Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What? 285
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that's in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. "Family," because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that's gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org's direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: "The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2,800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?" If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot's corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Use Libre Office (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Use Libre Office (Score:5, Interesting)
The other day I needed to open a Visio document. I had created it a few months ago, before my old XP PC got refreshed with a Win 7 box. For some reason, while it still had Office 2007, it was missing Visio. Even worse, it wanted to open IE, which wanted to use an ActiveX viewer plugin... which proceeded to turn the line art into a bitmap when printing to PDF.
So I downloaded OO. No Visio for you! (This was actually the point at which I tried the ActiveX viewer.) Then I decided to check if Libre Office could handle it. Holy crap, yes, it opened it like a native document.
Then I made sure to save a PDF version of my document just in case someone else wanted to see it later.
Re:Use Libre Office (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yeah, but since total, absolute crap such as your posting and all the others like it pollutes the otherwise useful commentary, *someone* has to moderate in the interests of keeping this site readable for others, right?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, created when some core developers were worried with Oracle's lack of attention to the project. Some time after that fork, Oracle donated OpenOffice.org code and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation to continue the project.
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Interesting)
competing claims ... is a matter of sometimes heated opinion.
- LibreOfice is the descendant when it comes to who got most of the original developers themselves
- Apache OpenOffice has the copyright and the original branding
which is the fork and which the original
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
Which, means, they should be merged and brought back together.
This is the unfortunate case of Open Source failure, and a pretty big one IMHO. The fact that they remain split is huge problem, because now I cannot recommend either, even though they are both decent. I have no idea which one will actually survive and prosper, or which one will die a slow painful death. Merging them is really the only REAL solution for my concerns.
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>which is the fork and which the original ... is a matter of sometimes heated opinion.
I don't care too much about that. I am interested in which is better though.
Which is better?
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Interesting)
Debatable, but I would bet the long-term money on LibreOffice. Why? Licensing. LO is under the LGPL, while OO is under the APL. LO is able to reuse any OO code that they like, nicking any cool new features Apache develop. OO cannot- the LGPL will not allow it. So if OO develop any cool new features or improvements, they'll turn up in LO one release later. If LO develop any cool features or improvements of their own, it remains an LO exclusive.
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Free Office viewers (Score:3)
My first thought upon reading this was, "Right, because Microsoft has all of those various free Office viewers".
Still need Microsoft Office unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.
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This is because microsoft manages to be incompatible with their own ISO standard (I guess their own "standard" is not documented).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
Best
-S
Microsoft Ofc often incompatible/incompetent (Score:2)
Re:Still need Microsoft Office unfortunately (Score:4, Informative)
Sometimes it's a typeface/font issue, which is why I "accidentally" copied the TrueType fonts from a Windows partition over to /usr/share/fonts/TrueType
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I'm curious: did you have fonts in there that were not part of msttcorefonts [sourceforge.net]?
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Yes, every TT font that was installed by default in WinXP, Vista, and 7. Which is a lot more than the core fonts.
You can probably thank Microsoft for this... (Score:4, Informative)
Since experiencing so many reliability issues with Microsoft Office 2013, issues that did not exist with Microsoft Office 2010, I've become a vocal advocate for making the switch from Microsoft to either OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
I often encourage OpenOffice for older folks that are looking for a more reliable experience while I suggest LibreOffice to those who want a feature rich experience and don't mind the occasional glitch or updating the software as regularly as they release updates. I feel both are great projects.
Re:You can probably thank Microsoft for this... (Score:5, Funny)
I think is has more to due with Microsoft lack of advancement in Office... For the most part what we are doing in Office 2013, is the same stuff we were doing in Office 95.
Sure there were some incremental changes that took advantage of newer technologies, some new UI changes that I am not sure if it makes things better. But for the most part things haven't changed too much.
Word is still a word processor,
Excel is still a spreadsheet
Outlook is still a memory hog
Access is still causing businesses to slowly go bankrupt.
Power Point is still making meetings boring.
Using Open/Libra office, we get the stuff that we wan't it is compatible enough to not look like a jerk (say even 10 years ago) for not being able to read the document.
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Some of the bigger changes have to do with things like sharepoint integration, which really does work fairly well in newer versions of Office in a corporate setting.
However, it still can be rather buggy, and doesn't play nicely with Chrome unless there is some plugin I'm not aware of (that is, the more web-based parts - if you just directly open a file from Office no browser is involved).
