IBM Wants to Port Office to Linux

shfted! writes "OSNews reports: As part of its initiative to put Linux on the desktop, IBM Corp. wants to migrate Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite to Linux. Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation."

Why ?

[PaintyThePirate]

Why use Microsoft Office when Open Office [openoffice.org] is getting so good?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Why ?

[abner23]

Access Database support...

Will Microsoft Sabotage?

[Dr Reducto]

Will Microsoft try to sabotage this by "upgrading" Office in future versions to things that are difficult to "emulate" or include a clause in the EULA that says "You may not run this with a compatibility wrapper" or Linux or anything else? I could see this happening.

Emulation

[ezh]

IBM tried to emulate Win16 application compatibility with its OS/2. As a result, nobody cared developing application of OS/2 as such. IMHO, emulation is a dead-end branch of development in this case.

For some reason (probably licensing issues with Sun) or compatibility with the rest of MS office document base, IBM does not want to develop OpenOffice or Corel WordPerfect Suit. I am just wondering - have they given up on their Lotus completely then?

Re:Oh, I see

[Dr Reducto]

IBM sells Maiframes, but really, Mainframe only refers to the operating system, not the size of the computer. You can get "mainframes" that fit under your desk.

While they are at it

[__past__]

If they can port Office without help from Microsoft, maybe they could also implement compatibility with open standards [oasis-open.org].

How about Crossover Office

[RaeF]

How about Crossover Office [codeweavers.com] by CodeWeavers. You can run the full Office suite including Outlook and Access. It works VERY VERY well. Better than running on Windows actually.

Re:*ahem*

[LehiNephi]

I'll agree with that--there are already emulators out there. IBM would just be repeating the work done by others.

On the other hand, what are the chances IBM has access to Office source code? And if they have access to it, what are the chances they have contractual permission to take Office and port it to Linux? Well, maybe they do, since M$ isn't threatening to sue.....yet.

And another question--I can't imagine they'll distribute it under GPL once it's ported. M$ will get no additional sales because of it. The people who will use it are people who are locked into Office, but want to switch from Windows to Linux. I imagine they'll be able to use it for free, but how will the distribution be handled? For some reason, I have a hard time imagining "MS Office for Linux" on CompUSA's shelves.

No, wait, I realized how dumb the 'free' comment was--M$ office 'upgrade' to Linux for free? HA!

Re:Hoax?

[dreamchaser]

IBM and MS still have some extensive cross licsensing agreements, so it would not surprise me one bit if they had access to some of the Office codebase.

funny quote

[manifest37]

"It suits us fine the Microsoft and Sun fight about office application suites. We stay away from that. The reason we don't collaborate with Sun is that they're too small," said Pettersson.

Wonderful! Give MS Office a Chance!

[yanestra]

Of course, Linux desires some other environmentally needed tools too, like Outlook (Express) (needed so badly - still no viruses under Linux!), MS Scripting Host (invaluable for executing virus scripts, dialer and spyware pages and so on), the whole broken framework of object interferences and misguided authorizations is missing under Linux.

Without that, the whole Office software couldn't be properly integrated.

To make Linux inferior and totally broken we need it! Port it to Linux! Finish your work, IBM, buy SCO and be friends again with Microsoft!

Re:Hoax?

[donutz]

I'm seriously questioning the validity of this article.

Actually, it sounds more to me like you've got a native English-speaking reporter interviewing a non-native English speaker (an IBM-er in Sweden). So I think what it boils down to is a failure to communicate.

So what's really going on here? Who knows! Maybe MS did provide some Office code that IBM is using to achieve greater compatibility in WINE. Or what if IBM was re-writing Office in Java (yeah, that's a real long shot).

Terminal emulation, not emulation

[venomix]

In the original swedish article [www.idg.se] it's written that Microsoft believes that IBM probably is working on a Terminal Emulation solution, not a emulation solution.

Re:Hoax?

[__past__]

It would be surprising if they had a license to redistribute a modified version of it, though.

Well, we'll see. If IBM really has such plans, they will surely not keep them a secret.

Re:Why ?

[Gilesx]

I'd say a major blocker is the fact that AFAIK Star/Open Office offers next to no support for macros - we use a lot of spreadsheets littered with macros, all of which are commented out when you try to open them in Open Offce :(

Re:Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using OOo exclusively for the last several months now. And except for one VERY irritating bug*, I think it's a fine replacement.

* For some unknown reason, sometimes when I load a document or spreadsheet, the font will look all jagged and screwed up. Highlighting the text and making it "normal" again fixes it. Though the downside to normalizing the text is that you lose all the formatting. Italics, bold, color, whatever.. If anyone knows why this happens, I'd love to hear about it. It's so aggravating that I'd almost be tempted to buy MS Office if there was a Linux port.

