Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:21 am Post subject: Simple solutions always the best?
Greetings:
Okay, here I go sounding a babe in the woods here, but if this is a case of, to quote a movie "what we got here is a failure to communicate!", why can't the parties and head honchos of all these OOo projects involved simply pick up the phone to the Mac rags and straighten them out? It should NEVER get this far that misquotes and misreadings can kindle unwarranted apprehension, insult and damage the reputation or marketing of a product.
Now, personally, I am kind of skeptical of most Mac rags in their all too tepid scarce regard and mentions of NeoOffice/and its kin; I don't know whether they've a iWorks or ClarisWorks fixation or hate non-Mac native ports or what, but thumbing your nose up at an incredible suite as OOo is which only enhances the Mac's stature in business and home is inane and insane and immature and unprofessional -- and this goes triple because said products are FREE! while their developers go unsung and unrewarded. It's a damn crying shame -- (shame on you all, Mac mags!), and I hope to make regular donations to this project whenever I can as long as my NYYC job doesn't follow the corporate herd out of here from Bin Laden-nuke phobia.
All the power to you Ed and Pat (and unsung OOo engineers!)
James Greenidge
P.S.: Ed & Pat, get on the horn and call Tech-TV! They'd roll over giving you an interview to pump their ratings and maybe you'll reap some help on the project from some listless computer programming grads! ;-D
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 11:44 am Post subject:
So it was just a misunderstanding like I thought We seem to be having a lot of them these days. I see Jim's point about communication and that's been raised on the mailing lists in the past as well (my mailing list accounts mostly just receive spam these days, so there's not much signal and a lot of noise). It's difficult to solve and I'll have to think about that. It was one of the motivators for me setting up the RSS feeds for the forums to allow for some aggregation.
The unfortunate thing for me is that I have to be so circumspect when updating the OOo site, our downloads pages, and the like. Outside the Mac OOo community, there's still a lot of animosity towards Neo so I've kept from saying anything about it except in muted tones on the OOo site.
If anything this has at least started the discussion with the OOo marketing leads to see whether we can codify these boundaries or remove them
Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 1:59 pm Post subject: Unbelievable
OPENSTEP wrote:
The unfortunate thing for me is that I have to be so circumspect when updating the OOo site, our downloads pages, and the like. Outside the Mac OOo community, there's still a lot of animosity towards Neo so I've kept from saying anything about it except in muted tones on the OOo site.
Gad!
Sounds like Sun's a nest of vain egos -- EGOs -- over there! I can understand cutting each other's throats for bucks, but over developing something that's not even going to earn you one plum nickel? For a blessed ego prize?? Haven't the non-Mac types over OOo heard of the word cross-pollination? That there might be something in developing Mac variants which could benefit them at least? It sounds like they don't even see NeoOffice as a stepchild but a bloody bastard!
Nice going guys! REAL nice guys! Hear that OOo honchos -- if I was ever able to post this on your cafeteria wall I damn sure would! This puerile one-upmanship game of who tags Cocoa first all sounds like a tall pile of deep manure. I guess the user community comes last when egos are up first.
Ego kills more than projects, guys! North American Rockwell, wishing to strut to the world that their engineering boys didn't REALLY need all those data points pioneered in Gemini, went ahead and built the Apollo capsule from scratch and got the Apollo 1 fire for their vanity. The USAF's X-20 DynaSoar was the natural progression from the X-15 for a true orbital aircraft before Project Mercury and was on the way when it was chopped and its data base scuttled -- a data base showing that you didn't need thermal tiles or fuel tanks hanging out of the space vehicle to orbit a winged spacecraft. We all know the penalty NASA paid for dumping such past research. The Saturn-5 (I saw the last one launched) was the most powerful and reliable booster in our inventory; it was scuttled for the shuttle (itself a bastard compromise of engineering and politics that never should've left the ground. Had we stuck with the Saturn-5 till technology was up to snuff to build a true single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, we'd lunar bases and a manned trip to Mars (hell, we were supposed to be there by >> 1980 << !!) by now for less than what was spent on the shuttle. Punchline; would you believe that the blueprints of the Saturn-5 were destroyed -- BURNED! -- to eliminate a competitive bid rival to the shuttle? Sure sounds a lot like Mac OOo; a scattered team of operators willfully deaf and blind and suicidally contemptuous of another's efforts to make their own vain hollow mark on the world. Like they were all after some golden million dollar prize, the end user be damned!
