msevior ([info]msevior) wrote,
@ 2007-12-12 21:52:00
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Surprised by KOffice interview
Today I read an interview from the KOffice developers where they imply that they will not support the ooXML file format. This sparked a slashdot story, the gist of which was that KDE is principled and GNOME has gone over to the dark side because of their sponsership of Jody Goldberg's attemts to improve the ooXML specification. ie KDE supports ODF (Yay!), GNOME supports ooXML, (boo hiss!)

This whole discussion is rather a rather clueless storm in a teacup and misses many different points.

First neither AbiWord nor Gnumeric are GNOME projects. They're not part of the GNOME platform, nor are they installed by default in any of the large distros that use GNOME as their default desktop.  Whether or not we (Gnumeric and AbiWord) manage to support ODF or ooXML is not a GNOME project decision. GNOME decided back in 2001 to NOT have productivity applications as part of the project.

Secondly, there are paid hackers working for various companies whose job it is to make sure OpenOffice can  support ooXML. Why? Because it makes OpenOffice more useful to its users.

AbiWord had a GSOC student whose project was to add ooXML support for us. He managed to get the basics imported and exported by the end of his project. Why did we do this? Because it makes AbiWord more useful to our users.

I find it surprising that KOffice would deliberately NOT support a file format that will be very useful to their users. Like it or not there will be a large number of ooXML documents flowing around the internet over the next few years and it will happen whether not it becomes any sort of official standard. KOffice is shooting itself in the foot by ignoring it.

Given all this it makes perfect sense to me Jody should try to get the best information out of MicroSoft that he can and I applaud the GNOME foundation for making this as easy as possible for him.

None of this means that AbiWord and Gnumeric are abandoning ODF or even lessening our commitment to it. Our biggest deployment will be on the OLPC machines where we've set things to import/export to ODF by default. What we want to do is to provide the most useful applications we can to our users.

Update:

The text above might across as the GNOME community being uncaring about AbiWord and Gnumeric. I think a quote from Jeff Waugh's recent statement on ooXML nicely sums up the situation.

"In 2000, the GNOME community de-emphasised its own office software products, choosing to support the nascent OpenOffice.org project. As a result, there are no office products released on our six-month time-based release schedule today, although we encourage and support projects such as AbiWord, Glom and Gnumeric."

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Koffice: time and resources
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 12:19 pm UTC (link)
The Koffice statement said that they didn't really have the time or resources to implement it, and there are other pretty vital things that they have to be working on. From what I gather Jody is rather experienced in that area anyway, however. There were no diggs at GNOME or Gnumeric from the Koffice developers that I can see; just pure FUD dreamed up by the guy on itwire which of course makes its way to /.

apokryphos

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Fedora
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 12:21 pm UTC (link)
Fedora Desktop (GNOME) Live images install abiword by default FYI

Rahul Sundaram

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Re: Fedora
[info]msevior
2007-12-12 12:51 pm UTC (link)
I didn't know that. Yay!

It wasn't on the main DVD though.

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Gnome Office
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 12:45 pm UTC (link)
If you search for "Gnome office" in google you will see, that the first hit is:
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/

Perhaps this page should be removed.

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Re: Gnome Office
[info]msevior
2007-12-12 12:53 pm UTC (link)
I live in hope that page will be meaningful eventually.

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KOffice position is not that black/white either
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 12:55 pm UTC (link)
http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com/2007/12/koffice-and-ooxml.html

Krita developer Cyrille posts that this black and white position is also not what the KOffice project is planning.

No news, however, that some of the press has a really hard time correctly describing complicated issues.

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
[info]msevior
2007-12-12 01:23 pm UTC (link)
OK clearly the KOffice guys have differing opinions on this.