Re:Will Microsoft Sabotage?

[IANAAC]

They already have... Try installing Microsoft Office 2003 on Codeweavers' Crossover Office. Immediately comes up with "You need a newer version of your OS" (or something similar).

Re:Why ?

[_|()|\|]

For that matter, what ever happened to Lotus?

Re:And Let The Screaming Begin...

[mmurphy000]

There has to be more to it than IBM just getting 100% file format compatibility. Think of these alternatives:

1. Convincing Microsoft to license the Office source code, then porting it to Linux
2. Writing a whole office suite from scratch and getting 100% file format compatibility
3. Creating a 100% reliable emulation layer (e.g., contributing to WINE)
4. Helping OpenOffice.org get 100% file format compatibility

You would have to think the last one is the easiest, and probably by a wide margin. If IBM isn't taking the easiest route, there has to be other factors (e.g., fights with Sun, wants it to be proprietary).

Re:Why ?

[Czmyt]

I disagree; I think that Access is a very useful front-end when combined with a decent back-end like SQL Server. But I think that IBM should throw a little money at Rekall and Postgres to try to turn them into a decent alternative to Access and SQL Server.

OO.o more compatible with M$ Word than M$ Word

[tepples]

10 LET M$ = "Microsoft": REM Slashdot limits subject length, and Penny-Arcade authors have probably never coded in BASIC

To expand on what the others have mentioned: OpenOffice.org not only will handle documents from different versions of M$ Word better than the current version of M$ Word but also will often read corrupted M$ Word documents that make M$ Word crash. Seriously, people have reported here on Slashdot that they use OO.o as a recovery tool for .doc files.

IBM doesn't even use Office!

[AlinuxNCSU]

Ironically, except in a few situations, IBM is a very anti-MS Office shop. Those people who work for IBM have had to live with the Lotus Suite of tools for everything they do.

As a former IBMer, I find it hard to believe they would give any support at all to MS Office. Then again, it's a big corporation. This could be a case of some department breaking with company normality.

-ALinux

Re:This is huge

[igloo-x]

Let me ask you this. If IBM and the rest of the rebels stole the plans to the incomplete Microsoft battlestation and Linus Torvalds managed to score that one-in-a-million shot at the exhaust port, do you think the galaxy would live happily ever after? No. To keep this in terms you can understand, IBM would probably proceed to corner the galaxy with their own software and things would be just as bad as they were before.

You people need to drop this romanticized view you have of this whole situation. Why do you think IBM would rather see an IT world without Microsoft? So that all software would be free and live happily ever after? Or perhaps becausre they're in business of making money and Microsoft is direct competition. You don't have to be Yoda to realise heir last attempt at a competing OS failed to make a dent and now they're jumping on a bandwagon running the closest behind Microsoft's.

Don't for one minute think that IBM has any moral interest in your cause, because they don't. Only your wallet.

Re:Why could IBM do better than OpenOffice.org

[quantum bit]

What will never happen, but would be awesome, would be for IBM or somebody to pump a load of money into increasing the performace/memory footprint of wxPython. Bring it up to the level of C#. It's Free and doesn't have all that Java baggage.

The next step to Utopia would of course be a wxQt port...

Re:*ahem*

[Shisha]

I think parent is right in the sense that it will use WINE one way or another. Maybe they can pay CrossWeavers enough to make the release CrossOver Office under LGPL. I can see why IBM could believe this will work out financially for them in the long run, because they are quickly becoming established as THE Linux provider for big businesses.

Besides one can argue, that running things trough wine is not really emulation in the sense of CPU emulation. It's almost like when WinXP are keeping around old Win 95 API just to be backward compatible. Wine applications usually work pretty damn fast, once they do actually work.

On the other hand, for most of us running MS Office on Linux defeats the point of not having our data locked in by a proprietary software vendor.

Even when I switched to Linux 6 years ago it wasn't in spite of MS Office, it was because MS Office in the sense that after Word made lots of my work dissapear completely one too many times, I started thinking that there must be some other way of creating formatted text.

I looked into LyX and later LaTeX (after trying to do it all in HTML for a while) and I figured out that using these is actually easier on Linux than on Windows. Then again, that's just me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that Office on Linux won't be great for mass adoption of Linux, I'm just saying that you still have the disadvantage of having to buy MS Office, just to _read_ things _you_ have written.

Port the Lotus code you morons!

[NemosomeN]

It's worth noting that the Lotus source code could be compared to a 200 line "Hello World" in GW-BASIC. From what I've heard it's a mess, and maintaining it would be more difficult than scrapping it (The reason it was "ported" with WINE).

Re:Why ?

