[LeeG]

Just downloaded the recently talked about version, and set it up with X11 - this is VERY impressive software folks.

I was always under the impression that M$ Office was such a MASSIVE amount of work, and so entrenched that no one could topple it. Well, now with major shifts to Linux in the enterprise, and companies reaping the benefits of opensource stuff - this could be the office suite of tomorrow - its really nice. An open office file-format is so needed its crazy.

So, anyway, I loaded the sucker up - took about 5 minutes (after the download ~170Mb), and it looks like a really nice office suite. It has a littel gui roughness typical of X11 apps, but its quite functional.

Hey all you MacNN'ers - I stood on the sidelines an whined too, but now I plan to test useability and contribute any way I can to furthering this great project - an aqua native port would be an incredible achievement, and offer mac users at last a full, FREE open standards office environemnt. Lets help contribute as a group and help inch up the release of an aqua version.

Lastly, (and this is where my ignorance of the GPL comes in) if apple was able to make KHTML into SAFARI, could they make OPENOFFICE into APPLEOFFICE - releasing a KICK@SS aquafied office suite for mac users - FREE, and at the same time contributing back their programming skill to the OOo group to roll into OOo for all platforms?

This would be another opensource, slick move by apple to help stave off the redmond beast, while really giving users of all platforms a FREE functional, compatible office environment...

Thoughts?

Lee

[spiney]

Have a look at the Brand X version of open office over at trinity.neooffice.org (when it comes back online next week). The gui changes are incredible.

[Eug]

X11? Well then forget it for me.

I'll check it out once it goes OS X native (maybe 2005 from the sounds of it).

[CheesePuff]

Originally posted by Eug:
X11? Well then forget it for me.

I'll check it out once it goes OS X native (maybe 2005 from the sounds of it).

Actually, I thought I read on MacCentral it wouldn't be until sometime in 2006 at the earliest.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Eug:
X11? Well then forget it for me.

I'll check it out once it goes OS X native (maybe 2005 from the sounds of it).

x11 rocks man!

[JKT]

Originally posted by CheesePuff:
Actually, I thought I read on MacCentral it wouldn't be until sometime in 2006 at the earliest.

This date is for OOo. v2.0 - the official OOo release. The Trinity website is dedicated to the NeoOffice concept whereby they may achieve an unofficial native Aqua release based on the current OOo v1.0.3 code.

FWIW, just because it is X11 it doesn't make it that hard to use. They have done excellent work on it:

1) It imports and uses your OS X fonts.
2) It prints to your OS X printers (thanks to CUPS in Jaguar).
3) It open/saves numerous formats incl. MSOffice... even Word document changes are preserved (that is you can track changes made by someone else in Word and they can track the changes you made in OOo).
4) It uses an Applescript launcher to allow double clicking of OOo generated documents to open OOo/X11 itself.

All in all it is a very, very capable app - approaching Office98 in terms of features. I personally haven't come across any issues with it other than UI related ones which are out of the hands of the Mac porting team.

However, for sake of clarity, the biggest issues with it being X11 are:

1) It is dog ugly (any chance of generating a more OS X-like theme??)
2) Open/Save dialogues are very Windows
3) Copy/Cut/Paste is tricky between the X11 and Mac environments (although not impossible)
4) It takes forever to startup.
5) It is too reliant on MS Office metaphors for its design - Office stinks in far too many usability terms and unfortunately OOo have chosen to copy too many of them... and even make some worse.
6) Keyboard combos follow X11 standards (control in place of command, etc)

[ambush]

I've tested it for like 10 mins (I will have the opportunity to test it some more soon because of school works) but

- It's slow
- Text/Font/Anti-Alias looked like crap
- Interface somewhat unfamiliar
- X11+OpenOffice = like A LOT OF MEMORY = swapping like a madman

But it doesn't matter, as long as it's free, I'll be usng it this year on my iBook.

[Diggory Laycock]

There are only two part-time people working on it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/32483.html

[edit: grammar]

[Arkham_c]

X11 is not bad for what it is. Remember that X11 is not supposed to be peer of Aqua. It's a stopgap solution until they can get it ported over to native Aqua widgets.

I suspect someday we'll have native GTK/GTK+ and KDE support in OSX, so that program for either can use Aqua transparently. It's all about demand -- right now there's not enough demand for Apple to do that.

I would not be surprised at all if Apple was working either from OpenOffice or from KOffice to make a new OSX Office Suite.

[LeeG]

Originally posted by Eug:
X11? Well then forget it for me.

I'll check it out once it goes OS X native (maybe 2005 from the sounds of it).

This is what I mean - don't wait - could be 2-3 YEARS! I knew nothing about this stuff, and with minor difficulty (actually I found it kinda fun learning more about unix/terminal recently) I set up X11. Though I don't use them often, I was proud of myself for getting GIMP and OPENOFFICE running.

I agree - open office is DOG slow to start up, and the GUI is typical X11 awful (I know many will argue this point - I don't debate functionality, but I find aqua much more visually appealing, personally).

If this is really being done by 2 people - they should win some kind of award - this is a herculean achievement ALREADY.

Using this as a basis for an Apple Office would be awesome, and a huge contribution back to Opensource on apple's part - I'd love to see it happen, and the amount of progress made on the unix version gives me hope!

Lee

[Eug Wanker]

Sorry, but the issues you guys mention are such a PITA it's frankly not worth my time. I tried X11 with GIMP and it was like I dialed my computer back 4 years in usability. And who wants to deal with cut and paste issues?

