PlexNex

FT: "Putting Linux on Desktops"

"Did IT work: Putting Linux on desktops" | Sam Hiser | Financial Times (7 Nov 2007)

Update in today's FT print edition of the three prominent Linux migrations in Europe...

• The Gendarmerie
• City of Munich
• PSA Peugeot Citroën

Shuttleworth & Co. on OpenSeason

Ashlee Vance hosts a fun & informative chat with Mark Shuttleworth on OpenSeason. Also attending: Matt Asay & Dave Rosenberg.

Audio (MP3) over an hour. Run in the background while you waste time on Facebook.

OpenOffice.org Doesn't Make the Cut

Web Worker Daily has a list of 10 minimalist word-processors for your basic productivity needs.

Conspicuously -- and appropriately -- OpenOffice isn't on the list. That's because OpenOffice evolved from way back in the 1980's as a direct competitor of MS Office, which is how it got so bloated. Add to this the fact that Sun has never run OpenOffice.org as an open source project and you have a 1997-era code-set too big and cumbersome to address present requirements.

OpenOffice will live an die by its proximity to MS Office's feature-set, and sadly it didn't get close enough in time to stop the native format it spawned, ODF, from becoming more important than the application. Apart from OpenOffice's utility as a negotiating chip for Sun, IBM, Novell and others against Microsoft, it's one of the great missed opportunities in software history...another of Sun's business blunders on the order of several hundred million Euros.

Long live the minimalist, web-ready, word-processors!

Interoperability by Design: Wisdom from DownUnder

Budi Susanto is a university lecturer in Indonesia. His comment on the File Format War is a spark of wisdom showing through the fog of Microsoft's & Novell's orchestrated misdirection.

Commenting on the interoperability ballet between Microsoft and Novell to enable OpenOffice to speak MooX and MS Office 2007 to speak ODF, Budi says...

The two fortifications also issued each other converter...Why must make separately the format for the document be open?

Budi's is a pointed question.

People are hearing about a format called "Open XML" and they are expecting it to behave like XML, that is, behave openly. Only ODF behaves the way XML was intended -- as a lingua franca for disparate systems to handle content smoothly. MooX needs translators. It is therefore fundamentally no open.

This itself should raise questions of the quality of Budi's. If MooX were open, it wouldn't require Translators. Q.E.D. You no need to read the 6,000-page specification to make this rock solid conclusion.

That Microsoft should put so much energy and $300 million into Novell to architect the conclusion that MooX is valid and deserves the "Open" appellation should indicate their intentions and the value to them of manipulating perceptions. Is no open.

Office Feature Mis-Match

Response to"ACME 376" has been strong, as we had hoped.

We have fielded some very useful questions at the OpenDocument Foundation as well as quite a few sample documents from enquiring customers. Let me address this one immediately...

Question:

How does the plugin cope with features from MS Office that are represented in the legacy .doc files that OpenOffice.org, for example, cannot handle?

Answer:

This is a question about document format compatibility with different appliations. If viewed from a more holistic point of view, it's a quesiton about system interoperability around a document format.

Yes, there are features in MS Office applications which are represented in the .doc format which OpenOffice.org does not duplicate. (And it is reasonable to assume that there will always be some form of feature mis-match between applications. Life isn't perfect.)

In short, the da Vinci ODF Plugin for MS Office loads into your Office | Windows installation (precisely as you have seen it can in your testing work with "ACME 376"). da Vinci intercepts the in-memory representation of a (working or outputted file), sends it through the da Vinci ODF conversion engine and tags the elements in the file that OpenOffice.org does not recognize with a special tag. Such a tag preserves the information so that the file can go back from ODF to its original format back in the Microsoft application where all the data will have been preserved & where it will be recognized there. This is what we call a "high-fidelity round-trip".

One day, when applications are ODF-Certified through an automated system (which we have yet to develop), high-fidelity round-tripping will be the standard practise and will work successfully for infinite round-trips across any & all Certified systems. Meantime, round-tripping needs to be minimized because standardization around a single format is so immature.

(Please keep in mind that da Vinci files that are generated/originated in ODF cannot be viewed in the current OpenOffice.org v2.0 [which is compliant with ODF spec v1.0] because da Vinci is designed to work with ODF specification v1.2, which is due to be represented in a version of OpenOffice.org later this year.)   

I hope this general example indicates how the Plugin is faithful to the FORMAT of the original document, that the incompatibility is with the APPLICATION. It is the very best and all a format can do until the application is designed to deal successfully with specific features. (Unrecognized elements will iteratively be recognized as application development moves forward. If your organization has specific features or elements requiring mapping into OpenOffice.org, then the OpenDocument Foundation can engage with you to write an effective spec to have the work done if the OOo team is not responsive.)