Dad used to relate to me about a close friend on the NYPD who lived in Little Itay about the orthraodox Catholic solution to divorce in the "old days" (pre-1960). If the bold bored hubby slithered up to the monsignor and said, "Father, I humbly and ruefully request annulment," and the monsignor would nod and say "God hears you, my son," then heftily slap the guy upside the head and say "Now go home and fly right!"
Seems to me that the OOo teams all need a lot of heads knocked together to fly right.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 2:39 pm Post subject:
Hehe...very ironic. The people who seem to be most opposed to it are not actually within Sun. Most people within Sun (well, engineers at least) don't seem to care. If they did, they would've funded OS X from the get go
I suppose the same could very easily be said of myself, though, not being willing to do my work within OOo and its licensing schemes. Granted, originally I was driven to fork by spite for Tony Siress (not Sun...he was the individual within Sun that tried to use Mac OOo and a fake Apple-Sun collaboration as his "claim to fame"...I think he's now out of a job but is definitely no longer talking to the media in any case). Not to mention the "face-saving" that went on inside of Sun marketing to avoid pissing off cnet and sacrificing Tony to the wolves...
But without his blunders I never would have "flipped the bird" to Tony in my own personal expression of trying to do an Aqua OOo without Sun. Being unable to compete with Sun's PR machine, I figured I'd execute my revenge through programming and a "clever" licensing loophole Stallman injected into the LGPL to preserve freedom. Thus NeoOffice was born.
Since that time I was able to convince Patrick to make his work public under GPL (thank you Patrick!) and the rest is history. We're almost there. It's still sad that we still have to deal with the side-effects of the animosity generated by a single individual almost 3 years ago and that it still exists within the community at large.
I, too, am not innocent and may too be guilty of holding a grudge that shouldn't exist. I cannot honestly claim the moral high ground in this argument. Feel free to Google for the vitriol I was spewing in response to Tony's blunder
Regardless, the situations of the past shape the future. The past is gone, the actors are different. Now the motivations are practical. Patrick's work is a phenomenal engineering achievement. It shouldn't matter that it's a different project, that it has different licensing, that it has a different name, that it is Sun/not-sun, or whatever. For all practical purposes, it is OpenOffice.org, and OpenOffice.org is NeoOffice/J. Users shouldn't have to continue to suffer due to petty political differences from years past.
I wonder if Jonathan Schwartz could write an open letter for us since they seem to be so effective...
Hehe...very ironic. The people who seem to be most opposed to it are not actually within Sun. Most people within Sun (well, engineers at least) don't seem to care. If they did, they would've funded OS X from the get go
...
I, too, am not innocent and may too be guilty of holding a grudge that shouldn't exist. I cannot honestly claim the moral high ground in this argument. Feel free to Google for the vitriol I was spewing in response to Tony's blunder
Let he who is without sin, throw the first stone (now that I'm an Oracle, I really should deal in metaphores more often)..
OPENSTEP wrote:
Regardless, the situations of the past shape the future. The past is gone, the actors are different. Now the motivations are practical. Patrick's work is a phenomenal engineering achievement. It shouldn't matter that it's a different project, that it has different licensing, that it has a different name, that it is Sun/not-sun, or whatever. For all practical purposes, it is OpenOffice.org, and OpenOffice.org is NeoOffice/J. Users shouldn't have to continue to suffer due to petty political differences from years past.
I wonder if Jonathan Schwartz could write an open letter for us since they seem to be so effective...
Anyway, regardless of the whole mess we got in and out of, I'd like to point out the good things that seem to have come out of that meeting in Germany:
-More support for the Mac port from OpenOffice.org.
-Invitations to new developers.
If anyone can tell me where to send my letter(s), I'll gladly ask for:
-1st tier platform status for the Mac X11 with OO.org, starting at 2.0.
-Legal and management assistance to work out a friendly cohabitation mechanism for Neo and OOo (and possibly other GPL efforts).
-Cash grants or infrastructure from Apple for Neo/J (they have money to burn these days in any case).
I'd like the first to be forthcoming soon, wonder myself about the second and I dream of the third, but if you never ask, you never get it. Perhaps mr. Schwarz will have use for it .
