An Open-Source NeoOffice: What Would It Take?

[JimWG]

Greetings:

This is NOT intended to incite any movement or competition, just a technical capability issue.

Were there an open source equivalent of NeoOffice (a'la AbiWord), would the evolution and updating of that product be more frequent than the current situation of having NeoOffice bound to a non-Mac core and funding? I know NeoOffice contains millions of lines of code, but split among and constructed by thousands of open source programmers would this really be an crippling issue?

Thanks,

James Greenidge

[OPENSTEP]

I don't think this is instigating at all and is something that really needs to be asked

I really go back and forth on this issue myself. I wish there was an easy answer. The problem is that there are so many shades of grey...

I think the problem really isn't whether updates would be more frequent. The inhernet problem is "catching up" with MS Office. Office has been developed for over 10 years (approaching 20?) and is so feature laden it's ridiculous. I once heard a statement that said every Office user uses at most 10% of the features of the software. To really compete on a funcationality level is so difficult not so much because of the common "letter writing" tasks, but of all of those specialty feaures (note the frequent complaints about OOo mail merge, for example).

Compatibility means more than just file formats; compatibilty implies good feature coverage. Since Office is so unfocused, it's very difficult for an OSS (or commerical) competitor to gain that feature set within a reasonable amount of time.

To me, OpenOffice.org is the best "competitor" in terms of raw functionality. KOffice is great, but it is feature limited which prevents its adoption by a lot of users. AbiWord is great, but it's only a word processor Even commerical options like WordPerfect Suite and AppleWorks suffer similar fates. A lot of the reason OpenOffice.org is so far ahead of its other open source bretheren is because it was a commercial project for nearly 10 years prior to its open sourcing and has such a broad array of features. It's almost folly to throw away all of that amortized work that has made such a solid, well-rounded offering.

That said...

There are great benefits to scrapping it all and starting from scratch. Only by dissociating from the past can one really create a radical new interface. From what I hear (I don't own a copy...) Pages can be quite revolutionary, perhaps the greatest thing since Aldus Personal Press (way ahead of its time). On the flip side, it's not entirely Word compatible, much less for complex business docs with dynamically embedded Excel charts & graphs and the like.

Who knows which is better, I really don't. I stick with OOo becuase I don't want to spend my time reinventing the wheel. I'd rather get it to the point where it can roll and stand on the shoulders of giants.

ed

[rays]

To my (albeit limited) knowledge, OOo is the only office-type application (includes as minimum word processor, spreadsheet and presentation functionality) which works across the 3 mainstream flavours of OS (M$, Linux and Mac). In that respect, M$ Office isn't even a player as there almost certainly will never be a version of its Office suite for Linux

OOo is the only package which does not involve a conversion process for passing editable documents across these three OS flavours. This means, in an organization like ours, some of us can see a future in which we will be more easily able to collaborate on the content and worry less about whether our partners are using Macs, Windows or, increasingly, Linux.

All this and it's free.

For the first time in my memory, I have a truly cross-platform office product which I can promote the use of to all (except Mac OS 9- users). That is entirely due to the unstinting efforts of the OOo for Mac OS X11 crew for porting OOo to the Mac and then to Patrick and Ed for integrating the port into the more familiar Mac GUI.

Oh! And yes it reads & writes M$ Office docs pretty well.

So, no, I wouldn't personally be in a position to support such a fork out of the mainstream.

[OPENSTEP]

I do concur in that the MS Office compatibility on a format level is something that cannot be ignored. While OOo is very very good in comparison, it's not perfect. I've tried to start exchanging things in PDF at my job, but inevitably I get comments that the PDFs aren't editable and asking whether I could send Word formatted docs.

Granted, of course, such a request usually means that someone is hoping to lift my content into their own docs and don't want to spend the time retyping it. I suppose the world would be much more interesting if companies could really track the authors of individual sentences and could track where those sentences wind up. In the meantime though, this standard business practice means that copy and paste and the document format of ideas determines the ease of their exchange, not the qualities of the ideas themselves Simon P. pointed this out to me a while back, but I hadn't started to experience it until recently. MS Office is a de facto lingua franca, and any software that can't speak it will be inherently ostracized.

ed