Plan-B for Software Documentation

Over the holidays, one of the users of Plan-B for OpenOffice.org asked me “Is there something equivalent to Powerpoint [Viewer]?” so you do not need to own the software to receive and view ODF files.

To the best of my knowledge there is not. Actually I would think there is not need. As anybody can download Open Office for free and install the full package it is about as much work as downloading the free MS Office PowerPoint Viewer.

One could argue that this is not equivalent, because you want to only install the viewer for presentations and not the whole application. However you can install only Impress the Open Office application for presentations and the difference in file size is minimal. You even get as a goody the presenter mode, allowing you to not only view the presentation but also present it on an external monitor. Free open source has its benefits I guess.

OpenOffice.org has released a bug fix release 2.3.1 for its popular Open Office productivity suite.

If you are using the product you should upgrade, especially if you use and exchange OOo Base database applications. Because up to release 2.3 the internal database application has a security risk that allows an attacker to execute raw Java code within the database. Basically he can do anything with it, from destroying your data to sending a copy to himself over the Internet.

So, do it quick, do it now and update OpenOffice.org to release 2.3.1.

There is a new magazine on the electronic newsstand. It is called o3 magazine and published by Spliced Networks.

The magazine reports on news in the open source world and is distributed as PDF document. The complete magazine is produced using open source tools, namely Open Office for writing articles, Scribus for page layout and Gimp for image production.

I read the recent #9: Open Source Publishing and found it rather unimpressive. The black and white design schema looks rather morbid and the overall layout is not very consistent. My pet peeve is gray text on black background for the table of content. Why make it hard instead of easier for readers to find what is in the magazine?

As to the content, it did not strike me as impressive. One article about publishing images with Gimp, and another one using Scribus, and two articles about OpenOffice, the very same tools that are used in the production of the magazine. The two articles about using OpenOffice are about writing a newsletter and about collaborative writing with the Open Office word processor Writer. Both articles lack a vivid writing style and any usable detail. What I learned from it was “Open Office can do both, collaborative writing and publish a newsletter”, no more. I didn’t learn anything how particular good OOo is at performing the task or how bad, how I actually do it, what steps to take, what pitfalls to avoid or where the programs limits are. Both articles did not even contain one screenshot to dazzle me with a marvelously appealing result.

I never cared for Hotmail, the Microsoft online mail account. I always found it not very user friendly. Hotmail was bought by Miscrosoft in 1997 to compete with the then dominant online mail provider Yahoo! Now, Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmails founders, has launched an new venture in Online Office document software, called Live-Documents.

Mr. Bhatia is Chairman of Bangalore based, InstaColl and wants to compete with Google, Microsoft, Adobe and many others with a browser based application to create, edit and manage office documents. Documents can be shared with anyone who has an e-mail for notification of changes and edited online in a Adobe Flex based application. Live documents also supports off line work on documents through a plugin for MS Office 2003. The company also plans support for Open Office as well as a Flash based local client program from the company itself. Offline documents are synced back to the central service ASAP. The storage server allows light document management services such as permissions to edit or print a document as well as attaching workflow tasks like review and approval.

The new service is available on an invitation only preview basis. The company plans to offer free service for personal use and business use for a fee.

While Everex started selling its low cost PC for <$200 at WalMart, it now offers the motherboard, CPU and OS bundled for $60. Add some memory and a hard drive ($40) and salvage an old computer case, power supply, keyboard and mouse ($0) and your are up and running for $100 and a little sweat equity.

LinuxDevices.com has an in depth report about Everex’s plans for its Linux and Google applications based $200 PC. LinuxDevices reports that Everex hopes to sell 50,000 to 60,000 PC’s through WalMart. The main concern for profitability are the support costs, which Everex hopes to keep under $30 per sale.

