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IBM and OpenOffice.org

Started by Terry, 2007.09.11, 23:24:03

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Terry

Here is the first paragraph of OpenOffice's September 10th announcement of IBM joining the OpenOffice.org project...

"10 September 2007 -- The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products."

http://www.openoffice.org/press/ibm_press_release.html

IBM has already been indirectly contributing to OpenOffice...

http://www.ibm.com/Search/?q=openoffice&v=16&en=utf&lang=en&cc=us&Search=Search

Perhaps we'll even see some Lotus SmartSuite compatibility, or Cloudscape compatibility, contributed to OpenOffice.  It will be interesting to see how much will eventually be ported to Serenity's eCS-OS/2 OpenOffice.

Saijin_Naib

This seems like only good news :)

El Vato

Quote from: Terry on 2007.09.11, 23:24:03
[...]Perhaps we'll even see some Lotus SmartSuite compatibility, or Cloudscape compatibility, contributed to OpenOffice.  It will be interesting to see how much will eventually be ported to Serenity's eCS-OS/2 OpenOffice.
IBM is using SWT in their free implementation of OpenOffice called Lotus Symphony --as you may already have read.  Accordingly, only the contributions that find their way into OpenOffice might be used to retrofit the OS/2 implementation of the latter.

Eclipse framework has been extensively integrated into Lotus Symphony and, like Google Apps indefinite betas (as well as MS family of operating systems --except that the latter's propaganda machine claim otherwise), the current release is admittedly beta sofware.
http://www.chingonazo.com/symphony_3.png

Although the Linux installation executable appears to be for heterogeneous Linux distros IBM_Lotus_Symphony_Linux.bin, my favorite distro, Debian experienced some issues, like lack of user initiation icons, even with a newer 1.5x release of Sun Microsystem's JVM.  Of course, I have to put up with those quirks because the mentioned Debian distro is the unstable release --read cutting edge.

http://www.chingonazo.com/symphony_2.png

Notwithstanding, in a CentOS (free implementation of Red Hat enterprise http://www.centos.org/[/color]]http://www.centos.org/) the icons for the user that link (short cuts for WinXX users out there) to start the Symphony applications appeared in the menu.  The interesting issue is that the JVM in the CentOS machine *is* the free implementation of Java 1.4.2 --gij (GNU libgcj)-- code freely available for a potential OS/2 implementation.

http://www.chingonazo.com/symphony_1.png

For those who say that there are poor software development practices in open source like that mentioned above, I encourage you to read http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/hacking.html

Terry

Quote from: El Vato on 2007.09.21, 09:10:04
IBM is using SWT in their free implementation of OpenOffice called Lotus Symphony --as you may already have read.  Accordingly, only the contributions that find their way into OpenOffice might be used to retrofit the OS/2 implementation of the latter.

Indeed!  "Can IBM save OpenOffice.org from itself?" sheds a lot of perspective on IBM's more pressing reasons to participate openly with OpenOffice.org.  Sun's "top-heavy" OpenOffice.org development participation article tidbit was quite enlightening.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9037499

For lack of better wording, it appears that IBM development using a "Sun-source OpenOffice" to contribute to a more effective office suite (Lotus Symphony) is similar to IBM's past practice of tweaking a "Sun-source Java" into a more effective Java.  With Sun and IBM it seems - the more things change - the more things in effect stay the same.

Thank you to El Vato for the OS/2 kernel and porting insights such as "the free implementation of Java 1.4.2" possibilities.  Many of us do not work with various operating systems "under the hood" everyday like this, but we do understand & appreciate these things once they are explained to us.

P.S.:  Hopefully, some Lotus SmartSuite "Easy Icon" features, especially "Text Properties," can make it into OpenOffice.  It is so irritating to continually drill down the "Format" menu in M$ Office (and OpenOffice cloning) to format a document.  "Text Properties" is the second "abc" easy icon on SmartSuite's easy icon taskbar.

BigWarpGuy

I have read reviews of the IBM Symphony but it does not seem to be getting good reviews. I have both Symphony and Open Office on my Win PC. Symphony seems to be way bigger than Open Office. It would be neat if there was a OS/2-eCS port of Symphony.

I still use my Star Office for OS/2 on my computer. It still works great.  ;D  I will give - some day - the OS/2 version of Open Office a try.  8)

miturbide


Well, the first step to have an OS/2-eCS port of Lotus Symphony will be to port the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) . There is currently a Bounty for it, and something coded on netlabs, but according to what I had hear it will be a hard effort to port it over.

But since I'm not a developer, I'm not sure the effort required to run Lotus Symphony under OS/2-eCS in the case we have the SWT ported.

There are also a lot of others IBM products that runs on eclipse SWT, like Lotus Notes 8, Sametime Connect 7.5.1, Rational Software Architect,...
Martín Itúrbide
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Open Source Advocate

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lpino

Hola Martin.