[sbaker]

A year or two ago, porting Office would have been a good thing for Linux because we really needed something like that to make Linux itself more viable.

But the lack of Office has spurred OpenOffice development to the point where it's now we really don't need Microsoft to be able to sell Linux to big business, governments from around the world and John Q Public. All this move does is:

1) Give OpenOffice some competition that will reduce the amount of 'developer itch' needed to keep it growing and improving.

2) Give Microsoft another revenue stream.

3) Allow email virii to attack Linux boxes.

Re:Hello

[Llywelyn]

There are reasons I use LaTeX.

That the programs do not make idiotic design changes while trying to "help" me is a big part of that.

Why not start with the Office X version

[BlueYoshi]

MS Office is allready running in a UNIX environement (MacOS X). So IBM could also port not the win32 version but well the MacOS X version. I m not sure that Apple would be extra happy but the Macintosh business Unit in Redmond could be interressed.

What is the best solution:

• emulate the win32 with WINE and it is allready done and with good result and permit to use MS Office on linux on X86
• Use Office X and have the hability to sell PPC box running linux and MS Office?

I think the second solution could have some advantage for IBM but It will not allow an transition from MS Windows to linux for 95 % of the population who runs on x86

Re:OO.o more compatible with M$ Word than M$ Word

[udippel]

Seriously, people have reported here on Slashdot that they use OO.o as a recovery tool for .doc files

True. We had a file once, created by M$-Office, which crashed any M$ system when you wanted to print it.

In OO I could open it, make minor changes, save it as .doc and it could be printed.

Since someone is going to mod this redundant, I might as well add another note: OpenOffice files are meanwhile usually smaller than their M$ counterparts.

Still redundant: I would like to find out why this IBM chap opinions that MS is a great packet. Used to find it not intuitive even before I was introduced to SO and later OO. Maybe he has never thought of some of its flaws ? As someone who was meant to support its users, Yes, at times it defies logic and common sense.

Now I'll get the thumbs down from zealots: The only good thing of M$ is, that it loads really fast. And I used to run it on different machines together with SO / OO.

Start from Office for Mac?

[caveat lector]

Maybe I'm missing something tearingly obvious here... but everyone seems to be assuming either an emulation layer or totally rewriting the Windows version of Office.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to start from the version written for OSX?

Re:I hope they don't....

[tlwillia]

I disagree with this... I use Codeweavers' Crossover Wine every day to run Lotus Notes (used exclusively by my company) and the Microsoft Office suite under Linux. There are some cases where OOo just doesn't quite get it right so I have to use MS Office in those cases. I have no problems with the day to day use of Crossover and I find that it is extremely stable.

Re:IBM doesn't even use Office!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, except in a few situations, IBM is a very anti-MS Office shop. Those people who work for IBM have had to live with the Lotus Suite of tools for everything they do.

Not anymore. Nobody in IBM uses Lotus stuff anymore (other than Notes). We now have site-wide licenses for Office. PPT and DOC files are EVERYWHERE.

Re:Why ?

[zakath]

And are these 'horrid monsters in sereious need of redesign' actually running the whole company? I seriously doubt it. Access has its place. I've worked in several medium-sized businesses where Access was used as a front end to a more serious DB and and with Excel as an input tool to a more 'serious' backend DB. Yeah...even though they were produced by MS they worked and saved a lot of time and money. The important thing is to use the proper tool for the job...if you're looking for high-availability and multi-million record tables MS Access ought NOT be your choice. If you need to do some quick and dirty analysis of some data it could very well be an easy way to get your answer. The person handing their corporate DBA responsibilities to 'Joe' in accounting is the person at fault in your scenario mentioned above...not MS. They produced a tool...what you do with it is up to you. Just like any other piece of productivity software, if you think it's the hammer for every nail you're going to get a nasty surprise before too long.

RTFA - This is a mid level manager in Sweden

[vidarh]

IBM has close to 300.000 employees. The guy talking about this is the technical manager for the Lotus division in Sweden. In other words, he works for a small IBM division in a small country, and he isn't even the top manager for the division. Secondly he's spouting off to Infoworld, instead of releasing a press release through IBM's ordinary channels.

This is some guy that's trying to make an impression for a pet project of his, not global IBM strategy. I bet he's in for some angry phone calls from various people, including his boss who'll likely be pestered as to why one of his subordinates is talking to the press about things that isn't his business.

The reason Microsoft hasn't heard anything is probably because he's been talking to people at his level in Microsoft, who has no authority to make any real decisions, just as this guy is unlikely to have.

Re:Start from Office for Mac?

