IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community 213
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."
Good news, and yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Free and Non Free. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Assistive technologies (Score:3, Interesting)
(However, there is also something to be said against this, in that we might want to not have separate accessibility frameworks for each app. That's true, however, for an office suite - sometimes the only app besides a web browser used on some PCs - it might make sense to customize it that way.)
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh dear God! (Score:0, Interesting)
The user interface has been greatly improved. It now uses CSS so you can modify colors, fonts, or just about anything else you'd want. The IBM chief designers even used blogs and forums to correspond with and query customers both during the development phase and the subsequent beta tests (how often does M$ do that?). Take a look -- it ain't quite your daddy's Lotus Notes anymore.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe that's part of the rationale behind this. Maybe IBM wants to be able to promote OpenOffice as the migration path for SmartSuite users.
IBM does alot with Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:MS Word is worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'd love to see the results of a little experim (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lotus Word Pro (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to use Word Pro ever since it was AmiPro for Windows 3.1. OpenOffice replaced Word Pro a few years ago, but I still have a lot of legacy documents that I need to access every now and then. So, when I rebuild a PC I install Word Pro just in case. (It's only about 70 MB for Word Pro 9.8, so it's not like it's a burden on my 160 GB boot drive.) Having an LWP filter for OpenOffice would be fantastic!
Re:OO.org 1-2-3 (Score:3, Interesting)
"And likewise, as I said, the open-ness or close-ness of the format has zero to do with why MS is dominant. They are winning because they are the superior app, and people prefer their product. But rather than compete on the basis of application superiority,"
That is a load of ass. People like it because they think that something is free *must* be worse, and also because the standard isn't open, they do end up with weird inconsistencies. Like one guy had a shadow being shown around the edge of his document (that had been created in word and he had tried to read in open office) and couldn't figure out how to remove it. The only thing that has stopped me converting the whole company to open office is that Outlook is a great email client that everyone is used to (and that I wrote the timesheet system to interact with Excel and cba to rewrite it for OpenOffice at the moment).
Actually I think the secretaries here would be happy to try a different word processor if I asked them nicely. I gave one of the girls an ancient machine with Linux on it, which she then overwrote with XP and realised how much faster Ubuntu was (rather than taking my word for it, which is fair enough really), then switched back. Most people only use MS because they don't know the fucking alternatives even exist, or there are Windows only apps that they want/need. I'm spending more and more time in Mac OS these days, though it's easier to use Windows at work just for ease of integration with the domain. Anyway, go take your flamebait elsewhere...
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:1, Interesting)