Plan-B for Software Documentation

On Sunday, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general council, gave an interview to Fortune magazine, where he alleged that OpenOffice.org violates 45 Microsoft patents. The article is about the general assertion that various open source project violate 235 patents where Microsoft claims to be the inventor. However, Microsoft chooses not to name which are the patents or the alleged infringements.

The article shines a broader light on the issues with software patents and gives an informative summary about the Novell/Microsoft deal from late last year. It also exposes some of the conditions that Richard Stallmann, the most ardent defender of open source, puts on journalists in order to grant an interview.

In short Microsoft scares people about alleged patents it holds that are violated by open source projects. It even claims that it made already secret deals with some fortune 500 companies to license these patents. This tactic reminds me of the SCO claim that Linux infringes on its Unix patent portfolio. Under scrutiny of the courts and especially IBM’s ability to deal with patent claims it evaporated into nothing. We will have to see if Microsoft has more legs to stand on. In the mean time one should not be scared, such risks are everywhere.

Dimitri Popov is known for his articles with deep insight. He has done it again and wrote a great introduction to how to extend OpenOffice.org with templates, macros and whole programs.

May be this idea in my head to add an item to the Help menu, that does navigate to Plan-B for OpenOffice.org became just a little more real.

Dimitri Popov shows how to use OpenOffice.org and a little known tool JODConverter to do document conversion in batch format. Dimitri hows how to start the relevant processes and how to define the input and output formats.

His one page article comes handy when you want to convert a large number of documents into a new format, lets say some spreadsheets into PDF.

The Office Letter, publishes in its May 7th issue a readers tip, how to use OpenOffice.org the free open source office suite to read and rescue corrupt Microsoft Office documents.

Paul Denize, the author of the tip writes “It appears that Word was saving files that it would later not be able to open or recover. When I closed the document, Word would not reopen them, saying they were corrupt.”

He recommends “Open Office did not complain when opening the so-called corrupt document, and managed to saved it back out. Then I could return to MS Word and open it successfully again. All I had lost was a few formatting items — some images were a different size and some grey lines were now black. I could live with that.”

Not that Paul argues to change to OpenOffice.org outright. But he seems to finds it a useful tool to rescue his corrupted Word document.

Apple’s notebooks have become increasingly popular. OpenOffice.org does run on Apple’s MAC OS X operating system However it does not comply with the OS X user interface, called Aqua. Sun Microsystems has now decided to commit two full time developers to produce a full MAC OS X compliant port of OpenOffice.org.

Even among the geeks at recent BarCamp Boston 2 it seemed they had gained a majority. So it comes to no surprise that OpenOffice.org on Apple’s OS X is seen as deficient, because it lacks full integration into the User experience. The current version requires the X windowing system to be installed. This poses a double whammy for users, because

1. It is an extra installation step, that might not so experienced users from using it
2. It does conform to the X Window user interface created for Unix systems, with significant differences to the way other programs work on OS X

There is a porting project underway which has been run solely by volunteers so far. Sun now committed two full time developers to support these efforts. Unfortunately this is only one of two projects that work towards the same goal. The second project being NeoOffice, which tries to achieve the Aqua user interface through using Java. I wished that those two projects could pool their resources and expertise in order to achieve this very desirable goal faster.

Free Software Magazine publishes a white paper comparing ODF and OOXML the two XML office document formats that compete to become the standards of choice. The author, Edward Macnaghten has produced the white paper on request from the UK Action Group of the Open Document Format Alliance. So don’t expect a totally unbiased work, but the white paper lists a lot of comparison facts and could be useful for any project making a decision for the future office document format.

The original paper, has fewer formatting constraints imposed by the magazines format.