Plan-B for Software Documentation

While OpenOffice.org Release 2.3 is just out the door, Developers like Carsten Driesner, Liang Weike and the OpenOffice team from RedFlag 2000, prepare new features for Open Office Release 2.4

One feature is the ability to create and store your permanant image list, which can be used to change the icons of the appliction w/o going through the build process. In combination with the OOo extensions I expect this to become the facility for different skins for Open Office.

The other feature mentioned is an enhanced help tip text for the print button in the standard toolbar. The new feature shows the name of the printer in the help tip text, just to remind you where your document will be printed. Sounds rather useful in an office environment, where multiple printers are available.

Liang Weike works for RedFlag 2000 the project that adapts OpenOffice for the Chineese market and helps develop new features as well.

Sun Microsystems updated its Microsoft Office® plugin for ODF. This plugin allows users of the leading office suite to read and write ISO 26300 compliant documents. It is not the only plugin available for MS Office, but it appears to be the most feature rich implementation of such filters to date, based on the Open Office/Star Office implementation of the ODF Toolkit.

The newly released Sun ODF Plugin 1.1 for Micrososft Office improves installation and fixes many bugs over release 1.0. It also does support now 15 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, Iberian Portuguese, Hungarian, Russian, Polis, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean.

Sun’s ODF plugin for MS Office supports Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2000. The latest version Office 2007 is not yet supported. The plugin supports the three leading applications in Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It integrates seemlessly and allows to set ODF (ISO 26300) as the standard file format to save when you hit Ctrl+S.

… unless they can get it for free.

A marketing study at the Univeristy of Arizona asks the question what makes students pay for office suite software and are free open source alternatives like Open Office an alternative to pirated copies of the market leading MS Office?

The research looked at how much students would be willing to pay for a legal copy if the consequences woudl be the two choices. It turns out that $98 is the media price students were willing to pay to own a legal license. And that registration was a wee more effective than the publication that the software is not registered with every document that is produced and shared with others.

Interestingly, a group of students that was educated of the free open source alternative Open Office did not show less incline to pay for the MS Office suite. The researchers conclude that stability of the product and logevity of the maker are more important than the price to pay. Also an important factor is the convenience of using an application that is already familiar and does not come with the pain of re-training.

* The article cited mentions in the introduction: “Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share.” Benjamin Horst an Open Office dvocate from NY, pointed out in a discussion about this article that market share numbers are often misleading in the context of free software. Because, market sizes are measured in annual revenue spend for a particular product. However, free products do not generate any revenue, so the basis for comparison is off. By Horst’s estimation, Microsoft claims 400 Million Office installations, and OpenOffibe.org claims 100 Million. Ignoring the rest of the competition, he estimates a 20% market share for Open Office.

According to Vietnam Net, OpenOffice.org gains popularity in Vietnam. One of the leading organizations to switch is the Vietnamees Communist Party, with its 20,000 office PCs around the country. However government agencies and businesses follow suite. The movement is driven, by the international integration of Vietnam with the world economy. Vietnam wants to trade with the world and therefore must respect intellectual property rights.

as the pressure from international integration forces Vietnamese state agencies and businesses to respect software copyrights, the future for open source software seems to be brighter. Some providers of open source software products and support services have appeared

The government pushes its corporations and citizens to use legal copies of software, with full licenses. However, Vietnamese can’t afford the $200 - $500 for a fully equipped MS windows + MS Office business PC. So they switch to increasingly to open source alternatives like Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird. The availability of a localized vietnameese version of OpenOffice helps this effort and the nature of open source allows the country to improve on this aspect at will.

I just learned that one needs to be careful when installing OpenOffice.org 2.3 on SuSE 10.X. Aparrently the packaging has changed so that you can install the various applications, such as Writer, Calc, Base and Impress, separately.

With the latest release, OpenOffice.org has gained many valuable features useful to extend its functionality.

Matching this growing capability, the Open Office community has rolled out a repository for OpenOffice Extensions.

The site allows to search for extensions by tag, operating system, application or popularity. Off course you can download all available extensions and if you create an account vote for your favorite extensions. Give it a try.

Really, would you eat a can of SPAM that is past its expiration date? Well, I would possibly in an emergency, but not as a regular exercise. Why, because expiration dates on food are predictions and most often nothing really bad happened. It is a safety net that the producer is required to provide so that the consumer and the distributer can check a product for freshness and avoid old and potentially dangerous food.