I'd rather just buy Office... and I did. If you can afford it, then why not.

Like I said, maybe when a native Aqua version appears, I'll consider it, but right now it's not even an option. For the starving student types, you can always get an educational version of Office. For those with a very tight budget I can see OO though, but even then one must consider productivity issues with having to deal with it. If you're a business with a tight budget, IMO you should still be able to fork out a few hun for Office if you need full Office functionality.

[malvolio]

I have been using OOo off and on for more than a year now, and I am very impressed. Using Apple's X11 beta 3, OOo is quite snappy� (once it starts up).
It is fugly and rather unpolished in some areas, but it is impressively feature-rich. And the best thing is that it offers a genuine alternative to M$ Office for those who don't want to support the Evil Empire.

[GENERAL_SMILEY]

I think X11 will become very popular when Panther is released, as it comes pre installed, and as I understand Apple is building some sort of package manager / downloader for it to access.

I think this is true...

[moki]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
Sorry, but the issues you guys mention are such a PITA it's frankly not worth my time. I tried X11 with GIMP and it was like I dialed my computer back 4 years in usability. And who wants to deal with cut and paste issues?

Just 4 years?

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
I suspect someday we'll have native GTK/GTK+ and KDE support in OSX

GTK is meant to inherit the "GTK look and feel" on every platform, last I heard. There's already a native Qt for OS X.

[clebin]

I use OOo on my Windows PC where it's a bit more native feeling, so you don't have to put up with going back 4+ years in usability (um....no, wait...)

If there's one piece of evidence that suggests Apple is planning its own office suite, it's the thee OS X OpenOffice developers saying that only 2 people are contributing. If Apple doesn't have forthcoming applications to sit alongside Keynote and Filemaker (and I think you'll agree that a minor AppleWorks update will not fit the bill!), then they're great big idiots not to help with OpenOffice.

Imagine a bundled open-source office suite of this calibre being bundled on the OS X install disks... they must have something of their own... surely?

Chris

[asxless]

Originally posted by clebin:
If there's one piece of evidence that suggests Apple is planning its own office suite, it's the thee OS X OpenOffice developers saying that only 2 people are contributing.

Just out of curiosity, who are you counting as the "[three] OS X OpenOffice developers"? There's Ed Peterlin, Dan Williams and...?

FWIW there have been more than "two developers" working on the Mac port of OOo for the last 18 months. A handful of additional developers have helped on either limited sections of the code (e.g. ODBC support, Netscape address book integration, OS X launchers, etc.) or working through compile issues in the transition for 10.1.x =>10.2.x. Nothing is absolute. But having been heavily involved with the Mac OOo port for the last year, I can attest that Ed and Dan have been doing the vast majority of the 'heavy lifting' on Mac porting code development. BTW The evidence is publicly available via the OOo IssueZilla entries which record who has submitted the lion's share of the Mac OS X patches that were committed to the tree.

-- asxless in iLand

[DeathMan]

You can never tell, what apple is doing. they don't seem to like GPL, though, so they'd me more likely to take KOffice, fix it up like they did with KHTML.

Who knows though. It would be nice if through some magical twist of fate MS opened it's file format completely so that companies could build competitive products, rather than needing to spend manhours trying to reverse engineer it.

[wataru]

My biggest problem with OOo was that it took up a lot more hard drive space than MS Office. Since I don't entirely trust it to handle all my Office documents correctly, I want to keep Office around, meaning I then have ~500MB of office apps lying around... not good on an iBook with a 30GB hard drive.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
You can never tell, what apple is doing. they don't seem to like GPL, though, so they'd me more likely to take KOffice, fix it up like they did with KHTML.

KHTML is LGPL. I wouldn't be surprised if KOffice is GPL.

[WJMoore]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
KHTML is LGPL. I wouldn't be surprised if KOffice is GPL.

Yep more or less:

Which license applies to KOffice?

KOffice is an open-source project and completely free. Regarding the license, it was first put under GPL. Some programs have been moved to the AL (Artistic License), maybe others will follow. This license is less restrictive than the GPL, thus allowing linking certain (free but non-GPL) libs into it without raising legal issues for distributors etc. However, it's just as free as the GPL, in fact it is even more free.

from: http://www.koffice.org/faq/index.php#AEN285

[kupan787]

From http://www.koffice.org/kword/:

KWord is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Version 2.

From http://www.koffice.org/kspread/:

KSpread is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Version 2.

From http://www.koffice.org/kpresenter/:

KPresenter is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Version 2.

So if KOffice is GPL, but all its parts are LGPL, wouldn't Apple use the parts, build there own office suite, and it be LGPL? But the question is why? KOffice doesn't read/write MSOffice files natively like OOo does. So it would make sense to help the OOo guys, then to do a port of KOffice.

[LeeG]

Exactly, the point of converting OOo to AppleOffice is the M$ compatibility - like it or not, we MUST stay compatible with the world - ain't no way you're gonna convince the world to change to a new non-compatible office suite - its far too entrenched...

If KOffice is not compatible, OOo is where they should go-


Lee

[Tsilou B.]

Originally posted by asxless:
[B]Just out of curiosity, who are you counting as the "[three] OS X OpenOffice developers"? There's Ed Peterlin, Dan Williams and...?