As you know, feature mis-match is a problem that arrises when working with legacy files which is not a real-world problem when files are generated/originated in the ODF format in MS Office or OpenOffice.org. The example above permits us to say "perfect fidelity" because the integrity is total at the format level -- if an application cannot read an element that's represented properly in the format, that's the application's fault.

If applications are not made to be compatible, then in this open source world it is incumbent on the customer to make sure the work is being done to satisfy the requirement. This is why the ODF Tool Kit is critical and needs to be funded too.

FYI, on the ODF-compliant server-side, the OpenDocument Foundation is also working on the ODF InfoSet API & SDK which is targeted to businesses seeking to integrate da Vinci-quality ODF capabilities into web applications, for example, in the office 2.0, the messaging and the CMS areas. Are you listening Google, Zoho, JotSpot, Alfresco, Zimbra & Lotus Notes?

da Vinci as you know was made to address the requirements of Massachusetts ITD.

This is a generalized response to a question that deserves a detailed explanation using real-world examples. We'll be in the best position to have a productive discussion of document compatibility and system interoperability with you if you send us sample documents that represent compatibility issues for you.

Novell's "Danaergeschenk"

Free Software Foundation Europe's George Greve writes a precise assessment on Groklaw of Novell's commitment to Microsoft's "interoperability." This takes place upon the eve of Ecma's rubber-stamping of the Microsoft XML format and its handoff to ISO and upon the eve of the announcement that Novell has inserted the Clever Age ODF translator into its patent-protected build of OpenOffice.org software.

From a naive stance, having two standards for documents may not seem so bad. But when considering that only ODF really is an Open Standard fully supported by multiple office applications and that the OpenXML format will be pushed with all the power of the dominant desktop vendor, it becomes obvious that accepting both ultimately means undoing the political efforts on Open Standards that have been undertaken in the past years.

Please! A Must-Read for CIOs, state gov't policy-makers and the File Format Cognoscenti.

George Greve | FSF Europe | Groklaw (8 Dec 2006)

Hiser on Don Marti's LinuxWorld Podcast

Don Marti was Editor of LinuxJournal during its long and important middle phase. He's now back at LinuxWorld.com as Senior Editor.

MP3 (24:02)

Don & Gary Edwards and I spoke together a few weeks ago about the GPL-ing of Java and the conversation turned to our file format work on ODF at the OpenDocument Foundation. This led to the LinuxWorld Podcast, which Don recorded late last night after my return from Boston.

Hiser...

"We have to stop being coy...if we're serious about the success of Linux in the market-place -- either desktop or server -- we have to be realistic about aggressively attacking some of the choke-points these gorillas are exerting..."

Don's questions were excellent -- they're questions we've been hoping to field from the Linux sector for years now. I ramble through the points (am fixing that), but the conversation represents our views clearly,and hopefully for a wider than usual audience.

Format Expert is Blogging Now

Florian Reuter has started sharing his unique insights about file format development. He is employed by Novell and remains a member of the OpenDocument Foundation.

Anyone seeking to follow the ODF story from the technical perspective might do well to follow Florian's feed. Feed links are here:

• RSS
• Atom

His first post is here. And the other following posts are edifying too.

Who's Your Daddy?

A while ago, while I was OpenOffice.org Marketing Project lead and full of fire-in-the-belly to evangelize OpenOffice through local retail establishments, I had an edifying series of encounters on the Mean Streets.

At the time -- this must have been back in the Autumn of 2002, the year OpenOffice.org 1.0 came out in that May with our big globally coordinated PR push led by the wonderful Zaheda Bhorat (ex- of Apple & Sun, now at Google) -- Members of NYLUG and elsewhere were rather interested in the idea of an OpenOffice boxed set to fill the shelves at retail. This conceptually was the bricks & mortar version of colleague, Anthony Long's, Flexeity Software: selling OpenOffice CD's bundled with pre-paid email & online support. Here's Anthony's Z-Shop at Amazon, still up.

On my own reconnaissance mission in NYC, I went down to some retailers and took the temperature of the store managers' attitudes to giving shelf space to a $19.95 to $49.95 boxed version of OpenOffice.org 1.x. There were also discussions with some college book stores (Columbia, Yale & Princeton) about a possible unobtrusive countertop display -- like the nicely designed & branded cardboard holder that Ubuntu ships with each substantial ShipIt shipment -- holding free OpenOffice CD's or those including OpenOffice and other great free apps from The Open CD Project (which Canonical, Ubuntu's pecunious parent, has since "acquired"). The two retailers I visited were CompUSA and Tekserve, the latter being the most successful Apple retailer in the world which has the best support shop to prove it (still offering 10-cent Cokes from an old-fashioned Coke machine, while you wait for your number).

Long story short, the response from retailers about OpenOffice was tepid, ranging from an Academy Award-winning glassy-eyed stare of feigned ignorance to overt hostility and threats of violence. It took me a while to process the meaning of this -- I mean, shouldn't the world, tut monde, love a cheaper alternative to MS Office? But it hardly takes an MBA to figure out the problem. It's Retail 101 from the OldSchool: the problem is retail margins, i.e, at our price-point and market share we had nothing in the long green department to offer retailers.