[memmel2]

No the OSX api at the application level are very different from Linux. Win32->linux is far more mature than OSX->Linux. Now if IBM could intice Apple into allowing the OSX ui to be ported to Linux it would be verry intresting. But for X86 you would still need to recompile Office for to work on a OSX/Linux hybrid solution. I suspect Apple could have the OSX api on Linux in a weekend. X86 linux in a few weeks.

Re:Why ?

[sniggly]

access database.. try database access

http://dba.openoffice.org [openoffice.org] really nice and versatile. Can do forms as well.

Everyone ignores the obvious....

[o517375]

IBM wants to port MS Office to Linux because IBM wants to sell Linux desktops. Bingo! Sun is selling their "java" desktop. IBM can include in their desktop everything that Sun has on theirs plus the MS Office port. Many people like MS Office; many people think they need it. IBM wants to make money. MS makes a lot of money on their MAC Office port. If you had to use one which would be, a desktop with Office port or one without?

I know, the one without, blah blah blah....

This is a GoodThing(TM) if true.

[Anonymous Coward]

It might not be as crazy as it sounds.

Let's assume IBM gets Office running 100% perfect on Linux. Doing so removes a HUGE barrier to Linux acceptance in business. Lots of organizations are actually married to Office more than they are to Windows. Let them keep their Office installations, but move them to Linux, and you end up decimating a huge piece of Microsoft's business.

I think this can be a very good thing.

Re:Why ?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

I'm sure there are a whole lot of good CS students who'd be very happy to design and implement a decent (not perfect, but decent) data base application for much less than (tens of) thousands. I know I was very happy to get such jobs while I was at the university. Most of the data bases I built back than are still in use.

Re:Opportunity & Dangers for MS

[Halo1]

Can MS-Office be ported to Linux technically? I would say yes, because they were able to make a Mac OS X port, which has BSD-Unix underpinnings. Pretty much anything than can be done on BSD can be done on Linux. So no great feat of technology would be involved on getting MS-Office ported to Linux.

MS Office for Mac OS X doesn't use the BSD's api directly (except maybe an open() here and there or so). It's based on Carbon, the re-entrant version of the classic Mac OS API that Apple developed for Mac OS X to make porting easier. You'd have to port all of Carbon (and probably Quicktime along with it, neither of which is open source) to Linux to even get somewhere in the neighbourhood of doing a port with "no great feat of technology".

Conversely

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be proof of ongoing antitrust violations. Lets say IBM releases a special version of WINE that lets you run Microsoft Office on Linux. Then let's say Microsoft goes to the EU and says "it's all open standards, we don't have any unfair advantages or hidden APIs!". The EU can then go, bullshit, look at all of the extra crap that Wine had to do to make Office run on Wine. If Office were using the open standards, Office would work on vanilla wine. ...

Whoa.. wait.. now I'm kind of getting stuck on this thought. Vanilla wine. What would that *taste* like? Vanilla vodka is pretty good but vanilla wine sounds questionable.

Re:Why ?

[Khazunga]

Biased options. Let me correct:

1. No database. Track information on paper, as it was done 50yrs ago.
2. Use access, make a huge number of kludges that work, and then call in consultants to solve the whole mess, paying by the nose in consultant fees (I've seen this happen several times)
3. Hire a DBA per hundred employees, right out of college.

2 doesn't look so good anymore.

Re:It's part of the standard IBM platform.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been an employee at IBM for three years. When I started, all the machines for employees came preloaded with Lotus SmartSuite. It was also preloaded with viewers for various Microsoft Office file formats. If you had a business need for writing Microsoft Office documents yourself, your department could buy a licence for you.

One year ago this changed. Now Office XP is part of the standard platform and is available for download for all employees (via an IBM intranet web-site where you can download all the software that is part of the standard platform) without additional charges for your department.

At least this is the situation for IBM in Europe (EMEA).

Re:The rub lies in the lack of software freedom.

[jbn-o]

I think it's all about delivering software freedom. Chasing software freedom has served our community very well in the past 20 years. I think it will continue to serve us well into the future. If people want a free software alternative to Microsoft Office, they can try OpenOffice.org. If people wanted to run Microsoft Office on a free software system, WINE could probably do the job today. But I don't see people asking for that. I think IBM's money is better spent enhancing OpenOffice.org rather than being a part of Microsoft's sales team and making their non-free software available to a slightly wider audience.

I don't think many people know about OpenOffice.org (or Abiword, GNUmeric, and a host of other free software programs), hence they don't run these programs. I also think that as Microsoft Office becomes harder to justify, more people will look to alternatives.

If people become used to running Microsoft Office on a free OS at work and follow suit at home, they have taken a step toward software freedom (which is genuinely worth celebrating) but not as big a step as they could have taken. Adding the features people need to a free software alternative will help them justify the move to freedom.