Patrick Luby has ported OpenOffice to Mac OS X using Java. It's a bit slow, but it uses all installed Mac fonts without any conversion. It's not perfect yet (it's slow, printing does only work after applying a patch from trinity.neooffice.org, and Copy and Paste does not yet work with other apps), but it's rapidly progressing. You can download it here:

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/

[asxless]

Originally posted by Tsilou B.:
Patrick Luby has ported OpenOffice to Mac OS X using Java. ...

I agree that Patrick has done a great job with NeoOffice/J by using the OS X Java GUI tools to port the OpenOffice.org code base to run natively in OS X. NeoOffice/J has the same 'look and feel' as the X11 port, including the Windows like Open/Save dialogs, etc. BUT it does not require X11.

But I don't think that Patrick's port is the "evidence that suggests Apple is planning its own office suite" suggested by clebin. At best it shows that Apple _could_ use the underlying OOo code base as a starting point for an Aqua Office Suite. Note, Patricks's port is part of the NeoOffice (GPL) initiative -- "June 13, 2003 atrick Luby open sources his Java-based port of OpenOffice.org under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Edward Peterlin offers to host the NeoOffice/J development project at NeoOffice.org ." This GPL licensing makes NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J very unlikely candidates as components in any Apple port of OOo.

BTW Patrick's involvement in porting OOo to the Mac predates Ed's and Dan's work on the OS X port. We all owe Patrick a debt of gratitude for his early and continued involvement in providing the Mac community a free alternative to M$ Office.

-- asxless in iLand

[normyzo]

asxless is correct, Patrick was the original Sun engineer tasked with brining OOo to Mac OS X in 1999-2000. Unfortunately for him, OS X sucked big time then.

And in my email to the register, I must say that I completely shorted people like asxless, Scott Dietrich, Kevin Hendricks, and others, without whom OOo on Mac OS X would not be possible. This wasn't through any devious or ill-meaning intention of my own, but is my fault and I am sorry for that. Its much more than just two people.

Thanks all,
Dan

[MacGorilla]

I have been using NeoOffice/J for a while and now that it prints, life is easier. Its good work.

[vsurfer]

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
I have been using NeoOffice/J for a while and now that it prints, life is easier. Its good work.

On another tack,...

is there a "sudo apt-get install" open office command for Open Office . . .?

(I've just found that apt-get seems to be more successful for me than downloading binaries and such.)

[cblueorg]

[medium-long post ahead]

This whole OpenOffice thing still doesn't make sense to me. I think I need some help... let's see:

1. first I have great respect and admiration for the two martyrs (it's not ironic) who decided to spent their past work time porting OO instead of doing something for themselves. Giving to the community is an effort that should always be rewarded.

2. The question I pose to myself is 'Will I ever use OO? Even when they (or the NeoOffice team) finally reach a port with native widgets? Even when they reach v2?'; my answer is, still and sadly, no.

3. OO is a clone of Microsoft Office. Is such a garbled, anti-intuitive, nonstandard, complicated and plain butt ugly application something I want to stare at two-three hours a day? Do anyone really thinks that native widgets can do something to improve a situation so flawed at the core?

4. That's not the way I'm used to. I work on the best platform available today (why would I still be a Mac user if not), with an OS that is logical, coherent, elegant easy on the eye, and designed for mankind use (your mileage may vary, but I'm not going to discuss this - it's by far a matter of personal taste). I expect applications I use are AT LEAST as good as the system. Clearly Microsoft Office or OO are not. And there's no guarantee that they will bebetter in this regard one day.

5. The two main points in porting OO on OsX are: it's a free Office suite cloning Microsoft Office, so no need of re-learning for users and sysmanagers alike, and cross compatibility for formats (it seems that there are always imbeciles sending .doc attachments); and it's free, thus diminishing ownership costs for large installations such us schools, government, public services etc.

6. On the first point: I understand OO may be a big selling point with Linux users. That way they just have to pay for hardware. OS and a basic Office suite is free, and this, along with a browser, covers 99% of users and mean user's time. When I buy a Mac, I have already paid for OS (and there's no way to do otherwise, and I'm happy about that). What I need is an office suite (since Apple is no longer developing and/or bundling AppleWorks), but not necessarily Microsoft Office or a clone.
This platform is regarded in the IT industry also for the outstanding quality of applications. Windows users are still green with envy when they have a look at OmniGraffle (more on this later), iTunes and many others. Why this should be different with office application? Why do I have to settle with sub-par software exactly for the apps everyone uses the most? I have seen beautiful WPs with a learning curve of about half an hour.
OO can read .doc format, but uses XML as internal format (or so I understood reading FAQs at OOo). That means that somewhere in the ocean of code there's a module that does the translation.

7. On the second point, a joint effort from the developer community would probably bring a similar result: a mac office applications suite, with most of the Office/OO features, but with our beloved mac easy of use and coherent interface, not just native widgets, free for all. Stone Studio, a nice and complete graphical suite, is coded and mantained by ONE full time person (or so I have read in a news site) thanks to Cocoa. Mellel, a recent foray in WPs, has a staff of two. Nisus Express (formerly Okito Composer) has a ONE person staff. What kind of miracles a staff of ten parttimers could do, expecially considering the whole corpus of GPL Office suites that can be predated?

8. Wouldn't make much more sense, instead of wasting time in the gargantuan effort of porting OO, to spend precious time writing a WP that does 90% of what Word does, using the same (well documented) XML format used by OO, and incorporating translators from-to .doc format? Wouldn't this be a much more 'mac like' solution?