If OpenOffice -- or Sun's StarOffice, for that matter -- wanted shelf-space at retail, it would need to dice & price the same as MS Office and its myriad versions (in order give the retailer an equal dollar profit on each unit) AND pay additional marketing spiffs to the retailers just to get on the shelves. This, to say the obvious, is beyond the means of the duct-taped mailbag toting rabble of students, college professors, save-the-whales do-gooders, office suite hackers and dot-com refugees who made up the OpenOffice Marketing Project at the time. Tea & toast as well as the one step above dial-up DSL plan was about the extent of our individual resources in addition to lots of time for endless threads of opinionated, often directionless, chat across time zones at weird hours of night and weirder hours of the day.

In retrospect, our intention that OOo would penetrate through retail channels, catch fire and overtake Mindshare in the general populace was Quixotic. It was the manager at Tekserve whose laconic cocking of his head (like a less excited version of my dog when I'm speaking to her) first disabused me of this enterprising daring do. When I asked him if the shop would like to offer free OpenOffice CD's on the counter, which I would happily re-stock regularly, he said, "Ah, no," as if (I now realize) he was only pretending to consider it.

In CompUSA, I got a really enthusiastic young guy who loved the idea to pitch it to the Manager; they were over there together for 10 minutes. The young attendant was gesticulating with his arms ('...but can't you see...it's so great!...). The Manager was looking up at me from their conversation like I was a homeless person and he was about to call the police. The young attendant came back and simply told me the news: "Uhm, you see. We make over a hundred bucks on each box of MS Office Pro...ya get it?" Following the math, I now can hardly believe the level of my own naivete'.

My experiences at the college bookstores were similar, if not actually life-threatening. At one -- which shall remain nameless (the one in NYC with no undergraduate social-life) -- the store manager yelled at me and saw me out with a large security guard checking me with repeated nudges past the t-shirts, coffee mugs, baseball caps and shrink-wrapped boxes of MS Office (priced low for edu). After gathering my mail bag and my cell phone which had skittered across the floor under the Alternative CD display, it took me a while and a bit of research through my connections in Registrar's to realize that part of the university agreements with Microsoft prohibit alternative software to be sold at the universities' on-campus bookstores. So much for our liberal bastions of free-thinking. The truth would make Larry Summers run swiftly and even apologize.

The MS Office alternatives like OpenOffice cannot crack the Mindshare Bind by naively accumulating users and developers alone until they can offer something like real cash to the retail channel or until some courageous or foolhardy soul sues the universities and Microsoft for having made illegal agreements. Same with the OEM channel. Open source must be able to replace the vigorish coming from Windows & MS Office if our new, new thing is going to play hardball.

The commercially inept open source projects won't ever go there successfully and, thankfully now that OpenDocument is taking off in its own right, they won't need to. Google is going to come in with Writely and whatever OpenOffice code they need and fund a competive office suite web service that will catch on and provide the necessary sprinkling of the retail and OEM channels to bump the other guy. It was Jason Calcanis who I saw speculating that Google will be able to cut a revenue share of the ads delivered via Goolge Desktops on Dell, hp or other OEM PCs. Perhaps Jason wasn't the first to make this point.

With regard to interrupting the influential cash flows that sustain the Microsoft Kairetsu, Google is the only open source entity with the dosh and the intent. Watch how quickly Dell, hp, Fujitsu Siemens, Lenovo and the whitebox chorus leap to Linux when Google demonstrates where Daddy really lives.

OpenDocument: Reaching Another Safe Harbor

Jono Bacon reports comprehensivley on O'Reilly.net the migration of Bristol City Council's 5,500 workstations to StarOffice. We knew Bristol was on the case list, but never did I imagine the similarities with The Commonwealth of Massachusetts were so strong.

There were two main drivers for its work on a new office software standard--one internal, one external. Within the council, staff responded to a survey about what standards they should incorporate--part of a Best Value Review of information and communication technologies (ICT)--and the top issue the respondents asked the council to fix was the mixed environment of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Office. Users complained of spending too much time on converting documents, even for internal sharing, and without a corporate licensing agreement there were many versions of each product in use. Many of these tools did not support the newer features of Microsoft Office, which made collaborating with partners more difficult.

Gavin Beckett, Bristol's IT strategist, has gone the Full Monty in making the business case for an open source-based office suite which offers as its center-piece the open standard OpenDocument file format.

Please read Jono's piece, it  covers everything from how they made the business case, to cost modelling (what they included from Gartner's migration cost model and what they threw out), their assumptions, user views and more. There is interesting information about how they addressed human factors -- fear and the overriding perception people have that Microsoft is the only solution. Plus, there's a section on how they are doing the migration...more similarities to The Commonwealth.