Comments on: Novell’s OpenOffice.org FUD Rallies Disruptors

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:58:20 +0000

Exactly.

By: What is Go-oo?

What is Go-oo? — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:50:47 +0000

It seems that the Go-oo team did exactly what the writers of the GPL intended. This is a Good Thing ™. Sun stagnated and Go-oo is picking up the slack.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:03:08 +0000

Alex Hudson has already explained why this is a Good Thing®.

By: Victor Soliz

Victor Soliz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:58:27 +0000

Unfortunately, some spreadsheets have grown to rely on Microsoft’s faulty math and so to some people, compatibility is more important than getting the correct answer.

It is scary that people would think like that, I just hope these compatibility tweaks are only there when editing those binary office formats, it would be a little non-sensical that the bugs were inherited to OOXML, but hey, this is MS we are talking about anyway…

By: Victor Soliz

Victor Soliz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:55:52 +0000

I still don’t get this non-sense from Novell fans wanting to avoid calling gooo a fork, perhaps they actually dig Roy’s assertion that it being a fork would be a bad thing and such they try so hard to avoid it being called a fork.

It is a fork, Ooo is free software, it has been forked, distros use the fork… Whether gooo is bad or not is a different discussion, but it is a fork. And no fork is necessarily a bad thing in Free software, as a matter of fact that’s supposedly the good thing about free software…

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:00:02 +0000

To be fair, OOo is not better in terms of integration.

By: twitter

twitter — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:56:33 +0000

Applications not working in various window managers/desktop environments? I suppose that’s what we can expect from M$’s Gnome poison but I’ve never seen it. I happily use KDE’s kicker with Enlightenment 16 and have used it with Window Maker and even OLVWM. Every Gnome, KDE and other X11 program I’ve used works perfectly with this combination. Gnumeric, Pidgin, Kontact, Open Office, Gimp and Koqueror are good examples of how everthing just gets along under Lenny with every window manager I’ve tried.

Shame on anyone who thinks spreadsheets should recreate M$’s bugs instead of giving correct answers. People who are more interested in agreeing with their peers than getting correct answers don’t need a spreadsheet.

By: fred

fred — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:06:53 +0000

the problems occur mostly after a longer usage of the programs, so you wont notice them immediately. They are reproducible with fresh and updated installs of 8.10, even with the preliminary 3.0 packages from launchpad.there are especially problems with special chars (umlauts, math symbols etc. – and the pdf export). Sooner or later you come to the point where document files are damaged and can not be opened anymore.
I first became suspicious when i could only open them in windows but not in ubuntu because the apps where crashingi

By: Will

Will — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:47:47 +0000

fred, I guess that’s why all the major distributions use go-oo; because it is so buggy and they so want to alienate their users. (And of course they are all bribed and forced into this evil-doing by evil Microsoft…)

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:30:20 +0000

Yes, I was comparing it to KOffice and other tools I use for composition (e.g. Kate, LyX). I hardly ever use a full-bloat [sic] office suite .

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:25:03 +0000

Also, the font support in Go-OO is better than vanilla OOo as well, especially with CJK.

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:22:46 +0000

Obviously KOffice is better integrated than Go-OO on KDE and Gnumeric/AbiWord are better integrated with GNOME than Go-OO, but Go-OO is better integrated than vanilla OOo.

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:21:31 +0000

Poor integration with desktop integration? Uh… that’s one of the things that Go-OO attempts to fix by using Tango icons and other patches to better integrate with GNOME (not sure about KDE, but I think they have integration patches for that too).

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:19:26 +0000

If the quality of Go-OO is so poor, why does Sun want it’s branding on it?

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:18:40 +0000

My only complaint about Go-ooXML has been poor integration with the desktop environment and fonts, but I hardly ever use Office suites, except for exceptional circumstances (being sent a file or having to do a spreadsheet that KOffice can’t handle). I prefer LaTeX.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:13:39 +0000

Strange that it works just fine here …(albeit not on buntu)

But whatever floats you boat …

By: fred

fred — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:03:07 +0000

Go-oo is a very bad choice for ubuntu, not only because it incorporates non-free file formats in a free office suite. My experience with openoffice in ubuntu has been nothing but a pain until i noticed the installed version is actually a fork. as soon as i replaced it with the original version Everything worked fine.
I use openoffice for my daily work and at university quite regularily. With gooo i experienced many crashes of the suite, damaged files which i could not open anymore and very severe font issues (missing fonts, mixed up letters, wrong interface fonts, and also crashes). It saddens me to see the reputation of an excellent office suite being damaged by this messed up fork in a main stream distro. I think i will soon file a bug report at launchpad and urge the maintainers to switch to the official version .

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:34:26 +0000

AlexH: yea, I was intrigued by that as well.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:21:50 +0000

We had this long discussion some months ago.

By: Dan O'Brian

Dan O'Brian — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:19:03 +0000

You mean, “the INcorrect answer.”

No, I meant exactly what I said.

For some people, compatibility is more important than getting the correct answer.

I don’t have any spreadsheets that rely on any Microsoft calculation bugs, but no doubt some do.

In any event, I would hope that there is some sort of config option for the compatibility mode or make it such that compatibility is enabled/disabled depending on the file format. This would probably require a bit in the ODF file format to specify whether the compatibility mode should be enabled (e.g. in case someone converts an old xls document into ODF format or some such).

I don’t write many spreadsheets, but when I do I would expect/prefer to get the correct mathematical results

(Note: I use OpenOffice and so would always be saving to ODF formats)