9. One day, by hook or by crook, Microsoft will open it's Office format to XML (maybe already in the next version, as rumor says). That would be a situation similar to the present OmniGraffle - Visio stand. OmniGraffle is a world-class app, a beautiful done interface for a robust diagramming program that still makes heads turn in the Window word (try handle a OG diagram to a Visio user, or use OG in a library and see what happens...) Being able to read XML visio files solves the problem of compatibility, and we have a mac application on hand, not a squalid port. When (and if) Microsoft will XML the rest of Office, I hope there'll be a real Mac Office application already to take advantage of this.

[asxless]

cblueorg,

I suspect that there are many Mac OS X users who would like to believe that...

[ brief synopsis ]
... somewhere in the Mac developer community there "ten part timers" who agree with you that it would "make much more sense, instead of wasting time in the gargantuan effort of porting OO". So they would be wiling to _donate_ their time to produce: "a mac office applications suite, with most of the Office/OO features, but with our beloved mac easy of use and coherent interface, not just native widgets, free for all... using the same (well documented) XML format used by OO, and incorporating translators from-to .doc format... [and] the whole corpus of GPL Office suites that can be predated... thanks to Cocoa". And if I understand you correctly, they would also want to rewrite most of the GPL office suite UI code, since the existing stuff is "garbled, anti-intuitive, nonstandard, complicated and plain butt ugly".
[ /brief synopsis ]

As a reminder, OOo is not just a word processor with a few add on helper apps. It is a credible replacement for the full M$ office suite (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) plus a serious graphics application (e.g. Canvas).

Certainly the Linux (and general unix) community has a culture of supporting large open source projects like you describe. But even in that world, most of the big projects are cross platform. AFAIK there are no Mac OS X only open source projects that even come close to the scope and complexity of what you suggest. I seriously doubt that he Mac OS X community is mature enough to contribute the support required for a Mac OS X only, open source project of this magnitude. But I'd enjoy being proven wrong

-- asxless in iLand

[moki]

Originally posted by asxless:
As a reminder, OOo is not just a word processor with a few add on helper apps. It is a credible replacement for the full M$ office suite (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) plus a serious graphics application (e.g. Canvas).

I wonder just how credible it is as a replacement for Microsoft Office. Other than price, I can't see anything in OOo that makes me want to use it instead of Microsoft Office.

It has a fairly poor UI, the feature set isn't as broad as Microsoft Office, it has problems opening files of various formats (especially Microsoft Word/Excel files), it runs under X11, the installation is not pleasant and the resulting install size is monstrous, doing things like configuring/adding fonts is a real hassle, and so on.

I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but again, other than being free, I don't see any benefit to OOo over Microsoft Office. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time; I'd rather just buy Microsoft Office.

(note: none of this is to take away from the work people have done on the project; writing a good office suite is not easy, nor fun)

[voodoo]

Originally posted by moki:
I wonder just how credible it is as a replacement for Microsoft Office. Other than price, I can't see anything in OOo that makes me want to use it instead of Microsoft Office.

For one thing, OOo supports Icelandic characters by default - something that M$ Office for Mac does not. I need to use the letters � � and � in my documents.

[normyzo]

Moki,

OOo supports many more languages than MS Office. That's #1. 1.1 (just now working on Mac) supports Hebrew and many others through BiDi language support.

Next, the reason I started working on OOo rather than AbiWord or another open-source solution was that (repeat after me):

SUN HAS DEDICATED PEOPLE ON FILE FORMATS

I took a look at the other offerings and decided that since OOo reads/writes MS file formats the best outside of Microsoft, that's where I'd like to add my effort. In my opinion, an office suite which doesn't do an excellent job of importing MS Office files will get NOWHERE. And since Sun pays engineers (yes, plural) to work full-time on making sure OOo works with MS Office files, its got the best chance to succeed.

Dan

[cblueorg]

Originally posted by asxless:

As a reminder, OOo is not just a word processor with a few add on helper apps. It is a credible replacement for the full M$ office suite (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) plus a serious graphics application (e.g. Canvas).

1. What I said for WP was (obviously) also intended for Spreadsheet, Presentation and Drawing apps.
2. What do you mean with 'credible replacement'? OO it's an Office clone with some of the more obscure features removed.
3. Why should I would want to replace Office in the first place? Who said that Office's components are the best apps in their respective category? By continuously stating that Office is something like a model to follow, we (IT community) created the myth of Office. The actual problem is not having a WP (or any of the other apps) that works LIKE Word - is having a WP that OPENS Word documents.

Originally posted by asxless:

Certainly the Linux (and general unix) community has a culture of supporting large open source projects like you describe. But even in that world, most of the big projects are cross platform. AFAIK there are no Mac OS X only open source projects that even come close to the scope and complexity of what you suggest. I seriously doubt that he Mac OS X community is mature enough to contribute the support required for a Mac OS X only, open source project of this magnitude. But I'd enjoy being proven wrong

4. I also have great respect of the Linux community (in the broader sense - there's always something noble in being David), but I can't think of any 'large open source project' that was useful to my everyday work. the Mozilla fiasco teaches us something, KHTML team did something much better, more compact and easy to tweak (Safari docet) with so much less resources - it's all in the management, shtoopid
I don't want to be flamed or transform this topic in one of those 'OpenSource Yah' - 'OpenSource Nai' discussion. I'm fully with you when you

'seriously doubt that he Mac OS X community is mature enough to contribute the support required for a Mac OS X only, open source project of this magnitude'

