Open source solutions for the non-enterprise user.
Open source communities have successfully developed a huge amount of software, although most computer users only use proprietary applications. I'm interested in the usabilty and viability of these applications and operating systems for the average desktop user.
Saturday 23 February 2008, 7:54 PM
Microsoft Promises Great for Hobbyists!
Unfortunately, everybody else is shafted and Microsoft's greatest competitors are excluded. The company's recent promises only protect open source developers for "non commercial distribution", and this excludes Linux. They are trying to equate "non commercial" with "open source" and these are distinct concepts. As usual, it's a marketing ploy and it's no coincidence that it comes just a day or two before national boards will meet in Geneva to discuss MS-OOXML. It adds confusion and there is no time to study it, only time to see the headlines that 45 billion dollars in the bank can generate.
If Microsoft was truly sincere about supporting open standards then shipping Office with a "save to" ODF option already installed would be a good start. ODF is an ISO-standardized format and they should support it natively in their application systems.
Lets look at an analogy, PDF, another ISO certified document format. OpenOffice.org added one click export for this format way back in version 1.1, circa 2003. This was without the need for relatively expensive third party add-on tools. Can we say the same for Microsoft? We couldn't back in 2003 but perhaps now we can now. Not sure, I'm not a Microsoft Office user, but if we can then we owe a boatload of thanks to the OpenOffice.org community.
At any rate, Microsoft has a tried and true tradition of failing to support open, cross platform technologies. When finally pressured into doing so, they undermine the technology by using their monopoly power to "extend" it, as the case with HTML, Java etc.
I believe the latest try try for dueling standards with the vote-rigging and less than above the board tactics is just a new form of the same old tricks. Their so called OOXML (even the name is deceitful) standard probably can't be implemented properly by anybody but Microsoft and I have my doubts there.
If Microsoft was truly sincere about supporting open standards then shipping Office with a "save to" ODF option already installed would be a good start. ODF is an ISO-standardized format and they should support it natively in their application systems.
Lets look at an analogy, PDF, another ISO certified document format. OpenOffice.org added one click export for this format way back in version 1.1, circa 2003. This was without the need for relatively expensive third party add-on tools. Can we say the same for Microsoft? We couldn't back in 2003 but perhaps now we can now. Not sure, I'm not a Microsoft Office user, but if we can then we owe a boatload of thanks to the OpenOffice.org community.
At any rate, Microsoft has a tried and true tradition of failing to support open, cross platform technologies. When finally pressured into doing so, they undermine the technology by using their monopoly power to "extend" it, as the case with HTML, Java etc.
I believe the latest try try for dueling standards with the vote-rigging and less than above the board tactics is just a new form of the same old tricks. Their so called OOXML (even the name is deceitful) standard probably can't be implemented properly by anybody but Microsoft and I have my doubts there.