Well, as far as I know I'm the only one working on the code of the port of SWT. In my view a good PM programmer could finish the port in no time as it stands now. The problem is that the base code it's old (SWT 2.01) and when I finish it we will be very late compare to other platforms.

With our support of Java I believe we could go as far as SWT 3.1 but from then on you need Java 1.5. Besides that there are lots of things being added that need graphic support that is not available on GPI and would need Cairo or other libraries.

The code is now available at: http://svn.netlabs.org/swt and anyone interested can request permissions to work on it.

Nos vemos Martin.

Leonardo Pino

El Vato

Quote from: Terry on 2007.09.11, 23:24:03
[...]or Cloudscape compatibility, contributed to OpenOffice.

IBM discontinued offering support for Cloudscape back in June 2007, Terry.  Apache Derby, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) implementation equivalent to IBM's CloudScape, is what perhaps you meant.

Derby (like CloudScape), weigh only at approximately 2MB footprint when embedded, and is extensively used in products from Sun Microsystems and Oracle, as well as IBM, of course.

Quote from: BigWarpGuy on 2007.09.26, 22:45:27
I have read reviews of the IBM Symphony but it does not seem to be getting good reviews. I have both
[...]

Yes. Although many of InfoWorlds articles are quite enlightening, some of the site's bloggers exhibit a tendency to be associated with MS "shills" --the words of some of the respondents, not mine.  Take for example this article where Fernando Cassia felt compelled to respond: http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2007/09/its_back_to_the.html

Obviously, "[The] curmudgeon's-eye view of desktop computing" is blurred by an MS indoctrination and could as well be renamed to "The (MS) Borg collective's-eye view of desktop computing."

I am surprised that this guy actually allowed Cassia's comment to go through.  In a past blog on virtualization, where I corrected the assertions of this fellow on his indiscriminate use of software virtualization versus hardware (CPU) assisted equivalent, my reply never made it into publication.

His narrow assertions, of course, focused on denigrating the Linux operating system --presenting in a favorable light one of MS family of alpha/beta operating systems

Quote from: Terry on 2007.09.11, 23:24:03
[...]Symphony and Open Office on my Win PC. Symphony seems to be way bigger than Open Office.
[...]
...it is approximately 561MB on a typical single Linux deployment.  Apropos it also worked well on my Debian distro --the buttons simply "appeared" afterwards  :D.
http://www.chingonazo.com/symphony_Debian.png

Terry

Here's a pretty fair assessment of "OpenOffice vs. Lotus Symphony" from October 4th...

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3703501

A quick personal observation:  Lotus Symphony Documents has replaced the quite useful & unique Lotus Word Pro Text Properties Easy Icon with a Text Properties Tab retaining the most used features of Text Properties which you must "float" if you want to view a larger document while writing.

El Vato

Quote from: Terry on 2007.10.09, 18:16:15
[...]with a Text Properties Tab retaining the most used features of Text Properties which you must "float" if you want to view a larger document while writing.

That reminds me of the (last?) version of DeScribe for OS/2 http://www.chingonazo.com/from_DeScribe-to-Symphony.JPG.

On the other hand, and emphasizing that the introduction of Symphony --as well as IBM's public announcement to join the OpenOffice.org effort promoting the Open Document Format (ODF) as an example of open standards-- those two facts appear to be the direct result of the Pseudo Open Office XML (POOXML) failing during its proponents bid to elevate it to an ISO standard on Sept. 2, 2007.

Accordingly, if IBM is using OpenOffice as an base for Symphony, it is to be expected that previous/current documents created in OpenOffice should be honored and rendered/formatted correctly under Symphony --and vice versa.  Any ODF compliant data creation implementations from any vendor should render/format appropriately data created from any other vendor's competing implementations (based on ODF, of course).  Otherwise, the term "open standards" will have the meaning that an vendor wants to give to the word (as Humpty-Dumpty told Alice) and POOXML will triumph due to the fragmentation and/or renegade self-serving forks of ODF implementations.

I felt the need to note the above because prior documents that I had created under OpenOffice 2.2.1 under Linux Debian were not formatted/rendered appropriately under IBM's Lotus Symphony.  I have reported the issue at the appropriate section at http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa

El Vato

...Well, apparently the Lotus Symphony beta implementation team of the Open Document Format (ODF) specification is not on the same page as the OpenOffice equivalent on matters of interpretation (of the ODF specification).

Purportedly, that issue is to be addressed in subsequent releases of Lotus Symphony.  In other words, (one of) the goal(s) for the subsequent releases of Lotus Symphony is compatibility with OpenOffice.  For some supporting information, please see:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/supportThread.jspa?threadID=3076&tstart=0