; I just don't think this is the way to go.
5. Ask Andrew Stone of Stone Design how many persons are needed to manage a 'project to the scope and complexity' of a full graphical suite that leaves OODraw in the dust. Ask good people at OmniGroup how many full time engineers are devoted to OmniGraffle. Ask Apple about Keynote (or just take a look at the previous owner's staff). We don't need a 'project of this magnitude' - we have the fastest developing environment-framework (ok, Visual Basic IS faster, but we're talking pro here), what we really need is talented people, and the mac developers' world has many notable examples, deciding it's worth something to have a real Mac office suite.
6. And good talent has to be rewarded. I have never said I would like to have all this and free: a reasonable price would probably fit my bill (as about anyone's among mac users - people used to shell ��, $$ and ��), but in exchange I want a BETTER thing than Office.
7. The whole discussion will be utterly useless if, as the rumor says (it seems much more like a desiderata to me), Apple is working on such a suite right now. We will remember this discussion like the interminable rant about browsers, in the dark age before Safari.
8. [completely off-topic] By the way, Stone Studio is a wonderful piece of software badly in need of a polished interface. This is the real 'must clone' program. Put a simil-Adobe interface on it, and mr. Stone will be a rich man (I hope for him he already is...)
9. Do you know the only reason I still think it would be useful to have OO ported to Mac OS X? In its dominance plan of the world ;-) Sun is flooding European countries with shrinkwrapped StarOffice packages. Six millions of those (yes, it's 6.000.000) will be donated to about every school in my country coming october, just after school year begins. I can already hear the usual Windows idiot: 'Oh yeah, you've got Office 11 on the Mac, but can you run StarOffice yet?'. I'd like to tell him 'Oh yeah', showing him the little critter running on my TiBook, then with an elegant gesture, put the whole OO folder in the trash in front of him and fire a real Mac suite... Then wait for the 'ooooh'

[cblueorg]

Originally posted by normyzo:
In my opinion, an office suite which doesn't do an excellent job of importing MS Office files will get NOWHERE.

Fully agreed. But why in hell to have the advantage of great file converters we the users should stick with such a poor application?

[asxless]

Originally posted by moki:
... other than being free, I don't see any benefit to OOo over Microsoft Office. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time; I'd rather just buy Microsoft Office.

I think this probably sums up the opinion of most Mac OS X users. who historically have been willing to spend money for connivence / appearance. FWIW I have been (and still am) a licensed user of M$ Office since it first appeared on the Mac ...

BUT... What if there were no Mac version of M$ Office that ran without VPC? That is the real world of Linux/unix that spawned OOo and similar projects.

FWIW I donated man months of my time over the last year helping the OOo Mac porting team create/test a viable alternative to M$ Office.mac because I wanted Mac users (including myself) to have the _option_ to quit supporting the M$ monopoly.

Without the various 'open office' projects / products M$ Office has _NO_ serious competition on the Mac folks. And now with the Feds off of their backs, M$ just might opt to simplify their product line by supporting only one version of M$ Office and just bundling VPC with it if you want to run it on a Mac.

BTW I've used M$Office in VPC extensively and I much prefer using OOo in X11 even with its quirks/faults

-- asxless in iLand

[asxless]

Originally posted by cblueorg:
2. What do you mean with 'credible replacement'? OO it's an Office clone with some of the more obscure features removed.

By 'credible replacement' I mean that someone who is now using M$ Office:mac can remove M$ Office:mac and use the OOo Mac port to read/write the same documents and do essentially the same things with OOo that they were doing with M$Office.mac. Whether or not you think that is a worth goal; other people do.

6. And good talent has to be rewarded. I have never said I would like to have all this and free

Actually you did or at least you implied that you did. For completeness "7. On the second point, a joint effort from the developer community would probably bring a similar result: a mac office applications suite, with most of the Office/OO features, but with our beloved mac easy of use and coherent interface, not just native widgets, free for all." Emphasis mine.

7. The whole discussion will be utterly useless if, as the rumor says (it seems much more like a desiderata to me), Apple is working on such a suite right now. We will remember this discussion like the interminable rant about browsers, in the dark age before Safari.

BTW when Apple released Safari at MWSF, I dramatically scaled back my involvement in the OOo project in particular and Mac open source projects in general. Apple's iApps, Safari, Keynote, etc. are both the best and worst aspect of Mac OSX. In each case Apple has provided a good application at a reasonable price (or 'free'). But in each case Apple has also reduced the options that are now (or will be) available to me as a Mac OS X user. Of course, Apple is simply exercising the power of a 'benevolent dictator' on the Mac platform. For example, X11 v1.0 (or rather the quarz-wm part of X11) is 'free' but only available if you upgrade to Panther. It shouldn't take to much imagination to see how future updates of all of Apple's software products will be tied to yearly OS upgrades which in turn will be linked to periodic hardware updates. In this sense Apple is not dissimilar to the WinTel monopoly except that Apple is both the OS and hardware vendor which gives it even more control of the outcomes.

I'll leave the discussion on whether commercial alternatives to the M$Office:mac office suite or the individual applications are viable or preferred to OOo to others.

ciao -- asxless

[cblueorg]

Originally posted by asxless:
By 'credible replacement' I mean that someone who is now using M$ Office:mac can remove M$ Office:mac and use the OOo Mac port to read/write the same documents and do essentially the same things with OOo that they were doing with M$Office.mac.

So you agree with me

Whether or not you think that is a worth goal; other people do.

