Montag April 30, 2007

OpenOffice.org joins SPI
"OpenOffice.org and Software in the Public Interest (SPI) are pleased to announce an agreement to place OpenOffice.org under the SPI umbrella as a member project. OpenOffice.org joins such estemed projects as the Debian, PostgreSQL and Freedesktop.org projects and the Open Voting Foundation." (quote from this article)
( Apr 30 2007, 11:32:40 AM CEST ) Permalink

Donnerstag April 26, 2007

NetBeans wins award at JAX event
Cool! Matisse, the GUI builder in NetBeans, won the community / conference attendee award at the JAX conference. Unfortunately, the information is only available in German. Here it is.
( Apr 26 2007, 03:07:22 PM CEST ) Permalink

Interesting comments from a former Microsoft employee
"Last August Microsoft decided to drop VBA from the Macintosh versions of Office. Despite complicated technical explanations, every development decision like this is based on a cost/benefit analysis. ...

By locking in users and then not supporting their own lock-in features, they're effectively making it very hard for many Mac Office 2004 users to upgrade to Office 2008, forcing a lot of their customers to reevaluate which desktop applications to use. It's the same story with VB 6 and VB.Net, and it's the same story with Windows XP and Vista. ...

PS: in researching this article, I tried to open some of my notes which were written in an old version of Word for Windows. Word 2007 refused to open them for "security" reasons and pointed me on a wild-goose chase of knowledge base articles describing obscure registry settings I would have to set to open old files. It is extremely frustrating how much you have to run in place just to keep where you were before with Microsoft's products, where every recent release requires hacks, workarounds, and patches just to get to where you were before. I have started recommending to my friends that they stick with Windows XP, even on new computers, because the few new features on Vista just don't justify the compatibility problems.

PPS: I was a member of the Excel Program Management team from 1991-1993, where I wrote the spec for VBA for Excel."

Found here.
( Apr 26 2007, 10:16:01 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Mittwoch April 25, 2007

Higher costs due to increased competition
Costs rise when competition increases, right? The more vendors and products there are in a specific market, the higher the prices that customers have to pay, correct? I don't know what business schools Microsoft's employees and their friends went to, but some of them seem to have a strange understanding of the economy, market powers and the impact of competition.

In Rob Weir's latest blog entry I found this link to an anti-ODF / pro-OOXML document. In the document it says "An ODF procurement mandate would also drive up costs for government." As I indicate above, this statement seems to be against any logic to me. Why would increased competition based on one common open standard increase costs? The exact opposite should be true!

O.k., to be fair, in the short term the adoption of ODF might be more expensive than continuing with the status quo, if a government decides to switch to a new application in order to adopt ODF. Thus, there would be some migration and maybe training costs. However, mid to long term the cost savings due to increased choice and competition should be huge!

Due to the fast growing adoption of products like OpenOffice.org (about 500K downloads per week with about 50% new users) Microsoft was already forced to lower the prices for some of their products. That's most likely the reason why they came up with the Student and Teacher Edition and later on with the Home and Student Edition, and why Microsoft is now planning to offer low-cost versions of Windows XP and Office in developing countries.

In addition, the adoption of ODF does not necessarily mean switching to new products. With the various ODF plug-ins (including Sun's), even Microsoft Office users can adopt ODF without having to migrate to a new application.

The anti-ODF document makes a few more false or at least very misleading claims. According to the document, Microsoft's OOXML is better for people with disabilities. I don't want to speak for the people with disabilities, but from what I hear more and more people with disabilities actually see ODF as a huge change, even though they initially were afraid of ODF. The adoption of ODF enables the usage of open source desktop platforms for which a growing number of open source accessibility tools like Orca, GOK and Dasher exist. Thus, with ODF there is a chance that more people can actually afford accessibility tools in the future. Peter Korn's blog is probably a good starting point for learning more about this topic.

Then there is a claim about formulas missing in ODF. Yes, ODF 1.0 allowed arbitrary formula languages. However, ODF 1.2 which will be finalized later this year, will address this gap. The current drafts can be found here. In contrast to just documenting how one specific implementation handles formulas, which would have been a trivial task provided you have people who can type fast, the formulas in ODF are defined based on best practices and state of the art knowledge.

