Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2003 11:12 pm Post subject: Too many forks, not enough food.
I'm fascinated by the fact that now we have several "fork-ports" of OOo for Mac OSX: The X/11, the Ximian X/11, the Java (Neo/J), and of course, Plain Old Neo. And despite commentary to the contrary, Plain Old Neo won't be up and about for 1.5 years, a lifetime even by Mozilla standards.
Why all the effort? Why not just create a free-standing Aqua Office document conversion tool, and a printer driver that runs on Wintel/Windoze platforms that converts Office Docs into something more portable? Perhaps even lowly HTML, with the undecipherable proprietary MS stuff made into comments or even embedded graphics as a hack?
Given that Microsoft is cutting the price on Mac Office (and will offer a Student/Teacher version for $150), all the hard work may be for nothing. And with Neo/J weighing in at 400 MB, whatever savings you'd have from getting a "free" office suite is lost, especially on laptops running slower drives. You'd end up buying a drive optimizer to offset the loss of .5 GB of space.
I think the Abisource Team could use help on their project instead, since they are racing towards 2.0 and towards the completion of their first Aqua build, with one FT developer. And they don't have the OOo politics to deal with.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2003 11:47 pm Post subject:
Well, as to why all the effort, a lot of it is just that executing a full port plus full user interface redesign is a really difficult task. It's too much to do at once on a program this large. The idea is that each 'fork-port' represents a different stage of evolution.
Instead of waiting for the whole shebang to be done in a God-knows when, there are two fully usable solutions (official X11, Brand X) and one that's almost there (Java). These are useful to test the 95% of the code that's not UI redesign related to iron out problems, as well as to provide a "benchmark" build for users to test against.
Justa_User wrote:
Given that Microsoft is cutting the price on Mac Office
Did they drop it to $0? Oh yeah...and what happens if they decide to drop it completely like Mac IE?
Another problem is that MS Office v.X really has no competition on the Mac, yet, and is continually treated as a second class citizen when compared to its Windows counterpart. There's also no motivation for it to keep up with the latest advances of Mac OS X technology. Without any competition, Office v.X will simply become a has-been. Hopefuly something like OOo could light a fire under their a**es and get them to finally make appliations for OS X that take advantage of the latest and greatest features of the OS...oh yeah, and don't crash and flood the network with network licensing packets.
Justa_User wrote:
And despite commentary to the contrary, Plain Old Neo won't be up and about for 1.5 years, a lifetime even by Mozilla standards.
Well, unless you're Dan, sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm aiming to get Neo up to speed by quicker then that, and Neo/J should be even quicker. The only solid 1.5 year deadline is for OpenOffice.org 2.0, on all platforms, and that deadline is not in my control.
Justa_User wrote:
I think the Abisource Team could use help on their project instead
I think the abiword product is admirable, and man it's cool they have a full time developer. I wish OOo OS X had one But seriously, AbiWord is just a word processing program. It's not trying to be a fully integrated office suite. Just a word processor may be fine for many users, and Abi may be the alternative that's right for them.
Unfortunately, I need a more powerful environment for my work and home use then Abi can provide, and definitely more then just a word processor. I'm just sick of using M$ products and for the last eight months I've been essentially Office-free both at home and at work.
Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 5:25 am Post subject:
What are you talking about?
There are plenty of reasons, technical, financial, ethical and political to choose not to use M$ products.
There are plenty of reasons technical, financial, ethical and political to support open source projects.
There is one excellent reason to support OOo: it's the only one to be powerful (maybe too much), and platform independent.
That why we want it to run on OS X.
Period.
Joined: Jun 23, 2003 Posts: 36 Location: Seward, Alaska, USA
Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 5:24 pm Post subject: Re: Too many forks, not enough food.
Justa_User wrote:
... And with Neo/J weighing in at 400 MB ...
Curious... Before I uninstalled the the MS office suite, it was eating up well over 1/2 GB. I would say that using Neo/J, Neo or OOo/X11 are saving me HDD space on the apps alone! Factor in, also, that the documents generated by these programs are typically less than half the size of a near-identical MS document (assuming just text, layout and linked graphics. Embedded graphics throw this ratio way off) and it works out that these OSS products are saving me a total of more than 1.2GB. That's a lot of extra documents for me to pack into the same storage space. _________________ Faster than a speeding slug!
I'm Paraplegic Racehorse.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 8:35 pm Post subject:
I've actually only ever noticed one case where OOo formatted documents are consistently larger the MS, and that is with documents that have high-resolution embedded graphics (like TIFFs). The reason for this is that OOo maintains the graphics at their original resolution, while the Word documents tend to lower the resolution of the graphics and reduce them in size. This may just be due to OOo's Word exporters, though, rescaling the images down.
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But seriously, AbiWord is just a word processing program. It's not trying to be a fully integrated office suite. Just a word processor may be fine for many users, and Abi may be the alternative that's right for them.