Everyone is entitled his own opinions (me too), and I can assure you I have not the power to force mine on others. Heck, there's even people using Windows... Fact is, I would like to know how many people would really like to have a free clone of Office with aqua widgets, and how many people want a proper Mac suite able to use OO filters to read .doc/.xls/.ppt. This would be a good topic for a poll. You seem to imply that having the first one is easier and quicker, but how can this go along the news about OOv2 and year 2005 recently circulating around here and in 'the register'?.

Actually you did or at least you implied that you did.

The emphasis sould be on free for all. You seem to have missed the 'prisoner' reference here. Don't be too picky, I'm not your enemy

BTW when Apple released Safari at MWSF, I dramatically scaled back my involvement in the OOo project in particular and Mac open source projects in general.

I miss the link between the two - care to elaborate?

Apple's iApps, Safari, Keynote, etc. are both the best and worst aspect of Mac OSX. In each case Apple has provided a good application at a reasonable price (or 'free'). But in each case Apple has also reduced the options that are now (or will be) available to me as a Mac OS X user. Of course, Apple is simply exercising the power of a 'benevolent dictator' on the Mac platform.

I'm not with you (iApps excepted). Keynote is a commercially available package. You want it - you pay for it. Is a quite good program for beginner - intermediate users, and presentations made with it are well regarded in the scientifical world, usually brutaly raped by Powerpoints (see last Tufte). In this case Apple, by buying a third party Nextstep app and porting it to X has decidely 'reduced the options that are now (or will be) available': cutting out of the market ugly and overpriced presentation program. I can't see how can this be bad. The 'benevolent dictator' has not (like another one, for which you probably wouldn't add the 'benevolent' bit) used hidden peculiarities of the system locked out to other developers (it's a ported app anyway, and all of the thing you can do in KN are plain well documented in Cocoa frameworks), or dumped the product on the market.
Safari is a whole different story. Apple hired ONE programmer (the well known Hyatt), took KTML and made Safari. Before Safari we had an eternally-coming-out-nice browser (Camino/Chimera), and a bunch of questionable browsers (IE, NS, Mozilla, etc). After we got a really god browser IMHO. Apple just had a good idea, that can be repeated for other apps as well (use Open Source core, add a well thought HI, got it right with one engineer). Once again, no one forced to you and me his own standards and a market domination; Apple instead went with open standards, portability, and even gave back in return. I don't want 124 programs with 124 bad interfaces doing the same things, I, as a user, just need good software, that's all, and I can't see how Safari is a step backward in this goal. Laws of classic economy won't necessary apply to this business.
As for iApps, I understand your grips - the only thing I can add is that some of the iApps (notably iDVD and iMovie) are, considering the target, much better than any other thing seen on any platform. An app for which this is well known to be untrue is Sherlock (vs. Watson). Go ask Dan 'Karelia' Wood how much this hurts his business (after the first initial outburst of rage).

For example, X11 v1.0 (or rather the quarz-wm part of X11) is 'free' but only available if you upgrade to Panther. It shouldn't take to much imagination to see how future updates of all of Apple's software products will be tied to yearly OS upgrades which in turn will be linked to periodic hardware updates. In this sense Apple is not dissimilar to the WinTel monopoly except that Apple is both the OS and hardware vendor which gives it even more control of the outcomes.

Argh! Let me point that:
1 - Panther is supporting the original iMac. Panther is actually FASTER that Jaguar on the original iMac. Show me a company that produces updates that supports five years old machines better that the old version; the fact that Apple is also the HW vendor makes this thing even more notable in the market (they are interested in selling more machines, not in render more usable the older one).
2 - The X11 example is misleading at best: Panther is a complete change over Jaguar. If you have followed closely the advances in X, you can see that applications' minimum requirements usually change when new public frameworks that pertain the app are added.
3 - Rarely (if ever) Apple has play bait and switch with the OS-apps upgrade comma 22. They tried sometimes with the OS-Hardware one. Apple is far from a perfect company, but your imagination sure is wicked.

I'll leave the discussion on whether commercial alternatives to the M$Office:mac office suite or the individual applications are viable or preferred to OOo to others.

But if you leave out 'commercial' and fill the blank with 'Open Source company (Apple maybe) sponsored developement', you got the exact point of the discussion: why port an ugly clone (can we agree on the fact that OO is ugly, even using Aqua widgets? Can we agree on the fact that Office is cumbersome, controintuitive and unfriendly?) when you can have a suite the Mac way?

[asxless]

Originally posted by cblueorg:
So you agree with me......

No. I do not agree you on this point or most of other points that you have proposed.

Your main thesis rests on the idea that the energy that others are spending on an Aqua port of OOo (and apparently other open source software projects) is somehow wasted and/or reduces the opportunity that you will get the better Mac applications that you want. I can assure you, as an open source contributor, I have never been very concerned about the opinions of people who have the resources to purchase what ever software they need/want; They, after all, have choice. I am always far more concerned about the Mac users in schools, non-profit organizations, 3rd world counties, etc. that have limited resources and need a free alternative to M$Office in order to function effectively in a M$ dominated computer world. BTW if the products of these open source efforts are as useless as you suggest, they can hardly be seen as competition to your proposed commercial Mac applications.

Even a brief perusal of this and other online forums reveals that ideas and opinions are easy to come by online. It is vastly easier to criticize (or praise) the work of others, than to build something yourself. So the number of people who actually do something beyond offering opinions about what other people should do is exceedingly small.