Re:You can probably thank Microsoft for this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really detest Sharepoint. It's the flavor of the moment at work. It's slow and saves from MS Office applications sometimes fail silently. It pretends to be a suitable replacement for shared network drives, but it doesn't work for that.
I use it rather than the old Wiki (TWiki, no gem itself) just to be a good sport, but it really sucks. It really exposes how poorly integrated MS's own internal teams must me - it is such an obvious bolt-on.
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Capable SP Admins/Consultants are relatively rare,
That is probably true and itself is a huge problem if you decide to go this route.
Your SP Admin is partly at fault, from your post it sounds like your SQL Admin, Domain Admin, and network guys all need to get on boeard with making this work right.
I'm not sure what the SP Admin can do to improve Office. The built-in Sharepoint Office features suuuuuck.
If you are trying to use SP as it is intended there are very few cases where you would move several thousand files at once.
Unless you are collaborating with other people and part of that collaboration includes data collection. So now instead of one spot to keep everything, we have two. It's no big deal, but like I said when you avoid Sharepoint because of a shortcoming, you also lose it's benefits. In this case, we can't keep data, data collec
Re:You can probably thank Microsoft for this... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is demonstrably the case upon firing the software up as the interface is horribly ugly and even Microsoft Outlook 2013 can be uninstalled and 2010 reinstalled in its place, and all the settings, mail profile information,
I got hit with that MS bug too. (Score:3, Interesting)
A few observations and suggestions (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft claims 1 billion MS Office users. No doubt some/many are pirated, but that gives a sense for the scale of the potential user base for OpenOffice. And from what I've seen, Apache OpenOffice gets around 1 million downloads per week, a steady rate that can certainly continue for quite a while. So even if Apache did nothing, we would get to another 100 million downloads in another two years.
The question is whether we want to glide or really take off?
To really advance among mainstream end-users, pe
Re:A few observations and suggestions (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft is probably counting every OEM that ships with the trial version of Office, and all the bundled licenses, even if they aren't used.
Most companies buy too many licenses, so they can be sure they have enough. So if we buy 50, and use 30, but only 10 use it on any sort of regular basis, MS will still count it as 50.
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Your theory is sound, but your numbers are not. For example, Apache OpenOffice has only had 4 releases in two years.
There are many other factors to consider: Users can take the same download and install on multiple machines, they might share with friends or family members (I do that). A corporate installation might have a single download sitting on a network file server shared with many. There are also many 3rd party sites that themselves have seen millions of OpenOffice downloads, e.g., download.com.
always come back to MS Word (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried over the yrs to download the latest ver of OpenOffice and to give it a try and I always end up moving back to MSFT Word within a few days/weeks.
It's not missing features per se, it's layout/UI awkwardness and smoothness.
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Funny, I've tried MS Office a few times over the years. I usually go back to OpenOffice. If for nothing else, I install OpenOffice when I set up a new computer, since it's too much trouble to find an unused MS license outside of normal business hours. :)
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Same here. I want to move away from MS but (in my case) LibreOffice doesn't quite make it. It does 90% of what I need, but I also need the remaining 10%. Also too many other people use MS products and the 95% compatibility just isn't enough.
The one exception is LibreOffice draw which I use as my primary quick sketch / drawing package.
Execute plan 66 (Score:2)
n/t
For their next trick (Score:2)
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Effects: Rotate. I found that in about 15 seconds and I don't use Open/Libre office draw at all.
I don't use Microsoft proprietary software (Score:5, Funny)
I use Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Now we get hammered (Score:2)
Then again, that's my reaction to a lot of things, so....
Free, less buggy, more usable, what's not to like? (Score:3, Interesting)
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That's obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
That's because Microsoft Office has long ceased being the proprietary alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Nowadays, any typical organization use Microsoft Office + Active Directory + SharePoint + Exchange et. al. complete with compliance with bullsh*t like HIPAA and FIPS 140-2, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice cannot simply become a drop-in replacement anymore.
The stand-alone world processor is long dead. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated solution for clerical work that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations [microsoft.com]
Microsoft has entered into a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Texas, a pact that carries much more weight these days after the HIPAA omnibus rule was released in January.
Implementing Office 365 for such a large network should serve as a sign that the state is comfortable enough with cloud computing that 100,000 employees, including the state Health and Human Services System, will be using the services.
