“While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. KOffice 2.0, to be released sometime in the first half of 2008, will be cross platform like many other applications in the KDE suite built with the Qt4 GUI toolkit.”
[qouted from article]
People involved in the Linux and open source communities have often expressed conflicting views on whether free software on Windows benefits, or detracts from, the adoption of free operating systems, particularly on the desktop.
Kugler believes it is “hard to say” one way or another if KOffice 2.0 on Windows and Mac OS X will benefit KDE on Linux.
“For some, there is definitely less incentive to switch to free platforms, which is a pity,” he said.
[/qouted from article]
I think this can be translated to “Microsoft Thinking” vs. “Open Thinking”. The more open, the more adoption and therefore, the less platform dependent one becomes. How can that be bad? I love the fact that I will be able to run KDE apps on Windows, BSD and Linux because I have to run Windows at work and, on occasion, at home too.
Edited 2007-10-09 13:05
I agree. Tapping users and developers on Windows can help increase the quality and exposure of the KDE components. The proponents of Linux can then sell their kernel as a drop-in replacement behind the Qt API layer.
Having KDE and KOffice on Windows can also help to sell more commercial licenses for Qt, which would allow Trolltech to expand its efforts and have more power to help OSS.
I’ve always liked the K side of the fence better than the other one because it’s a better-made product on the inside. This is likely because it is developed without too much corporate influence and politicking. It’s more of a “true” open-source product, it seems.
Having KDE and KOffice on Windows can also help to sell more commercial licenses for Qt, which would allow Trolltech to expand its efforts and have more power to help OSS.
I fail to see how that will materialise.
Commercial app developers might see Qt in action on Windows and pick it as a viable choice for cross-platform programs.
Commercial app developers might see Qt in action on Windows and pick it as a viable choice for cross-platform programs.
It’s just shooting in the dark really with assumptions layered on assumptions. As far as I’m aware, the most popular platform for Qt right now is Windows anyway.
I agree.
It is really nice to have programs that run on multiple platforms. Why? Because some people will want to use the software but be unable to leave the platform, while others need a little time to transition and having the software on both platforms helps.
That’s really part of the strength of F/OSS – you can run a lot of software on both Windows and Linux, Mac, or nearly any Unix. This makes F/OSS software a great platform for being able to transition between platforms. If you like Windows, fine you can use it. If you want to go to Linux or Mac, great we can help you get there.
The new music notation feature for KOffice 2.0 was developed by a Mac developer under Mac OS X.
KHTML also attracted Mac developers (Apple itself). KHTML/WebKit improved a lot thanks to its development on Mac OS X (eg its Acid2 support).
Thanks to Mac developers KDE/KOffice gained important features. Now imagine a horde of Windows developers doing additional work KDE/KOffice.
omg – I can see clearly now what you mean.. … ….
-> RUUUUUN fellow freetizens, save your souls (and BACKUP your code trees );)
I think this can be translated to “Microsoft Thinking” vs. “Open Thinking”.
You have those two the wrong way around. The Microsoft thinking is to get developers to port applications to Windows in order to get users to stay there.
I love the fact that I will be able to run KDE apps on Windows, BSD and Linux because I have to run Windows at work and, on occasion, at home too.
If all the good applications are ported to Windows, what incentive does your work environment have to switching away from Windows? None. That’s what people just don’t get about this.
Edited 2007-10-10 10:50
I’m not going to attempt to pass this off as some sort of fact that I can prove, because I can’t. But, I truly believe the number one reason people can’t, don’t or won’t switch to Linux from Windows is the applications.
I think the better question is, “If all of the good applications are ported to Windows, what’s to stop someone from moving away from Windows? None. That’s what people like you don’t get about this.”
I think the better question is, “If all of the good applications are ported to Windows, what’s to stop someone from moving away from Windows? None. That’s what people like you don’t get about this.”
That statement is just absolutely ludicrous. You’re asking ‘What’s to stop someone from moving away from Windows?’ There isn’t an action implied anywhere in that question. The real question is ‘What’s going to make someone actually make the move from Windows to something else?‘ If all the good applications are ported to Windows then it’s certainly not the applications that are going to make people move. If not them then nothing is going to give people the incentive to move.