Here is a comment by Thomas Zander.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=385823&cid=21669741

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 01:46 pm UTC (link)
No, Cyrille and Thomas are actually saying the same thing, which is also what I tried to convey in the dot story that only now got picked up:

So, let's summarize:

* OOXML is not a standard yet
* It is a bad proposal for a standard with many flaws and one that duplicates an existing standard for no good reason. It is also not implementable.
* Nobody uses it, not even Microsoft
* There is not any need for this standard. There is no obstacle for Microsoft to use ODF and participate in the further development of ODF.
* declaring support for OOXML in any way validates OOXML as a standard, which is highly undesirable
* Microsoft perverted the standardization process to an unimaginable extent: for instance right now it's impossible to get any standard voted on because the new p-members only joined to vote on OOXML and do not vote for anything else.
* Just because this is Micrsoft doesn't mean their proposal will necessarily become a standard or even much used. There's no need for the beaten-dog-rolls-on-its-back impersonation yet.

So, we've got a bad proposal promoted by a a company that perverts the whole standardization process just to get its way. That's not an effort anyone should cooperate with. And I am really surprised anyone can profess surprise at our stance. We won't put time into cooperation or implementation of OOXML. If there is an ooxml-to-odf converter, our users will be free to use that for the hopefully few if any ooxml documents they will encounter in the future. Right now the chance they will see an ooxml document is nil.

Boudewijn Rempt

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
[info]msevior
2007-12-12 02:01 pm UTC (link)
Hmm I wonder why companies are paying hackers to implement ooXML support for OpenOffice then?

We certainly managed to get basic input/output from Word2007 working and it was far easier than getting a similar level of support for *.doc.

At this level we're already ahead of Word 2003 and we have one more reason for users to switch to AbiWord instead of paying $$$$ for Word2007.

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 03:01 pm UTC (link)
When you say "companies", you really mean "one company: Novell". And by coincidence, that's the very company that gots millions of MS dollars as part of an agreement that we don't know too much about.

Anyway, even if this has nothing to do with it (which I doubt), you must separate the issues "support for a format in an application" and "support for making an ISO standard of the format". It is the latter that the brouhaha is all about, which Boudewijn very eloquently described.

What we, the KOffice developers, think is that it is harmful to society if the OOXML format becomes an ISO standard. And whether or not Gnome supports this, it looks from many people's point of view that you do. This is especially true since MS itself has brought the fact that "Gnumeric supports OOXML"[1] as a point *for* making an ISO standard out of it.

This is also why it would have been good if Gnome could distance itself clearly from the thought of an OOXML ISO standard.

Inge Wallin

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 08:16 pm UTC (link)
partly /signed by another KOffice-developer. Thanks Inge :)

Just an addition; it's also SUN who's working on import/export filters atm, just see xml/oox/* in 680.
Through http://lists.opendocumentfellowship.com/pipermail/odf-discuss/2007-October/002853.html is still valid and renders the "sucking documentation out" argument somewhat invalid imho.

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 03:01 pm UTC (link)
I think it's not KOffice but Abiword who is shooting itself in the foot if its developers think Abiword can compete with MS on its own file format support. I think there's clear evidence on the contrary and that we really need a patence/license problems free, open and rational standard to be able to compete on equal conditions. That's, in my opinion, the way KOffice is and should keep going, trying its best to provide good support for a open and vendor-neutral file format.

Alfredo Beaumont

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Re: KOffice position is not that black/white either
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 09:28 pm UTC (link)
AbiWord would not be competing with MS on file format support. File formats fundamentally aren't about competition, and you tacitly recognize as much when you say that OOXML isn't particular "open" or "vendor neutral".

If AbiWord were able to support MS's file format, it would mean that AbiWord could compete with MS on other fronts, such as ease of use, without users needing to worry if their data is inter-changeable with friends/coworkers/whatever. If, hypothetically, the KOffice team said that they don't want to implement OOXML, in a very real way, they'd be excluding themselves from competing with Microsoft. Which is a fine position to take, but it's not one that I'd prefer to take myself.

Differing, redundant file formats drive market fragmentation and promote vendor lock-in, and should thus be considered evil. Maybe ODF as a document description language is good enough. Maybe ODF's standardization process is more open than OOXML. One could make good arguments for these points. However, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that Microsoft's OOXML won't get significant user uptake is an absurd position. The pile of OOXML documents in my wife's inbox are proof enough that it already has. And then to say that we should effectively ignore a (friggin' huge) potential market segment that has documents in this format is an even more absurd position.