Nothing is stopping the commercial Mac software development community from building your dream apps. And just in case the captains of the Mac software industry fail to appreciate the obvious brilliance of your ideas/opinions, nothing is stopping you from creating an open source project to do what you described in your original post.

Meanwhile, I'll quit wasting my time in this forum and go back to work on non-profit projects that I think have value.

ciao - asxless

[spiney]

The one thing the critics here seem to be missing is an evaluation of the quality of the application. I own Micro$oft office and I used it on a daily basis before ooO came along. After being fed up with excel crashing "unexpectedly" so often that it was expected, having word re-format the styles I defined, having spell check change all of my arial fonts to times when fixing spelling errors, having powerpoint not open files from windows-using-colleagues in the same file format, I decided to give an alternative a try.

I have been delighted with ooO. I have not had a single spreadsheet crash "unexpectedly". The calculations are miles faster. I can open an excel spreadsheet that once took half an hour to recalculate everything in about a minute. The styles that I define stay defined period, end of story, and I can open ppt files from windows users that office X couldn't touch.

Beyond the fact the ooO simply does what office is supposed to do, better, it costs me nothing, and has a supportive community (ooodocs ) that helps with problems at less than 75$ per incident. If you look around some you will even find a pretty good looking version of ooO (ooO brandx) that makes everything look nothing like windows. I now have an office package that enables me to work with Microsoft Office using colleagues, and doesn't leave me with a featureless suite like appleworks. And best of all I have a choice!

ooO is simply an office suite with teeth. Give it an honest try and see if you don't agree.

[moki]

Originally posted by asxless:
BUT... What if there were no Mac version of M$ Office that ran without VPC? That is the real world of Linux/unix that spawned OOo and similar projects.

Sure, but you're making my argument for me, in a way. There *is* a Microsoft Office for MacOS X, and it is indeed a better package -- by far, IMHO -- than OOo. Why would Mac users be interested in OOo?

Linux, and the end-user desktop apps that run on Linux, are without exception not the "best of breed" applications. They are simply all that is available for Linux on the desktop.

Their great advantages are simply that they are free, and that they are not Microsoft apps. Some people/governments may care about the latter, but I don't. I use the best tool available that suits my needs.

I think Linux may eventually do well on the desktop, but it won't be based on competing on a level playing field. It will be because it is free, and because governments will be mandating that people use something other than Microsoft.

It's an interesting idea to ponder; will Linux become the "poor man's OS" used in developing countries? Will applications _ever_ get to the level of competing with commercial desktop apps, with the monetary incentive removed? With governments like China/Japan/Korea/India/Germany etc, sponsoring their development, I suppose it's possible.

But what will that do to the profession of computer engineer? It's interesting to note that I can't think of another profession where people give away so much of their time and effort for free; I'm not sure it is sustainable.

Regardless of my tangental thoughts, the fact remains (for me at least) that OOo is just not worth the hassle for me. It isn't on par with Microsoft Office, on a number of important fronts, despite what people say about it.

I suppose if I were running Linux, and I had no choice, I'd use it -- but then again, that's why I'm not running Linux. I know there are better alternatives out there. I'd gladly spend a few hundred dollars for the software I need than chew up so much of my time tinkering with Linux and the finicky/unfinished apps that run on Linux just to get work done.

[LeeG]

I agree especially seeing this price its hard to argue that office isn't worth it.

BUT, I brought it up since the OOo seems like the code base is THERE, for apple to package into a nice suite...


Lee

[Catfish_Man]

It seems like there is a TON of duplicated effort going into reading the MS Word file format. Apple supports it (in NSTextView in 10.3), OpenOffice does, AbiWord does... it seems like making a BSD or LGPL liscenced "Word File Reader" library would save everyone a lot of trouble and let people focus on getting that one library to full compatibility.

[asxless]

v

Originally posted by moki:
It's interesting to note that I can't think of another profession where people give away so much of their time and effort for free; I'm not sure it is sustainable.

It is quite possible that we are only seeing the beginning of an era of increased volunteer contributions in areas which have been poorly handled by commercial 'incentives' (e.g. environmental, social, etc.). The book "BOBOs in Paradise" [BOBOs = bourgeois-bohemians] describes the large number of people who have benefitted from the post WWII meritocracy in education and business. BOBOs are relatively well educated, reasonably well off (i.e. bourgeois), but have lofty ideals and aspirations (i.e. bohemians). BOBOs are intellectually / socially active and often find the commercial work environment stifling / boring / unattractive. Most BOBOs are boomers and are at (or nearing) a time in their life/career when they can take up more interesting pursuits with lesser (or nill) monetary reward. BOBOs have been a significant force in western society since the 1960-70's (education) through the 1980-00's (peak productivity in the work force) and will remain so well into the 2010-40's (retirement). It would be a severe mistake to underestimate how we will use our education, skills and energy to continue changing the economic and social landscape over the next 40 years.

FWIW As I ramped down my volunteer work on the OOo port, I ramped up my volunteer efforts building web sites, data bases, etc. for non-profit organizations which match my interests/ideals. Computers are my hobby and I don't use them to play games.

-- asxless in iLand

[moki]

Originally posted by asxless:
v It is quite possible that we are only seeing the beginning of an era of increased volunteer contributions in areas which have been poorly handled by commercial 'incentives' (e.g. environmental, social, etc.).