What will Texas Office 365 deal mean for healthcare security? [healthitsecurity.com] [Feb 2013]
Please Stop (Score:4, Interesting)
...collaborate and listen. LibreOffice has ~10 times the number of developers involved ( https://www.ohloh.net/p/libreo... [ohloh.net] , https://www.ohloh.net/p/openof... [ohloh.net] ), and it's a better project in every possible way. The only thing you have going for you is that name you inherited for Oracle. By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community. In fact it harms the community, because new-comers try AOO and think it's the best that the community can do, when LO has shown we can do so much better.
The only upside, is that LO can import your work and benefit from what little improvements your small team are able to produce.
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By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community.
Actually, AOO 4.0 was the first one to have a sidebar (their answer to the ribbon?), and LO copied it later. Also, there are Apache developers committing a nontrivial amount of code to LO (one article I read said 400 of 3000 bugfixes in LO 4.1 were submitted by people with apache.org email addresses).
Macros. (Score:3, Interesting)
Macros are the main problem keeping back a switch to LibreOffice or OO.o. Also, paid commercial support (so that Joe Smith can call up an "engineer" at 3 AM on a holiday Sunday with an urgent issue and get a hotfix issued by 7 AM).
The macro problem is bigger than most people (i.e., those outside Corporate or Public Sector America) realize. On many large enterprise systems, the computer is so locked down that to develop almost any kind of automation, or work productivity software, is nigh impossible. So, assuming you know some basic stuff about software development and you're tired of clicking and dragging on the same cells in Excel 500 billion times, you have two choices: either suck it up and click until you get a repetitive stress injury, or break out the VBA.
Most enterprises (at least, those I've worked at) don't restrict the use of VBA macros, so they've become a sort of "programming environment of last resort" for worker bees in companies that are either too cheap, or too stupid to deploy actual development software like Visual Studio or Eclipse. And even those employees who decide to go off-roading and fly in the face of corporate policy to install "un-approved" software (heretics; how dare they!) will run into major roadblocks related to not having administrative privileges on their system.
VBA code does not port seamlessly without major changes to the LibreOffice/OpenOffice environment; it basically has to be rewritten, depending on the complexity. Long story short, there are entire enterprise systems implemented in VBA (typically based on MS Access or MS Excel), often with copious use of Win32 API functions, which include networking, databases, custom file formats, custom GUIs (UserForms), and so on and so forth. These systems can save hundreds of hours of manual labor and improve the quality of life for people who work for a living and are just trying to get shit done, despite cloistered "departments" impinging from all sides, trying to impede their progress to the fullest extent possible due to NIH and general paranoia about software that they themselves didn't select (but when one of the IT guys who pulls the strings decides they really like some cool new program that helps THEM in THEIR job, of course it gets immediately installed on everyone's systems without so much as a security sniff-test).
Hiring an intern to work on one of these for a summer or two, or hoping and praying that you recruit someone who's willing to work for near-minimum-wage with a background in programming, is often the only thing separating corporate drones from RSI-inducing repetitive work. And don't go to the IT department and ask them to develop or buy a system, oh no; they never have the budget, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to sit down with your boss's boss's boss for a Project Scope Agreement meeting until July 2017.
VBA, from a pragmatic perspective, is a loophole that skunkworks people have been gleefully exploiting for close to 20 years now. If you propose to do away with it by removing Office from peoples' computers and putting OO.o or LO in its place, you'll incite a riot. If you do it anyway, your business will grind to a halt as productivity and efficiency drop by a factor of 100.
If you're an IT director with a hand in a decision like this, I urge you to survey ALL your employees -- not just the managers who have no clue what their employees do -- to see what impact a transition from MS Office to LO/OO.o would have. I'm not saying a move is impossible, but you need to do it in cooperation and coordination with your employees. Yes, even the inconvenient ones who like to download zipballs with those "Open Sauce" EXEs that you don't trust. They're the good guys; they're helping your company; and they're just trying to get their work done as efficiently as possible.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Actually, we do have those stats, via surveys. 78% of users who try OpenOffice continue using it.
Tried it, wasn't impressed (Score:2)
My wife has a lot of technically unsophisticated clients. More than half came back with "I can't open this." Not worth the time to educate them, so we went back to Office.