Yes, Microsoft's OOXML supports custom schemas, i.e. "data customized for specific purposes", but so will ODF 1.2. However, due to the fact that ODF is being used as the default file format by at least two open source implementations, there will be broad application and vendor support for these features for ODF. OOXML's custom schemas are, AFAIK, only supported by Microsoft Office, i.e. one single vendor. Since OOXML support is still not available on Mac OS X, it's even questionable if and when custom schema support will become available on platforms other than Windows.

Finally, the anti-ODF document says "ODF, on the other hand, was designed to represent information created by two applications, StarOffice and OpenOffice, that are not widely used." The statement is wrong in two ways. First, ODF was not designed to be application dependent but application and vendor agnostic. Check out this ODF white paper for details about the openness of ODF. Second, OpenOffice.org is already widely used! Just look at this wiki page or do Google searches like this one, this one, this one, or this one. Also read this ("Science cannot at present accept files in Word 2007's .docx format.") and this ("We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats."). You will notice that Microsoft's OOXML does not play a significant role, yet. In contrast, ODF is already used widely as the hundreds of published ODF documents proof.
( Apr 25 2007, 11:20:33 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [3]

IBM's Rob Weir about ODF and OOXML
IBM's Rob Weir just shared some more insights about ODF and OOXML in his blog. Worth reading!
( Apr 25 2007, 09:40:55 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Gartner gives Sun "positive" rating
Gartner just gave Sun a positive rating. Here is their one-line summary:
"Sun Microsystems' improved revenue, substantial progress toward sustainable profitability and return to Unix server market leadership warrant an increased vendor rating of "positive.""
Sun's open source strategy definitely strongly influenced this positive rating.
( Apr 25 2007, 09:23:52 AM CEST ) Permalink

Montag April 23, 2007

Sun Anniversary Sale: StarOffice for just $34.95
As part of Sun's 25th Anniversary Sale, the StarOffice software can be purchased for just $34.95. All the special offers can be found here.
( Apr 23 2007, 06:17:58 PM CEST ) Permalink

Donnerstag April 19, 2007

Ubuntu bundling Sun Java Software Stack
Check out this! Ubuntu is bundling the Sun Java software stack. This should make Ubuntu even cooler and increase the distribution and market share of Sun's tools significantly!
( Apr 19 2007, 06:38:51 PM CEST ) Permalink

New Report Designer for OpenOffice.org
You might want to check out this blog entry by Ocke Janssen if you are interested in generating database reports. The blog entry talks about a new Report Designer that is being developed. The included screenshots give a good first impression!
( Apr 19 2007, 12:50:59 PM CEST ) Permalink

Michael Dell running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org
The world is definitely ready for alternative desktops! I just found out that even Michael Dell is running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org on his laptop. Check out Michael Dell's bio page here or read this article. Pretty amazing!

I'm running Solaris on my main/work laptop and I can't remember when I booted Windows the last time. In addition, I'm running Ubuntu on a few private machines. My wife is running Ubuntu on her notebook as well. I think Ubuntu is very cool when you are looking for a fun and easy-to-use desktop system! Thus, I'm not surprised about Michael Dell's choice.
( Apr 19 2007, 12:45:49 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Mittwoch April 18, 2007

"Microsoft's 'Men in Black' kill Florida open standards legislation"
"It was just a bit of text advocating open data formats that was slipped into a Florida State Senate bill at the last minute with no fanfare, but within 24 hours three Microsoft-paid lobbyists, all wearing black suits, were pressuring members of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations (COGO) to remove the words they didn't like from Senate bill 1974."
Found here.
( Apr 18 2007, 01:30:42 PM CEST ) Permalink

Croatia proposes ODF adoption
Check this out!
( Apr 18 2007, 01:27:12 PM CEST ) Permalink

Dienstag April 17, 2007

New article about OpenOffice.org Calc functions
Bruce Byfield wrote another useful OpenOffice.org article about Calc functions:
"In part 1 of this article, I gave an overview of functions and what they do. Now, in part 2, I'll continue by explaining how you enter formulas (or formulae, if you prefer), and how you can check and review them afterwards."
The full article can be found here.
( Apr 17 2007, 06:49:07 PM CEST ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org got 10 Google Summer of Code projects
Details can be found in this blog entry by Stefan Taxhet.
( Apr 17 2007, 06:45:52 PM CEST ) Permalink

Mittwoch April 04, 2007

Online form for submitting papers for the OpenOffice.org Conference now available
An online form for submitting papers for the OpenOffice.org Conference is now available. Proposals should be submitted before 1 June 2007.
( Apr 04 2007, 03:18:40 PM CEST ) Permalink