It would be a severe mistake to underestimate how we will use our education, skills and energy to continue changing the economic and social landscape over the next 40 years.

It would be an equally severe mistake, though, to assume that programmers will continue working for free, when they have families to feed, and no other source of income.

Most OpenSource contributors are either students, who have the free time to invest/tinker/learn, or professionals who have a day job coding, and enjoy it so much that they contribute on their own time as well. Graduate them from college, or take away that lucrative day job that supports them, and see how quickly their volunteer contributions end.

This is why people who think all software should be free are incredibly overzealous. I don't see them demanding that architects designs houses for free, or mechanical engineers design motors for free. Nor do they realize that if they achieved their goal of all software being free, they'd doom it to failure by cutting of the income supply for those individuals who are experienced enough to contribute meaningfully.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
It seems like there is a TON of duplicated effort going into reading the MS Word file format. Apple supports it (in NSTextView in 10.3), OpenOffice does, AbiWord does... it seems like making a BSD or LGPL liscenced "Word File Reader" library would save everyone a lot of trouble and let people focus on getting that one library to full compatibility.

I've thought something similar for a while now.

[asxless]

Originally posted by moki:
Most OpenSource contributors are either students, who have the free time to invest/tinker/learn, or professionals who have a day job coding, and enjoy it so much that they contribute on their own time as well. Graduate them from college, or take away that lucrative day job that supports them, and see how quickly their volunteer contributions end.

Maybe you didn't do the math... You forgot the group of open software contributors (or non-profit organization volunteers) who are already RETIRED and don't need or want a stinking "day job".

The leading edge of the BOBO / Boomer bulge has already reached early retirement age. After 30+ years as technical/managerial professionals they are educated, skilled and "experienced enough to contribute meaningfully" to almost any open source / non-profit project. Many have worked hard, invested wisely and are now ready to do something they enjoy more than making money. And this one isn't playing golf or going fishing all day

-- asxless in iLand

[moki]

Originally posted by asxless:
Maybe you didn't do the math... You forgot the group of open software contributors (or non-profit organization volunteers) who are already RETIRED and don't need or want a stinking "day job".

Sure, though I do think they are in the minority.

Regardless, let's steer this back on topic. I've used OOo, and I've used Microsoft Office. OOo seems incomplete, buggy, and unprofessional by comparison.

Am I the only one who has compared both packages, and sees it this way?

Again, none of this is intended to trash OOo -- I think it's remarkable that they've gotten as far as they have, with Sun's help pushing/funding the development.

[normyzo]

Originally posted by moki:
Sure, though I do think they are in the minority.

Regardless, let's steer this back on topic. I've used OOo, and I've used Microsoft Office. OOo seems incomplete, buggy, and unprofessional by comparison.

Am I the only one who has compared both packages, and sees it this way?

Buggy and imcomplete, not for lack of trying though... While I would love to start over and make a ground-up, Mac office suite, most people here (moki probably excluded) would grossly underestimate the amount of work required to deal with the little things like file formats and version tracking and scripting that are behind the scenes and NOT something you can just RAD off in a day. _That_ is what makes an effort like this huge.

The good thing about the Register article is that it _has_ gotten a number of people interested in helping out. If they stick with it, serious manpower will be available to push this thing along. Even just one more person doing part-time development would be great, as would someone doing the level of front-line support like asxless did for so long.

OOo does have its faults (and yes, those of us who work on it have to deal with them all the time) and it does look like crap, but I wouldn't dismiss what it can become. It probably will never feel or look quite like a ground-up Mac application, but it can get damn close, close enough for the 98%.

Dan

[asxless]

Originally posted by moki:
Sure, though I do think they are in the minority. Regardless, let's steer this back on topic.

IIRC you are the one who publicly mused about the possible lack of sustainability of open source projects. I simply demonstrated a large and growing potential labor/leadership force, not bound by the economics of employment, who may do far more than just sustain open source projects. Time will tell which musing was correct.

I've used OOo, and I've used Microsoft Office. OOo seems incomplete, buggy, and unprofessional by comparison. Am I the only one who has compared both packages, and sees it this way?

As I posted previously, I have been a licensed (and heavy) user of Word, Excel and subsequently Office since their inceptions on the Mac. My livelihood over the past decade has depended on my skilled, daily use of the entire suite: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I also lead the Beta testing effort for the OOo Mac X11 port for the last year. As part of that effort, I built a fledgling Standard Test Suite of documents and instructions to 'exercise' OOo's features. I read and wrote literally gigabytes of modestly complex Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to test compatibility. [BTW I discovered that OOo has roughly the same compatibility issue when reading/writing Office:mac documents as M$ Office on a PC.] So arguably I have as much (or more) experience using _both_ products as anyone in the world.

Based on that experience, I would advise anyone interested in a alternative to M$ Office:mac to install the OOo X11 port and give it a honest try. See where it works well for you and where it has problems.

* If you are just fitting out a new Mac -- you can always buy M$ Office later, should you find OOo's foibles too annoying. But it is more costly to do the reverse. AFAIK M$ doesn't offer full refunds if you take Office back and say you found an office suite that does much the same thing and its free.

* If you are already a licensed user of M$ Office:mac -- you may find, like I did, that even the existing X11 port of OOo is good enough that you will not need to spend another penny on M$ Office:mac upgrades.

In either case, by choosing OOo, you will be left with enough spare cash to purchase a professional, complete and bugless product from Ambrosia software which will keep moki's professional computer engineer's families fed

-- asxless in iLand