-Oscar
P.S. The disclaimer on the Apple Downloads site is a big put off. Someone have a text that is both warning and friendly?
P.P.S. Does anyone have a clue as to when OOo 1.1.5 will be out? OOo 2.0 seems to be pushed back ad infinitum and this doesn't bode well for Neo/J 1.1 final or GM...
-Ask Apple to quickly send out a fast and memory-efficient version of Java 1.5 with AWT and Swing for Jaguar, Panther and Tiger.
If anyone knows how far this has come along, I'd be happy to hear it because after all of the iWorks, iLife and Mac-mini, all has been quiet from the Java front.
Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2005 4:32 am Post subject: Getting NeoOffice's Word Out
Greetings:
Dear Ed & Pat:
I need your permission to disseminate relevant NeoOffice posts around to college and university and corporate boards such as those posts relating to NeoOffice development and marketing issues. If you can delinate a guideline of what you'll allow to be gleaned I'd be most appreciative.
P.S. The disclaimer on the Apple Downloads site is a big put off. Someone have a text that is both warning and friendly?
Er, that was one of the places that was updated for Beta before we came up with the revised language in the "Marketing" thread. Unfortunately, and unlike, say, VT, it's not easy to change that text without redoing the whole thing. So my plan is to fix it with the 1.1 release. I used the new text, though, when I submitted us to the Macintosh Products Guide (why Apple has two different databases of available apps is beyond me...).
ovvldc (away) wrote:
P.P.S. Does anyone have a clue as to when OOo 1.1.5 will be out? OOo 2.0 seems to be pushed back ad infinitum and this doesn't bode well for Neo/J 1.1 final or GM...
Well, according to a roadmap that was last updated in October, beginning of March. But that doesn't really affect us. 1.1 RC and Final will be done with 1.1.4 if that's current, or 1.1.6 if that's current. It certainly would be nice for the first official non-beta, full-version-number Neo/J release to have the "backported" OpenDocument support Pavel was predicting for 1.1.5, but we can pick that up in 1.5. I suppose if it became a big deal, it would be conceivable to do a 1.2 (or even 1.1.5 ) release of Neo/J to include that plus consolidate the patch-fixes. But especially as long as OOo 2.0 is delayed, there's not going to be a great need for reading OpenDocument files....
Anyway, I've added a page about our "roadmap," as I understand it from public info, to the wiki. So as not to repeat other roadmap "disasters"--esp. as it is not endorsed by any devs--it's very un-wiki-like not linked from anywhere. Savvy wiki shoppers can find it. If Patrick and Ed think it's safe to have such a thing "public," we can link it from other wiki pages, but for now....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2005 10:32 am Post subject: Apple's foreign-beta SPO
Greetings!
Oscar wrote:
P.S. The disclaimer on the Apple Downloads site is a big put off. Someone have a text that is both warning and friendly?
APPLE wrote:
If you are a Mac OS X user and running software that may have bugs or may even crash does not bother you, feel free to download and install it. However, if you expect software to be absolutely perfect before you install it, we recommend that you purchase a commercially supported office suite like Microsoft Office.... Apple is providing links to these applications as a courtesy, and makes no representations regarding the applications or any information related thereto. Any questions, complaints or claims regarding the applications must be directed to the appropriate software vendor.
I don't really have a problem with this. Standard procedure of operation for companies protecting their butts for products not developed in their domain -- especially betas! I just can't see Apple "endorsing" NeoOffice much more than this without dumping their whole iWorks team, which will happen when it starts snowing down that deep warm place....
Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2005 10:32 am Post subject: Re: Getting NeoOffice's Word Out
JimWG wrote:
Dear Ed & Pat:
I need your permission to disseminate relevant NeoOffice posts around to college and university and corporate boards such as those posts relating to NeoOffice development and marketing issues. If you can delinate a guideline of what you'll allow to be gleaned I'd be most appreciative.
You can reference anything that is in these forums or on the planamesa.com or neooffice.org websites. Most everything we do is public and, for items that Ed or I wrote, can be relied on as our opinion.
One thing that may be worthwhile to spread is that Neo/J needs donations. Without donations, I will likely have to do my annual "put Neo/J on hold for six months" and go work some contract jobs to replenish my bank account.
