Mittwoch Mai 30, 2007
Opinion about Microsoft's OOXML support for the Mac
"Right now, Microsoft is pushing hard to get ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standards certification for OOXML. How is it that OOXML can be a standard if Microsoft doesn't even fully support the format in a major version of Office? Irreconcilable is the push for standards and not fully supporting the format up for standards approval.
Meanwhile, Microsoft makes big noise about interoperability. What kind of example does Microsoft set when the formats for its Mac and Windows Office suites aren't interoperable? Irreconcilable is the position of increased Microsoft-and-other platform interoperability and the decreased interoperability between Office file formats across two platforms.
Microsoft can argue that there will be interoperability later this year. For enterprises mixing Office 2004 and 2007, later isn't soon enough."
The full article can be found here.
( Mai 30 2007, 04:16:39 PM CEST )
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Reminder: OOoCon 2007 Call for Papers Deadline is June 1st
This is just another reminder that the deadline for the call for papers for this year's OpenOffice.org Conference is approaching VERY fast. The cut off date is June 1st. Thus, there are just a few hours left! Details can be found here.
( Mai 30 2007, 03:03:18 PM CEST )
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ODF for OS/2
OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 including ODF support, AFAIK, is now available for OS/2. Unfortunately it's not free like for the other platforms. More details can be found here. Nevertheless, this adds another platform to the long list of operating systems for which ODF implementations exist.
( Mai 30 2007, 01:37:01 PM CEST )
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New Zealand could invest the $100M in OpenOffice.org development
I just became aware of this article via my colleague's blog. I'm not a Mac user yet, although I'm sure my next privately purchased laptop will be a MacBook Pro since I've seen it run Solaris very well in parallel to Mac OS X. Nevertheless, I know many people who are already successfully using OpenOffice.org on the Mac every day. Thus, I'm sure that the schools in New Zealand could easily use OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office.
However, I also admit that the Mac version of OpenOffice.org is still not perfect. Therefore, in case people in New Zealand are too concerned about the quality of OpenOffice.org, I wanted to suggest that New Zealand could invest the $100M mentioned in the article, or at least a percentage of it, into the development of OpenOffice.org. Such an approach would have multiple advantages:
First, students could help with the development of OpenOffice.org as part of their computer science curriculum. It would be like a Google Summer of Code project, except that the funding would not come from Google but from a government. In addition, local companies could be contracted with OpenOffice.org development and customization tasks which would lead to a local software economy.
Second, since OpenOffice.org can be used everywhere, i.e. at all schools, universities, and government agencies, every dollar invested in the development of OpenOffice.org would save licensing fees somewhere else.
Third, if a government like New Zealand invested in OpenOffice.org development, more governments probably would follow. For example, as can be seen on this wiki page, the French government is a heavy user of OpenOffice.org. Thus, France would be another good candidate.
Forth, the adoption of OpenOffice.org would also ease the adoption of a truly open document exchange format which is supported by many different applications on many different platforms. Thus, vendor lock-in would be decreased.
Anyway, I'm convinced we will see a lot more cases like the one in New Zealand over the next few months and years!
( Mai 30 2007, 09:18:06 AM CEST )
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ANSI/INCITS accepts comments regarding Ecma Office Open XML
I wonder who provided the template for the comments regarding OOXML that have arrived at ANSI/INCITS during the last few days. Many comments have almost identical wording in the beginning. The comments can be found here.
I guess, ANSI/INCITS is mainly interested in comments from people in the US, but if you want to send in your comments as well, you can probably send your emails to this person. At least that email address shows up on several of the other comments.
( Mai 30 2007, 08:49:31 AM CEST )
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