But what have food expiration dates to do with software. There is no software expiration date, or is there? Well, basically every new release of an application should expire the older version. And in case of a new installation you won’t install the older version, if you can have access to the latest and greatest, or would you?

Some bloggers have tried IBM’s new Lotus Symphony office suite that is based on Open Office. Well, they found out LotusSymphony is based on a rather outdated release 1.X of OOo.

I can’t imagine how a company like IBM thinks it can be at all competitive with a product based on three year old code that has many known bugs and performance problems.

This discovery really begs the question what are the 35 developers that IBM assigned to work on the Open Office open source project are going to do? Have they been involved in repackaging and rebranding this OOo distribution? Are they trained in the technology of 2004/2005? What will be their contribution, if they are not up to date with the latest OOo release?

Matt Asay asks the question “What to do when open source is not good enough?” in his CNET blog.

He argues that he sometimes encounters cases where his choice of open source software does not fulfill his desired feature set and so he resorts to proprietary, closed source, binary only applications. For example, Asay switches from Adium to iChat when he needs video chat capability and from OpenOffice.org Impress to MS PowerPoint, when he needs video embedding. He concludes it is o.k. to use binary only applications in these cases and I would not disagree.

However, I’m not quite sure if Asay asks the right question or answers the question he asks.

Open Source is there so you can improve on the software you got, as opposed to a binary license that does prevent you from even pin pointing (debugging) a problem. The core freedom of open source is being able to add/modify/fix what is “your itch”. That the software is it also “free as in beer” is more of a side effect.

The better answer to Asay’s question is “If open source is not good enough, then improve it.” Sure not everybody is a programmer, but everybody can hire someone to do the job.

That is where it becomes clear that the “free as in beer” is only for making a copy of the software. If you really want to get the best out of it and solve your specific issue, then you have to invest like in anything else. You don’t even have to share (publish) the fruits of your investment. Only when you want to give it to someone else (for money or for free) you have to give that person the same rights you got (under the GPL at least).

So now it is your decision if you want to invest your money/talent/time into proprietary software that does not give you these freedoms or in open source that does. I’m not saying OSS is the only solution, but I’m saying it is equivalent to closed source and even better in some cases.

Ask yourself how would you answer the question “What to do when closed source software is not good enough?” I’ll think you’ll come to the same answer, use a competing application that does do what you want. Now in case of proprietary binary only software, you are at the mercy of “the market.” If you can’t find the app with the features you need, you are out of options and have to start from scratch to build the software you need. In case of open source you can take the package that comes the closest to your needs and add/modify/fix.

It’s all about options, you choose yours.

Today, IBM released Lotus Symphony, its version of OpenOffice.org as a free offering to business, government and consumer users.

The productivity suite is free to download. Interestingly the website only presents three applications, “Documents”, “Presentations” and “Spreadsheets.” The Database functionality of OpenOffice.org is apparently missing. The Suite supports Windows XP or Vista and Linux RedHat or Novell SuSE. A discussion about MAC OS X support has already started in the support forums.

Lotus Symphony does naturally support ODF and also can read and write the Microsoft Office formats most of the time. The latest MS OOXML is not yet supported.

Unfortunately this is another species in the jungle called Open Office eco-system.

P.S.: If you are PC veteran, you might remember the Lotus Symphony for DOS, which included Lotus 1-2-3. This is not the same!

The Openoffice.org community released its latest version, called Release 2.3.

It includes a new charting component with much more pleasing default colors, many enhancements that make Open Office extensions more viable and a series of bug fixes, some relevant to security vulnerabilities.

Behind the scenes many configuration options have changed or been added, such as:

• Suppressing to save the printer settigns with a document, which in times of roaming Laptop users, might print the document half way around the world.
• Improved export of spreadsheets with cotanget functions, such as COT(), ACOT(), COTH(), ACOTH() to MS Office compatible Excel files.
• A new Chart Wizard makes it easier to generate charts from spreadsheet data.
• A new report writer has expanded the abilities of OOo Base to write complex reports with grouping, sorting or different alignments of fields.
• Exporting drawings and presentations to HTML now support .png images.
• Exporting a text-document to a MediaWiki (think Wikipedia pages) format is now supported.

Also, don’t forget the smaller memory footprint that this release should include. This will make OpenOffice.org less memory hungry and more responsive as well.

I’m surprised hwo many changes have been made to the look and feel of menus and dialogs. Most of them are to please the extension developer community. I haven’t detailed the changes here, but be prepared to re-learn a few things, especially if you are a power user.