Well so what, that just means a lot of people in the first world will more and more be left behind a hell lot of more people in the rest of the world. If it’s their choice, hey who is going to question that, or even care about it?
Besides, it’s not actually about converting present windows users to FOSS. Most developers rather concentrate on improving upon something referred to as… THE CODE(tm)
the battle for market share – which is really not so much an important war for the community as there is nothing to loose for us – will be decided by big PC vendors who either put GNU/Linux/KDE4 on the machine and sell it for 100 bucks less, or install Vista on it for the conservatives. For the newbies, the branding advantage of Microsoft clearly doesn’t count that much – their minds are not yet littered with WOW and bling, they just want an internet gaming typewriter toaster.
In the end, as I understand this free market crap, the cheaper better product should win over the overly-marketed but costful and restricting alternative.
The quality of most FOSS apps has progressed very nicely over the last years bringing it mostly on par with commercial offers, here behind and there ahead – the speed of progress though and the steep advance of shared base technologies make me really look forward into a bright future of actually WORKING computer software.
The inevitable rise of the open source mentality clearly demonstrates the superiority of the principle cooperation versus the outdated market competition regime and ‘intellectual property’ ideology. Hooray for b.. shaaring xD
Besides, it’s not actually about converting present windows users to FOSS. Most developers rather concentrate on improving upon something referred to as… THE CODE(tm)
Free code works a lot better on free platforms, and takes up less time and effort ;-).
Ever since Trolltech announced that QT4 will be cross-platform, it became very clear that KOffice will follow down the same path. Nothing new here.
The real problem here that I can see is not whether interoperability with Windows will undermine Linux adoption. The crucial problem is whether KOffice will implement the complete Openoffice’s support of ODF. Right now, KOffice’s support of simple ODF presentations that have just been created out of Openoffice, or even of itself, is just plain horrible. If we really are to present ourselves to the rest of the world as a bunch of disconnected monkeys incapable of displaying the same content coherently, then lets not talk about convincing people away from Windows.
The good thing about this is that KOffice 2 may have much better support of ODF.
Another point to note is that, while the possibility may be there, it may take some time for KDE on Win to be recognised as a contender. This will buy the FLOSS some time to rectify errors like these, and hopefully, by then, KDE on Win will be a viable option for the masses.
he crucial problem is whether KOffice will implement the complete Openoffice’s support of ODF. Right now, KOffice’s support of simple ODF presentations that have just been created out of Openoffice, or even of itself, is just plain horrible.
From the article: KOffice has already transitioned to OpenDocument Format (ODF) by default and while it is not yet fully compatible with the standard, it is being worked on.
So, to answer your question: They’re working on it.
And BTW: OO.o doesn’t have full ODF support yet either. ODF is *not* defined as “whatever OO.o produces” but it’s defined in the ISO standard document.
Do we know if any office suite supports the full standard of ODF? I think OO.o is the closest. I know when I saved a file in OO.o and opened it in Abiword it didn’t look quite right.
It’s good to see KOffice go cross platform. I’ve never really used it before (I’m a Gnome guy) but I say the more users that open source software has the merrier.
I cannot imagine there is any.
Very probably. They had a big headstart because ODF is at least the most similar one to the old OO.o format.
There may be cases where ODF is correctly written and read from a formal point of view but the different implementations disagree on the interpretation. There may be areas that are underspecified.
These cases call for
a) reaching an agreement between the different suites
b) amendment of the standard.
(NB: I think this is a better approach than MS’s OOXML one where in some areas every iota is specified (on 6000 pages) including 20 years of office bugs that would be thus kept alive for all future in every piece of software that wants to have 100% compatibility.)
I really have hope that these problems will be rectified over time.
Edited 2007-10-09 16:48
Obviously other commercial vendors like Novell and Apple were interested in having everything specified in OOXML so that they could open Office documents without their users complaining about changes.
Of course the details must be worked on and specified at some point. And I was a bit surprised that the spreadsheet functions have not been standardized in the initial version of the ODF standard, for example (are they in now?).
