and runs nicely on Linux (which is my platform of choice) as well as Windows and OS X. I imagine it can run just about anywhere Java does. To be honest, I don't think the new version is hugely better than previous versions, and I've never been a big fan of Notes, but for Linux users whose companies use Notes it's really nice to have a native client rather than mucking about with Notes under WINE, or running a Windows OS on another box or in a VM. As an OOo user, it's also very nice to know that I'll soon be able to send ODF documents to my colleagues secure in the knowledge that they can read them.

Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but I'm not a spokesman for IBM. IBM is happy about that state of affairs, and so am I.

Accessibility code from Lotus Notes?

Am I the only person who thinks that contributing any interface code from Lotus Notes is a *bad* idea?

IBM is doing it the wrong way.

The correct way would be to promote "choice" for customers by offering yet another standard and bribe countries like Azerbaijan, Loolooistan, and Iamsodumbistan to make it an ISO standard. It should offer features like "Page break as in Lotus Notes Style" or "autospace like in IBM370/155 JCL //job card punch format" that no body else can offer. Howzthat for product differentiation? Instead is joining OO.org. How sad, the business acumen is so lacking in the Internation BUSINESS Machines!

Work on Project Manager and visio

If IBM (and sun) really want to make a dent in Office, they should work on MsPM and Visio clones. In particular, if they first do the file format library (open, read, write close files), then it allows other OSS projects to move forward. Then followed up with clones/improvements. By doing these 2, they pretty much remove one of the large blocks to corporate adoption.

Lotus Word Pro

I hope they add a .lwp filter.

Add new ideas to OO.o - move beyond Office clone

During the entire fight about OOXML and ODF I heard the ODF folks praise the "innovation" in ODF. Well, I have news for all the hard working XML folk out there: People don't buy a format, they buy an application! And given that OO.o is nothing more than an intentional knockoff of an antiquated product, it's hard to make the case that supporting ODF is not just about improving IBM's market position, instead of creating better workflow or innovative ways of interacting with documents.

Right now, our productivity apps are essentially feature-set upgrades on the old MacWrite/Microsoft Word for Mac paradigm we all learned back in the 80's. Most of the menus and icons remain conceptually unchanged. Hate it or like it, at least the 'ribbon' in the latest version of Office is slightly different. Unless OO.o goes somewhere new, why should anyone buy it other than to "stick it to the man" at Microsoft? And before someone points out that you don't "buy" OO.o, In the government space someone is going to get paid, either for a license or for a service contract.

IBM and other corporations who want to fund OO.o with a long term goal of lining their own (corporate) pockets need to think beyond the clone. Until they do so, OO.o will remain nothing more than a sales tool in a marketing brochure. What would serve the world better is an OO.o that rethinks our document world.

IBM does alot with Linux

This is pretty cool.
I was working with an engineer from IBM who had a Linux laptop setup by IBM for his work computer. It used OOo, as well as a Linux version of Lotus notes. (I know many of you hate Notes, but like the Mainframe, it'll be around forever b/c my company runs many critical apps off of Lotus notes databases)
He also had working VPN (I think it was IBM's connectivity software), so he could connect back to his office LAN from my office.
I was very impressed. He said that many of the engineers were piloting the new Linux desktops/laptops.

35 developers in China

Wow, that should cost IBM, what, about $35 a week, right? I'm so glad they are behind open source. I can't wait to see the new "pwintew pwevewences" dialog.

[que Flash Gordon Theme Music by Queen]

China - a-ah - saviour of Open Source
China - a-ah - you've saved everyone of us
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
China - a-ah - it's a miracle
China - a-ah - land of cheap labor

IBM should open source Lotus 1-2-3

IBM should release Lotus 1-2-3 as open source. It was once the de facto industry standard and there plenty of people who remember it. It is one of the most well-documented application programs ever, and its @ functions are still cloned to this day. It ran on all platforms from DOS to Windows to UNIX. The WKx (WK4, WK3, etc) file format is very well documented and an industry standard. I'm not sure IBM even remembers they own 1-2-3's source, since they got it with their purchase of Lotus to get the groupware stuff that was all the rage in 94 or 95 before the Internet took off. If IBM released 1-2-3 as open source, and maybe used their 35 Chinese developers to update it a little, it would be the new industry standard plus GPLed so no one could ever take it away from us again. I imagine a few months after the open source 1-2-3 was released, people would have trouble remembering there ever was an Excel.

Lotus SmartSuite filters? Please? Soon?

I have been a very, VERY loyal user of Lotus Wordpro ever since it was AmiPro 1.1. OpenOffice.org Writer allows me to work in much the same way as Wordpro (not like some other unnamed cr*p from M*******t) but there is no filter to import my existing Wordpro documents. This was possibly going to be addressed in Google's Summer of Code but I have not yet seen any results. Anyway, if IBM is this committed to OpenOffice--and since they've discontinued SmartSuite development--they ought to put one or two of these coders on writing the SmartSuite import filters for OpenOffice.org. Anybody know a name/email/phone# of a real person at IBM I can discuss this with? Thanks...
--Ray

Price is important

Is important that Open Office keeps getting improved and all the help from IBM is welcomed. At some point (if not already there), the dominant MS Office will have to make a revolutionary step in order to justify the price tag.

Users will look at the quality/price ratio although a bit difficult if you have to divide by zero for Open Office :)

Hmm

they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies.

Am I the only one unsure if this is good news or not?

Equations / Formulas

Overall I really like OO but I have to admit that I have started to use Office 2007 (pirated of course) on Win XP because of the lack of sufficient/user-friendly equation and formula editting in Word/Writer.

I am working on a graduate degree in math and I really need a good text/doc editting program that will allow me to input formualas/equations/matrices etc with ease!

Re:"Superb OOXML" makes OOo obsolete

Who cares how many companies are joining OOo development when the "superb OOXML" is soon an ISO standard?

Who says OOXML is a superb standard? Our own Miguel, of course: http://groups.google.com/group/tiraniaorg-blog-com [google.com] ments/browse_thread/thread/2a07b8b50038d8c8/2429b3 3859cf05c0?fwc=1

However, I have not yet heard from Miguel why all the corruption is needed to speed up a "superb standard"?,

more kool-aid?