news.com.com — "The participants in last week's ODF Summit included Red Hat, Adobe, Computer Associates, Corel, Nokia, Intel..., in addition to Oracle, Novell and Google. The goal of the meeting, convened by Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source, was to drive support for the standards "on a global level," Sutor said." Look out, MS Office.
Nov 10, 2005 View in Crawl 4
chriskzooNov 10, 2005
If you have no way of converting .doc to .odf SEAMLESSLY, then all businesses currently using MS Office will continue to do so.
Closed AccountNov 10, 2005
It is raining here in Seattle alright... but you meant reign.
justdarickNov 10, 2005
I love OpenOffice, and I will begin to actively use it the second it gets a reliable Grammar check. I cannot believe there is a word processing application without built-in, easy to use, and seamless functionality that competes with Microsoft Word.
ricoduedNov 10, 2005
Yes, I like how you guys are completely ignoring the fact that in Office 12, Microsoft will be using new, OPEN document formats, all based using XML. They also are allowing export to PDF *and* XPS, which will have a free Linux reader for XPS upon release.Did I also mention that XPS is also an OPEN standard?All you guys are doing is backing behind a single format because it contains the word 'open' and all to oppose a company you hate. News for you, Microsoft is going to start using open formats in Office. There is even (not sure if it was confirmed) an export option to ODF in Office 12. Microsoft IS changing, but you guys haven't noticed because you're all too fixated on destroying, destroying, and destroying.Do you know who that reminds me of? You're all becoming your enemy.
satoshiNov 10, 2005
I believe all applications should be open source.Open Office is a symbol of good things to come.
bhsxNov 11, 2005
I don't know that "all applications should be open source." I would say that most software that is used by most people should be open source. My only exception would be tax-style software that needs new data added annually, though that's mostly being taken care of by online filing services, and large (Doom 3, GTAIII, etc) games. If you extended that to say something like:I think all applications and game engines should be open source, but the creative content (artwork, music, etc) should be owned and distributed under copyright by their respective owners, under whichever license they see fit (GPL, CC or proprietary).Then I'd agree 100%.The fact is, it's not easy or cheap to create works like the games I mentioned. It would be great if everyone decided to do these just for fun and have them be as good; but so far, that hasn't happenned. I basically see games creators on the same level as movie/music/artwhatever creators that should control their content to some limited extent.Fortunately, some of the best open source games are starting to see a snowball effect, and are starting to look very nice.Here's a few good cross-platform OSS games:<a class="user" href="http://glest.org">http://glest.org</a><a class="user" href="http://wesnoth.org">http://wesnoth.org</a><a class="user" href="http://ufoai.net">http://ufoai.net</a><a class="user" href="http://flightgear.org">http://flightgear.org</a>Plus plenty more former Q3 mods that are now building stand-alone games since the Q3 source was released.
lycolocoNov 11, 2005
As much as I love open formats, if everything became open, there wouldn't be need to innovate, just to take code from others. Not saying that this would always be the case, but I think it would happen more often than not...
smokezzNov 11, 2005
captainjy: Yep, and American car manufacturers thought they were invincible not so long ago too...