Photoshop, Acrobat and Illustrator (Score:3)
I would love to see an alternative to Adobe for Photoshop, Acrobat and Illustrator. I have used Photoshop and Illustrator (licensed owner) since versions 1.0 and now have CS4. I don't want Adobe's Cloud version. I don't want to deal with the cloud or subscription based software. CS6 won't save files in CS4 format so I don't want it for that reason too. Just as we have OpenOffice it would be nice to have OpenCS.
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Hmm, Gimp is fairly decent for a Photoshop alternative. I know pros won't be switching, but I'm proficient enough with it that I still prefer it now.
However, Gimp won't cover Illustrator. Inkscape does a damned good job with SVGs.
I'm a scientist, not a designer, so these cover the needs of me and my lab for no cost. I can do nice looking posters and whatnot with these tools, quite efficiently.
Wake me up when any flavor of OO has outline mode (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd *love* to ditch MS Office for any version of Open Office, but none of them give me MS Word's Outline Mode, an integral part of Word since Word for Windows back in the '90s.
For you real old-timers, it's not KAMAS (a CP/M based outliner that I maintain has never been surpassed), but it's the only thing current that comes within shouting distance
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Ah, yes. Issue number 3959. Originally filed April 10, 2002. More than twelve years ago. In that time it has remained in the top-voted issue list year-in and year-out. Others come and go, but 3959 keeps on pissing off users. At last look, there are about ten duplicates requests on file.
Every few years some developer wanders by and tells the people following it that nobody needs outline view, or that there are tools available to do it, or whatever. Often, they close the issue. In effect, "I don't use
The most uttered English phrases (Score:2)
2. I promise I won't come inside you.
3. I hate Word.
They could start by (Score:2)
dealing with bug/enhancement issues that have been pending for more than twelve years. Issue #3959 (notice the position in the queue?) has been either ignored or brushed off as unimportant since April of 2002, despite seniority and votes in the issues list.
Classic case of writers telling programmers "this is a must-have function" and programmers responding with "I don't use it so neither do you."
Code != Literature = Why Writers Need Outline Mode (Score:3)
Perhaps for programmers the need is not evident, but for anyone who writes long documents, it's indispensable. It's indispensable enough that I am still using Microsoft Word for anything that has any sort of header/subheader structure. OO and LO are OK for short letters and memos, but if it has more than 2 headings it gets clunky because of the lack of outline mode.
The core difference between writing text and writing code, which apparently the programmers working on OO and LO fail to grasp, is that writers are producing text which will be read by humans, not executed by machines.You can't just comment out the cruft and do a GOTO jump over that module you decided you don't want, then tell them to go back 17 pages to pick up the information in paragraph 3. Writing needs structure and flow to lead the reader through the material in a way that make the content comprehensible. It needs primary and subordinate ideas. Order and levels of importance are important. In Microsoft Word, collapsing the document into Outline mode and seeing the heading and subheading structure makes the flow of the document visible, and more important, the means to change that flow is on the same screen. There is no interruption in the work flow.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ seems to understand it, going the other direction: most real code isn't actually in a form that can be simply read .... in order to grok it I have to essentially rewrite it. I'll start by renaming a few things so they make more sense to me and then I'll move things around to suit my ideas about how to organize code. Pretty soon I'll have gotten deep into the abstractions (or lack thereof) of the code and will start making bigger changes to the structure of the code. Once I've completely rewritten the thing I usually understand it pretty well and can even go back to the original and understand it too.
Which leads me to "Issue 3959", wherein writers asked for this on 2002-04-10 20:39:19 UTC ... it's ranked as "Trivial" now. It has nothing to prevent implementation except the inability of the code maintainers to accept that writers really do know what they need in their tools.
Here's the overview of Bug 3959 ... https://issues.apache.org/ooo/... [apache.org]
As the wisdom of XKCD proves - http://www.xkcd.com/619/ [xkcd.com]
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:5, Interesting)
For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.
The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.
There are enough users who refuse to even try OpenOffice for the word processor. "I can't because...". I've tricked some users into switching, by just giving them shortcuts on their desktop with the MS names instead of the OO names, and changing the default save types to the MS counterpart. When they ask about why it looks different, I just tell them "oh, this is the newer version.", and they're fine.
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:5, Interesting)
You are describing my experience with home users, e.g. people who use Word to type out a school assignment or a project report and then print it.
.htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
:)
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating. Excel formulas will not always successfully transfer to Calc, which means old spreadsheets can't be used and they can't be shared with people still using MS products.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities. E.g. one bug lingers around for years: when a header is saved in OpenOffice format and then saved as a Word document, it will appear on all pages and not only on the first page.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base, but Base does have stability and bug issues, at least on Mac (just yesterday I had problems with it crashing).
I won't even go into macros, templates, etc.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious
Fresh start with OO/LO, on the other hand, is a breeze
I use both quite a bit (Score:4, Informative)
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating.
I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities.
Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base,
I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.
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Calc used to be really bad. I can not remember if it was LibreOffice or OO that just refactored Calc and added support for GPU compute. Calc is now pretty good. Exchange/Outlook has been a sticking point for a while.
As too how many government agencies could move? None. Until they are forced they will not move and Microsoft probably gives them a great deal just so they can sell copies of office to every vendor.
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:5, Informative)
Calendaring is one a business task that is critically important to many businesses, but is quite widely ignored in the open source world, at least with respect to easy setup.
In my small office, we use Apple's open source Darwin Calendar Server: http://trac.calendarserver.org... [calendarserver.org] It'll serve calendar data to the mac calendar client, as well as Mozilla's Sunbird client, probably others too.
It works great and it has been extremely stable (I have it running on a debian VM), but it isn't totally trivial to set up. Not hard exactly, but certain OS defaults don't work (e.g., requires extended atrributes, which requires editing fstab, and if you don't, it will never ever work): https://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/... [debian.org]
Anyway, a simple to set up calendar server would be a substantial contribution to the open source business software stable.
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.
If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro [microsoftstore.com] then another 135 euro [microsoftstore.com] to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.
When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.
Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.
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Don't treat your users like idiots or children.
Really? My motto is don't treat your idiots and children like users.
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You don't support end users, do you?
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:4, Insightful)
Due to the way MS products are licensed, and the cost of training, and the fact that the average person gets confused easily with software, it is cheaper for large organizations to buy the MS products for use by the minority of users that actually need it.
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Not just those.. I mean, macros in general is a pain to work with in OO.o (LibreOffice as well), while it's much simpler in VBA. And I'm not talking about syntax here, but things like accessing graph data and manipulating it. Want to highlight a particular point in a graph? I don't even know where to start with OO.o as the documentation is.. well I'm sure it's to be found *somewhere*.
But also rather common things like chart titles based on a cell value. You'd think that "Weekly report - Week #" where #
Re:I wonder how much damage... (Score:5, Informative)
you are funny, the miniscule percentage of government spending that goes to Microsoft is a budget rounding error
And if Microsoft fell, those people would do other things for a living, maybe even get a few good companies while losing one giant crappy one
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Marketing doesn't add much to the economy (Score:2)
When the government spends a million dollars on MS Office, let's guess that something like 1/3rd of those resources go to marketing, 1/3rd go to development, and 1/3rd to administration. So for $1,000,000 in spending, $300,000 of utility (goodness) is produced, the economy has $300,000 more utility in it that gets divided up between people.
If instead, the government spent the same million on OpenOffice, 80% would go to development, 20% to administration, and 0% to marketing. Therefore, $800,000 of develop
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How does the economy benefit from taking your money and giving it to someone else for a service when you could get the same thing for free.
If they are going to take your money, they could spend it to repair failing bridges or at least on some service that isn't free.
Of course they could not take your mon ha he ho hoe howhhooo. oh.. I cracked myself up there for a second.
Re:OpenOffice? (Score:4, Insightful)
If that were true then there would not have been 100 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice, would there? Therefore...
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If that were true then there would not have been 100 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice, would there? Therefore...
Sorry, that was me. I left curl running in a loop on a 56kb dialup and went on vacation. My bad.
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I can say with authority that it was 100 million of full installs of Apache OpenOffice specifically, not counting OpenOffice.org release, not including beta releases, not including language packs.
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Needless to say. I'd love to compare to LibreOffice download numbers. They used to quote them, back when they started. But for some unknown reason they stopped publishing such numbers as soon as Apache OpenOffice started publishing their numbers,
Re:100M downloads are nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually have been looking into that question and tracking it via surveys. Of those who tried OpenOffice, 78% continued to use it "sometimes" or "regularly":
See: http://www.robweir.com/blog/20... [robweir.com]
Unless you are a business user you are unlikely to use any office application daily.
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I have LibreOffice installed on Fedora, but rarely use it. And when I do need a word processor I tend to use AbiWord.