The developer board comes with the CPU and a DVD containing the ready to install gOS Operating System. According to the article, gOS is an Ubuntu based Linux distribution with the Enlightenment Window manager for the low cost PC is called gOS like in Google OS for its inclusion of all Google online tools available and pre installed. The vision is to use online Google tools for Search, E-Mail, Calendar, Bookmarks, Text Documents, Spreadsheets, and more. If needed local applications, such as the office suite OpenOffice.org are included as well. gOS is also open source and available for download, but it appears the version delivered with the board or the PC is pre configured to the hardware and adds programs for multimedia (playing mp3, DVD, etc.). You can’t expect an abundance of performance from the Via C7 processor, however, it does a good job with web browsing and running basic applications and multi media playback.

Gee, WalMart is becoming a major outlet for Open Source PCs. It just announced a desktop PC for under $200, including mouse and keyboard and even speakers. The machine is rather green than powerful, as it uses a 1.5 Ghz VIA G7 processor, which has enough juice for homework and playing mp3s, and in turn is quite energy efficient. This machine needs just 2 Watt power on average (how ever that is measured) and is almost not to be heard, with 28db noise levels.

The kicker is this is a PC with lots of open source software and w/o MS Windows. It runs a Debian based Linux distribution called gOS, including OpenOffice 2.2 and uses lots of Google, YouTube, Facebook and other web applications pre-installed. Some might see the Google web applications as bloatware, but at last they are not try & buy versions.

You have to buy an extra monitor or use one of those that are discarded in perfect working order. I know a few people who have dumped their nice 19″ tubes for flat screens. So if you have more space than money, ask around their might be a good monitor for free in some garage. Did anybody say Craig’s List?

OpenDocument Format (ODF), the standard accepted as ISO 26300 norm, has been mired in some controversy. The OpenDocument Foundation, a group formed to promote the standard format across different applications and platforms, has now denounced its support for ODF. The reasons cited is that Sun Microsystems, in control of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice the largest application supporting ODF, does not allow more compatibility to legacy formats such as .doc or MS OOXML. Sun favors supporting legacy document formats in the application, with appropriate import/export filters, while the ODF Foundation thinks it should become part of the format itself.

Recently, Sun has come under scrutiny for its policies surrounding OpenOffice.org and ODF. Some have even speculated if Novel instituted a fork of the OpenOffice.org project. It should come at no surprise that standards, as open as they may be, are a business tool. The ODF standard and the fact that it offers transparency which enables safety in archiving documents and having access centuries into the future forced Microsoft to rethink its own document formats. Now the ODF Foundation is surprised that Sun does want to keep out direct compatibility with the rival format(s).

However, having witnessed the discussions of ODFoundation members on some mailing lists, there also seem to be some strong personalities at work. Or is it the rivalry between MS Office Plug-in developments from the ODFoundation and Sun Microsystems that is causing all the bad blood?

The sad fallout of this is that the ODFoundation wants to morph itself into a CDF Foundation, CDF being another document format proposed by the influential standard body W3C. It will stop developing its MS Office plugin to seemlessly read and write ODF documents.

Apple releases tomorrow its latest version of Mac OS X called Leopard. It’s build-in text editor TextEdit now supports ODF and MS OOXML. This means it can exchange text documents with OpenOffice.org Writer, NeoOffice Writer and also with MS Word 2007.

Many Mac OS X fans now hope that Apple will soon support the ISO standard ODF in the iApplications such as iWork.

Can 900,000+ users a week be wrong? It appears that nearly a million people download OpenOffice.org since the release of 2.3. Mark Herring, Senior Director, Marketing, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems Inc. reports in details about the uptick in weekly download triggered by the latest release and the publicity of the OOoCon 2007 in Barcelona.

While the numbers are impressive, I think Mark’s speculation of cost for a regular markerting campaign to reach the same results is excessive. I think it is safe to assume that the majority of extra downloads are upgrades by existing users. If this would be a commercial product, one would not need to buy millions of e-mail addresses to reach the existing users. In a traditional proprietary software model, users register their software and with that allow the company to inform them of new releases. So there is no cost of 10c per e-mail to reach the existing user base. And some proprietary products get their users to even download automatically what ever they throw at them. I see this comparison as a bit shaky.

Siemens jsut annouced its latest offering in small business VOIP solutions and called it “HiPath OpenOffice ME”.

This has abolutely nothing to do with the free open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite for individuals, small and larg businesses as well as education or government.