Yesterday, VNUnet.com published a story claiming that there was unrest within OpenOffice.org over Sun’s continueing ownership of the underlying code. IBM, Sun, and now the OpenOffice.org community manager himself all say ‘no way‘.
Yesterday, VNUnet.com published a story claiming that there was unrest within OpenOffice.org over Sun’s continueing ownership of the underlying code. IBM, Sun, and now the OpenOffice.org community manager himself all say ‘no way‘.
1) develop a import/export plugin for MS Office
2) improve Openoffice.org
?
Because there is no need for an import export plugin. I routinely compose essays at home with Oo.org and then edit them at school with MS word. My question would be why doesn’t MS come up with an .odf import plugin? That would alleviate the need for me to save my homework in a proprietary(word xp .doc) format. You can already export docs created with Oo.org to just about every file format out there including pdf.. so like i said..no need for it.
As for improvements to Oo.org. The 2.0 version is great. Try using it, If you don’t like it use MS office, or one of the other suites.
My question would be why doesn’t MS come up with an .odf import plugin?
I agree with you on this one. The problem is if the document you are writing has tables and other formatting, it may not display properly when opened in MS Office. I had several clients that I do some documentation for, who complained about this and we eventually agreed to all use OpenOffice.org and save all docs in ODF.
Because this plugin would help Opendocument take off,
as organisations and authorities could make the switch to the format without risking extra costs of abandining their existing licensed software (or forcing people to do it).
Microsoft doesn’t want ODocument take off, as this means more users to OOOffice!
I force myself to use openoffice 2.0; has many features but could be faster.
There is indeed a need of an import/export plugin as this would help the OpenDocument format take off.
How can organisations and authorities make the switch to the new format, without having, (or forcing others) to abandon their existing software (cost!).
Don’t wait for MS to develop the plugin, they don’t want to see OpenDocument taking off!
1) develop a import/export plugin for MS Office
What are you referring to? I can output to all recent versions of MS Office with my copy of OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Including MS Office 2003 XML.) That’s just a bizarre request, much like saying I wish Sun would port OpenOffice.org to Linux…ummm, it’s already there.
2) improve Openoffice.org
I agree there, but what piece of software (open source or commercial) that couldn’t stand some improvement?
I think you need to explain these requests a little better. If there is something specific that you need, it never hurts to ask for it. The OpenOffice.org devs aren’t mind readers, let them know what you want and they might just add it.
Sorry to say but MS office docs with design/boxes are not opened properly with OO. OO is really in bad shape for the MS office format.
In my company most of our managmenet team members use MS Office and thats why we all have to use terminal server and use MS office!
The docs sent by menagement team with boxes,design simply gets messed up when opened in OO.
“OO is really in bad shape for the MS office format. ”
But not as bad as MS Office’ shape is in regards to ODF.
“plainstyle” has actually responded a couple of times to this thread, and those responses help to illuminate his original meaning. It seems that he would like OOo to develop a plugin for MS Office that could import/export to ODF. This would indeed be beneficial to some people. Of course, you can use OOo to import/export MS formats, but you can’t use MS Office to import/export ODF. Some IT departments are more willing to add a plugin to existing approved software than to install new software.
Arguably, this might also prompt MS to be motivated to develop their own plugin or at least improve upon what OOo might develop. If the plugin didn’t work perfectly, it might reflect poorly on Office rather than the plugin (I know that I have blamed a program for faults that were introduced by a plugin before I was able to find the real source). Most people don’t know how to tell whether a problem is coming from a plugin or a program.
If OOo did develop a plugin it could be added to the main install routine of OOo. The installer could check to see if MS Office is installed and offer to install the plugin if it is. Migrating from Office to OOo could then become that much easier.
Personally, I’d prefer any extra work to go toward the second point, improving the software, but there are arguments to be made for a MS Office ODF filter plugin.
…but they had to load OpenOffice before writing it.
I know the feeling…
He, not a joke anymore with OpenOffice 2.0.
Writer takes 9 seconds to load the first time, subsequent loads barely take 5 seconds.
This is a P4 2.8Ghz 512MB running SUSE 10. Yeah, call it a high end machine, it was when it was bought 2 years ago .
I think the “vibe” is that the project would do better if it was unfettered from comercial control. Look what happened to Netscape/mozilla when AOL bought them and left them hanging for years. I can see a portion of the community wanting OpenOffice.org cut totally free from Sun just so other companies can feel like they are equals. As it stands now, OpenOffice.org is ENTIRELY SUN’s baby. It’s good for a project to have focus, but when EVERYTHING has to go back to SUN to be offical I could see that scaring off a lot of developers that might bring money to the table.
If Sun were allowing (compelling might be a better word since forks of OOo are possible) OOo to wilt on the vine in the fashion of Netscape/Mozilla with AOL, there would certainly be reason for developers (and users) to concertedly request that control of OOo be released to a separate entity. In reality, Sun contributes a substantial amount of resources to OOo including code. Do they try to benefit from it? Yes, but they haven’t kept anyone else from trying to benefit from it either. That is why IBM has been able to use OOo as a basis to help them have ODF support in their products.
Right now having more choice and more software that supports ODF is a good thing. By using ODF as the format of choice, documents created with any of the software programs should appear exactly the same as when they were created when opened with any other program that supports ODF.
The difficulty for developers to contribute to OOo comes more from the codebase being quite large and complex than from Sun being too controlling.
I think many more people really wants to involve in OOo, and the greatest barrier may be not politics, but the size/complexity of the OOo code/development process.
It just takes too much time to really start develop something on OOo.
Building (dmake) OOo alone can takes you more than six hours,
understand relevant components for your project takes more than that.
OOo dev docs, to my impression, is .. difficult to get access to.
I didn’t said that there’re no good OOo dev docs. Many of them are very professional and very detailed, but at the same time … just too long and not fun to follow.
(and most of these docs are in PDF .. difficult to make a reference/share link in a discussion).
Even the “easiest task” like bug report can make you mad, since you will be flooded with tons of components to choose from in the IssueZilla (and how can you know what the differences between “Word Processor” and “wp” components ??)
As you can see, you have to be very dedicated.
And I think this is why only Sun engineers (who has full-time job for OOo dev) and few other people are actively contribute to the project.
(With the exception of OOo Native-Lang projects, which are very community strong — real end-users community, no Sun guys here.)
If they want more individual contributors,
they should low down this barrier.
I think that developers should be working on these import plugins (if they have the time). Like the ubiqutous PDF format – if people come to expect ODF as a default mechanism to send data amongst themselves – suites such as OpenOffice will have a better chance for uptake!
The IBM editors for Workplace are derived from the OpenOffice code and are currently closed under the license they have from Sun. Thus they are essentially a fork of OpenOffice. I have not had a chance to try them yet but they do some interesting things. They are a plugin for the Rich Client Platform (RCP) a cut down version of Eclipse. They are included with the Workplace collaboration software and soon will support ODF.
According to the IBM roadmap, the client for Lotus Notes will be merged with Workplace as of Notes 7.5 to 8. This will mean that a large number of Notes users, when their IT depts upgrade, will find that they have a full ODF compliant office suite included with their email collaboration software. The implications for MS Office ar significant, since this should happen about the same time that MS will be pushing users to upgrade to Office 12.
In an ideal world IBM would have opened up its Workplace editors and there would be collaboration between IBM, Openoffice.org and Sun with full and free code exchange.
The move of the Lotus Notes client, because it is bulit on the Java/SWT based RCP will also be the first Notes client to run natively on Linux.
At work I use Lotus Notes and I am hoping that in the not too far far distant future to be using the IBM editors on a Notes client