But taking 20 years of bad office formats and in many cases *not* even specifying things but saying “this should behave just like Word95” is dead wrong. Even MS will have problems implementing this crap. Everyone else needn’t even try.
ODF can be amended when the need becomes clear.
But removing the crap that MS has speced into OOXML will not be possible and we’d have to live with it forever.
The normal interoperable answer is the solution to this problem: be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you output. If certain areas are not desired in documents going forward, the solution is to make profiled subsets of the standard (as is what usually happens with large standards… look at SVG for an example of a monster spec that was profiled down to a manageable size). You think it’s better to start with something small and then try to standardize in the cacaphony of incompatible extensions, while I think it’s equally valid (but not necessarily good) to start with something big and whittle it down to the subset that most people are happy to implement.
There could technically arise two worlds of OOXML: the Microsoft one that’s basically Office 2k7 and 2k8 and the rest of the OOXML crowd that has a smaller subset and simply ignores the unimportant edge cases in the larger standard (for instance, the autospacing tag that everyone complains about but no one realizes only applies to japanese text in a particular style which doesn’t affect 95% of the world population, and only affects that 5% marginally).
But now we’re going far afield and maybe someone will come around demanding that I get back on topic :-).
“The crucial problem is whether KOffice will implement the complete Openoffice’s support of ODF.”
It’s unlikely to ever happen, because that would mean have all features of OpenOffice, which is not a goal of KOffice, the aim is to create a light weight office suite. Next version of ODF is likely to define such levels of support, going from embedded office to full. So what is “crucial” is that opening and then saving an ODF file in KOffice lose as few as possible information, even if it’s information KOffice can’t interpret.
Not many will move to a platform, where the programs they, dont work. If all apps i needed worked on e.g. ubuntu, i would have transisted asap.
Beginning to transist to programs that work on windows would help 1000-fold.
Everything is about doing a nice an easy transistion. Replacing one program a time over a period in a larger organisation would make the replacement of win to x easy. The users wouldnt even notice.
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240×320)
… the ‘start using free software then switch to a free OS’ argument holds at least some water. When my girlfriend got her new (windows) computer she needed an office suite. We put on OO.org and she has been using it ever since, in a job that involves tonnes of document creation. For browsing, we install firefox.
From there, it was a trivial step to create a partition for linux and have it boot by default (we still need the windows part for the logitech/harmony remote control, does anyone know a free alternative to their software?). The rest of her computing is the typical play music, browse the web, load the iPod sort of stuff.
If I’d dumped an entire new OS and application suite on her at once it probably would have been too overwhelming and too much change all at one time (not selling her short here… she’s just not a computer person by nature). By being able to have her develop trust in these unfamiliar apps first in a “safe” environment it made the switch to an unfamiliar one a lot simpler.
Sorry for the off-topic post. Just wanted to say as far as the Logitech Harmony controller goes. Looks like there is a bit of headway.
http://www.phildev.net/phil/blog/index.php?title=writing_a_linux_dr…
sorry for the OT reply
but thanks for the info! cheers
I personally don’t like working with OpenOffice (I think its too bloated and not intuitive). I haven’t used KOffice before, but I hope its better than OO. KDE software has always been better in terms of configurability and responsiveness (developer response). They don’t usually create the nicest looking UIs but I certainly find it better to work with KDE than Gnome.
Well, KOffice is a magnitude more usable than OO.o, but also much less powerful. At least, it’s pre-2.0 releases. But 2.0 and 2.1 are gonna rock, as far as I can see now 😉
I’ve always genuinely liked Koffice, it had an indescribable something that actually made it enjoyable to use. It is the only thing about Linux I miss. Been looking forward to using it in windows for a long time.
ISO ODF 1.0 had about 10 pages on formulas (obviously not enough).
OOXML was better but it still retained bugs (google “ooxml” and “formula for failure” for the details).
ODF 1.2 has OpenFormula which is the best of the lot. During ODF 1.0 they realised that they both needed to be able to emulate buggy behaviour (in order to produce the results people expected) whilst not encumbering newly created documents with those same bugs. So they added useBuggyBehaviour=True/False type flags, and it’s turned out to be a great spec.