I haven't posted the latest estimated cost list for the various engineering tasks that Neo/J needs, but if you find an organization that wants to contribute, contact me directly.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2005 12:52 pm Post subject:
Like patrick said, anything that I do I consider to be public fodder. I just realized that I should change the copyright notices on here to a creative commons/copyleft format. That's more of the intention I had all along but just had never checked that silly footer text before.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2005 12:57 pm Post subject:
ovvldc (away) wrote:
-Ask Apple to quickly send out a fast and memory-efficient version of Java 1.5 with AWT and Swing for Jaguar, Panther and Tiger.
I wouldn't expect a full-blown Java 1.5 for Jaguar. The 1.4 support on Jaguar isn't up to the same level as on Panther, so I wouldn't hold my breath for 1.5 on Jaguar.
That's actually one of the biggest "downers" to moving to a newer VM...we have to do it, sooner rather then later, since 1.3 is getting long in the tooth. We also need to switch VMs to start using various Cocoa tools without gnarly integration worries. Switching, however, will start to leave Jaguar users out of the loop. And there are still very many Jaguar users primarily because it was such a rock-solid release of the OS.
That's actually one of the biggest "downers" to moving to a newer VM...we have to do it, sooner rather then later, since 1.3 is getting long in the tooth. We also need to switch VMs to start using various Cocoa tools without gnarly integration worries. Switching, however, will start to leave Jaguar users out of the loop. And there are still very many Jaguar users primarily because it was such a rock-solid release of the OS.
I know that. And I see the catch: You either lose the users on Jaguar (and printing capability) or lose development ability on Java 1.3. I sent an e-mail to Apple asking them for more info on release plans. I'll let you know if I get back anything useful (and I'm not holding my breath ).
I am actually quite curious as to what Patrick's and your plans are in this matter. AFAICT, switching VMs will be easier than switching OOo version, but I could be wrong. I also saw Patrick will have to worry about cashflow a bit more (as do I) . I suppose I wonder what you two are considering to be current Neo/J priorities and that they are contingent upon. It would be nice if you could take a look at Smokey's roadmap.
If this sounds pushy, please know we all understand that real life can intrude here - I wouldn't have it any other way.
Best wishes,
Oscar
P.S. Smokey, you are quite right about not needing OOo document support for now. I was losing coherence here, no need to let that stop Neo/J 1.1.. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I am actually quite curious as to what Patrick's and your plans are in this matter. AFAICT, switching VMs will be easier than switching OOo version, but I could be wrong. I also saw Patrick will have to worry about cashflow a bit more (as do I) . I suppose I wonder what you two are considering to be current Neo/J priorities and that they are contingent upon. It would be nice if you could take a look at Smokey's roadmap.
My current plans are to get an official Neo/J 1.1 Beta patch out in the next week or so that has all of the infinite srolling fixes and all of the text layout fixes and performance enhancements.
Then, I am going to spend a few weeks working on inter-application drag-and-drop. A donor (who wishes to remain anonymous) has given a me a sizable donation to implement this feature.
When that is done, I hope to release Neo/J 1.1 Release Candidate.
After that depends on whether or not I can secure another big donation.
My current plans are to get an official Neo/J 1.1 Beta patch out in the next week or so that has all of the infinite srolling fixes and all of the text layout fixes and performance enhancements.
As usual, I am itching to get my hands on the new goodies.
pluby wrote:
Then, I am going to spend a few weeks working on inter-application drag-and-drop. A donor (who wishes to remain anonymous) has given a me a sizable donation to implement this feature.
Sweet! This anonymous donor can now consider his/her hands shaked and his/herself bowed to in deep gratitude.
May many more people follow this example .
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
All times are GMT - 7 Hours Goto page Previous1, 2, 3Next
Page 2 of 3
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
We seem to be having a lot of them these days. I see Jim's point about communication and that's been raised on the mailing lists in the past as well (my mailing list accounts mostly just receive spam these days, so there's not much signal and a lot of noise). It's difficult to solve and I'll have to think about that. It was one of the motivators for me setting up the RSS feeds for the forums to allow for some aggregation.
So my plan is to fix it with the 1.1 release. I used the new text, though, when I submitted us to the Macintosh Products Guide (why Apple has two different databases of available apps is beyond me...).