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You either did not read the survey results or did not understand them. Survey participants were asked about "the software application called OpenOffice". They were asked whether:
1) They had heard of it
2) They had tried it
3) They use it occasionally
4) They use it regularly.
The "continued to use" percentage is the sum of "they use it occasionally" and "they use it regularly". It excludes those who just tried it.
Re:What now? 1 billion! (Score:5, Insightful)
Find me a replacement for Excel then. A real replacement, not some crappy OpenOffice thing that has 80% of the features.
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Somewhat valid point.
I am a scientist. At some point, I decided to move over to linux completely. Real number crunching can be done in R or Matlab, but for some things, excel is quite useful. In the end, I found gnumeric quite nice to work with, and I have not found anything that I missed compared to excel. (actually, it has some extra functionality that I find quite convenient).
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I'd be very happy with an open source equivalent to Publisher 98 to be honest. I know there are alternatives but they don't have the useability and functionality of good old Publisher.
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OpenOffice/LibreOffice may have only 80 percent of the features of MS office, but since neither I nor anyone that I have worked with over the last decade use more than perhaps 15 percent of those features that's not really much of an issue to me. To be truthful, MS Office 4.3 was overkill for probably 90 percent of end users. I can't foresee ever creating a spreadsheet doing anything more complex than pull numbers out of a SQL database and make a pivot table with them, and the free versions do that just f
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Wow, you serious?
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Re:What now? 1 billion! (Score:4, Insightful)
Excel is fantastic for exploring small sets of data... "quick and dirty" stuff. When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data, R and friends are far superior. And anything even remotely repetitive should be done in something with a better scripting language. But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.
And of course, we are completely deviating from Excel's forte as a financial tool, where it is much stronger.
Sometimes I'll even use it to clean up data for insertion into a database or some other such task. It has some nice built-in "Filter" functions.
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Yes, good suggestion, especially if you already know MATLAB... they syntax and overall workflow is similar for plotting. I personally like the "Pyzo" distribution for Python.
I still find Excel plots to be faster, easier to modify, and easier to share for trivial data sets.
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The sad part is, MS Access barely qualifies as a database, but most of the "techies" I spoke to at a ghost-hunting conference last weekend** heaped praise on building a "database" with MS Access - they intended to put it on their website for collaboration between ghost-hunting groups, much to the cheers of those various groups who were present.
I stood up and quietly began asking questions of the guy who announced it. 30 minutes later, after realizing to his horror just how insecure and craptastic Access is
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If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
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If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
Corporate world sure, everywhere else is a maybe sometimes, which is a long way from "almost everyone", which is just ridiculous. That comes from people who live in a corporate world and thinks everyone else does too. Not. There are tons of people in the non-corporate world who don't even need a spreadsheet for anything. And some who do, that don't use Excel.
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http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP010073849.aspx [microsoft.com]
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I'm using Thunderbird (for email) with the Lightning extension (for calendar). I also use the Google Calendar extension. The whole thing works quite nicely. Granted, my company uses Gmail for it's corporate email and not Exchange so I can't vouch for how well, or poorly, it works with Exchange.
I should note that I have a licensed copy of Outlook. Thunderbird is utilized by choice because I feel that it is snappier and more stable than Outllook. Your mileage may vary.
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Disagree. It was about killing ODF. The "standardization" (and I use the quotes deliberately) was an attempt to be able to sell to governments and other organizations that have a requirement for "open and standardized document formats".
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Actually not. It was a random survey, conducted via Google Consumer Surveys. I had absolutely no input on the surveyed participants.
Survey the fanboys (Score:2)
You evade, which does you no credit. Offering a survey that you know will be answered by fanboys inevitably produces bad results. The rest of the audience isn't bothering to answer this.
You'd also need to ask them at a longer duration from the download to see if they kept using it. There are many ways to cherry-pick data, and the first is to be careful about who you ask.
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Actually, the survey was repeated, three times over 18 months, with similar results. And Google Consumer Survey's does post -stratification weighting to ensure the survey participants match the target demographic by age, sex, geography and income. The approach has been validated. So I have a good data set.
I seem to have all the facts here, while you seem to have all the opinions.
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I'm not sure you read or understood what was in my blog post. In particular, one of the survey choices was "I tried it once". That was around 6% of survey participants. Absolutely no where is it assumed that a person is a regular user just because they installed OpenOffice.