Sure, we should promote and support open, vendor-neutral standards such as ODF. And we should probably lambaste Microsoft for their rotten behavior. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore OOXML and not (grudgingly) support it. Or that people like Jody Goldberg shouldn't be nagging Microsoft to correct errors in their self-proclaimed standard. People like to set that up as a false dichotomy.

But I've said this before and I'll say it again. Word processors already had a fairly open, well-understood, vendor-neutral file format, and it was called RTF. To some large extent, both ODF and OOXML re-invented a perfectly good wheel.

-Dom

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GNOME projects
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 01:20 pm UTC (link)
> First neither AbiWord nor Gnumeric are GNOME projects.

It seems rather hard to figure out what projects are actually GNOME projects, and what projects are not. http://www.gnome.org/projects/ doesn't help much either. This is frustrating, especially in the light that many people tend to distribute FUD about GNOME just because some non-related GTK+ application doesn't work as expected.

> GNOME decided back in 2001 to NOT have productivity
> applications as part of the project.

Do you have any reference for that?

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Re: GNOME projects
[info]msevior
2007-12-12 01:35 pm UTC (link)
Sorry, I don;t have a reference handy. I vividly recall an email discussion that happened back in 2001 where the core developer of gnumeric basically said further work would be a waste of time and encouraged everyone to move onto to other, more exciting projects.

Jeff Waugh's statement nicely sums up the situation though.

http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/ecma-tc45-statement.html

"In 2000, the GNOME community de-emphasised its own office software products, choosing to support the nascent OpenOffice.org project. As a result, there are no office products released on our six-month time-based release schedule today, although we encourage and support projects such as AbiWord, Glom and Gnumeric."

Edited at 2007-12-12 01:37 pm UTC

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Re: GNOME projects
[info]flinux.wordpress.com
2007-12-12 07:06 pm UTC (link)
And I think that this was and is a BIG BIG BIG mistake. As office applications are most vital. Although OO.org is great for now its far from ever becoming something like a part of GNOME and instead this has reduced trust, momentum and support from GNOME devs and users for Abiword. I understand the rational, but do not agree with this GNOME policy. As a user i EXPECT from a desktop to provide all core tools that I need every day and to integrate as best as it can. OO.org still is and will ever be an alien on the GNOME desktop. And KOffice position is much nicer in relation to KDE and has helped the project very much. -- Thilo

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Re: GNOME projects
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 01:47 pm UTC (link)
> > GNOME decided back in 2001 to NOT have productivity
> > applications as part of the project.

> Do you have any reference for that?

I don't. But the way I remembered it, it was more a business decision by Ximian (now part of Novell) than a community decision. They decided that they weren't going to pay anybody to work on productivity applications after Star Office had become open source.

I'm not really happy with my phrasing above. Ximian was certainly entitled to make whatever decision made business sense to them. But the effect was certainly that efforts to expand gnome office as a suite didn't get off the ground.

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Re: GNOME projects
(Anonymous)
2007-12-12 01:48 pm UTC (link)
Forgot to sign the above. I'm Jon Kåre, still a marginally active Gnumeric developer.

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Re: GNOME projects
[info]msevior
2007-12-12 02:02 pm UTC (link)
Hi Jon!
I think my original text was too hard on GNOME and added Jeff's quote.

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Cant see your reading
[info]flinux.wordpress.com
2007-12-12 07:18 pm UTC (link)
I too can not see in the post you linked the position against GNOME. I think the position that it may be time to not follow Microsofts lead, again is understandable. I am not sure I personally would support it, but although following Microsoft has been a good idea for many years the OOXML issue might be a good point where we abstain. Also I love to see more compatibility between open source applications. The bad thing is that its alwys easier to import Microsoft documents than to move from one OSS app to the other. So practically its often nicer to keep using Windows because everybody offers you to switch easy. But if you use Abiword and have .abw files you cant import them to OO.org. And this is a shame as I think this kind of lock in is not how Open Source apps should have. And we all know that OpenDocument still is far from being exchangeable between Abiword<->OO.org<->KOffice. I hope it will be, soon.

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