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."

faster!!!

[b1ufox]

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.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes

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

Re:Good lord..

[gEvil (beta)]

It gets even better than that. Ever tried using Notes on a Mac? Version 6 was the retarded little brother of the Notes family. Thankfully with version 7 they've managed to put him into a nice suit, but he still acts funny and drools all over himself...

Notes is EVIL and must be killed

[Shadow_139]

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....,

This goes without saying...

[russlar]

I, for one, welcome our new IBM overlords.

Oh no

[bytesex]

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

Re:Notes is EVIL and must be killed

[tomstdenis]

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

I wonder ....

[Anonymous Coward]

if they are trying to kill OO with low quality code? I hope not, but China? Crap, I have seen the code that comes from there, and it makes their toys look positively great.

Re:Good news, and yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that.

Tell him it's Office 08 and he'll not only accept it, he'll tell everybody else how good it is and sneer at those that don't have it. Guaranteed.

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

This may actually cause the first "black hole" scenario for software. Notes combined with OpenOffice may actually be so bloated that the code will collapse in on itself and suck all surrounding code into it. When you try to open the application everything seems to slow down as you get closer and closer to actually running the program; as if time almost stops when you're at the verge of finally looking at a document.

Re:MS Word is worse.

[xtracto]

Shut up with your objective comments, we are trying to bash Microsoft here!

Re:Oh no

[SEE]

Er, no. The first time someone created document editing software that collapsed upon itself, sucked all surrounding code into it, and slowed the computer to a halt, they called it EMACS.