Why I'm rejecting your email attachment
fsf.org
fsf.org
tl;dr: Make OpenOffice 10x better than Office and you won't have to cajole people to switch. Don't do that and we'll ignore you like we've been doing.
Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document.
As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".
Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?
This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts.
Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.
You're completely right. The alternatives are garbage. OpenOffice is an absolute joke. My dad sent me this attachment, asking for some help doing an animation. Let's compare the OpenOffice version, to the Keynote version.
Keynote: http://grab.by/3r23 OpenOffice: http://grab.by/3r25
Until the app that I use to deal with these open formats is equivalent or better than MS Office or Keynote, I'm going to use it. I could care less what format the document comes in... I've never had an issue opening something. I worked out the issue my dad had in Keynote (the slide he needed help with was not the screenshot, heh)
The FSF guys have never provided alternative solutions that actually work, and yes, until then, I'm going to ignore their stupid bullshit.
For me, anyway...
It's the GIMP problem all over again. If they would just separate each functionality into components, it would make it easier for others to create "shells".
I see potential for a lot of improvement in the GIMP and Photoshop interfaces, and someone with better design skills than me could potentially make a Photoshop-killer.
It's the rest of the world that refuses to use any model better than Powerpoint or Word, and they get exactly what they deserve -- a tedious way to make poor-looking presentations and documents.
Once you get past that point (and I agree most people won't), I doubt you have to remember more things in LaTeX than in Word. I one case, it's special sequences of characters, while in the other, it's menus.
Also, this wasn't really about ease of use. The TeX back-end is definitely better than Word's or OOO's, and that fact ends some arguments. A well integrated WYSIWYG on top of that would be great, though.
That's a bold statement that's backed up by no facts and makes no sense. If you were just to stop and think for a second, I bet you'd see how ridiculous it is.
LaTeX is more difficult than Word by about a dozen aspects. And here's a random list off the top of my head.
1) It's more difficult to see how what you're typing will look like.
2) It's more difficult to decide which one to download and install (there's just one Word).
3) TeX comes with its own set and philosophy of fonts that you have to learn, understand, remember and debug. Word uses the same fonts that come with the OS.
4) You need to learn what the hell "DVI files" are and what to do with them. Word prints to your printer or saves in a number of familiar formats in addition to its proprietary ones.
5) Word makes it easy to include a diagram, a drawing, a photo. TeX has different competing "drawing packages", all arcane, all hard to learn and use, all have caused many a dissertation author to curse in despair.
6) You're a journalist or a writer under contract or a translator. You need to know how many words you've written. Word can tell you immediately. TeX? Go online, look for a tool or a script, there's half a dozen, none standard, most probably obsolete or not maintained anymore.
7) Because Word is WYSIWYG, quick iteration is possible: try something, see it's not working, immediately back out and try something else. TeX's cycle is slow and breaks the flow of thought.
8) Word has hierarchical menus, context menus and tooltips, together they make it relatively easy to find some functionality if you don't remember the exact keystroke, command or menu item. Most of the times, you know where to look and quickly scan a dialog box to find what you need. In TeX, you need to remember dozens of commands, or tediously search for them in docs or online.
9) It's rare/difficult to do a local change in Word that screws up an entire page or document; it's trivial to do so in TeX.
10) When you screw something up in Word, you see what went wrong and can quickly undo it. When you screw something up in TeX, you're bombarded with arcane error messages.
11) You hardly ever need to fix up a Word installation or understand the hierarchy of its directories, include files, etc.
12) Word trivially exports to HTML, the great universal language of our times.
(2), (4), (6) and (12) are off topic: I was assuming LaTeX was already installed, like word often is. DVI files can be viewed by evince, which makes it as easy as a pdf file (and no, the absence of a reasonable default document viewer on Windows does not count). Counting words isn't the word processor's job. HTML doesn't solve the same problem as Word and LaTeX.
I already said (8): "It is also less discoverable". Plus, LaTeX aware editors (like TeXmaker) do have those menus, making (8) false when you use them.
I don't understand (3). I just use the pretty default fonts, and that's it. Unlike Times New Roman, they're good enough. I never needed to mess with them. Did you?
(5) and (11) are fair enough.
LaTeX suffer from the fact that it is just a bunch of TeX macros. I believe even Leslie Lamport would describe it as an ugly hack. TeX need better front-ends. A set of mark-up languages, of limited purposes each, would be great. Markdown could be a good start.
EDIT: Please someone tells me where I am wrong. I don't care about downmods, but I do care about being corrected, or else I stay wrong.
Please someone tells me where I am wrong
2) You assume, that everyone going with open formats would improve software. Why should it happen, exactly? I honestly tried various versions of OpenOffice at least a dozen of times and gave up. I have no hope it can get rid of that Frankensteiny feel.
And I have no idea, why and how average office worker (who spends most of the time working with those documents) should know the difference between proprietary and open formats and which is which. In most cases format question will boil down to "this is garbled" and "this looks fine".
(2) In the case of popular software, where a popular alternative already exist, I do (although even if I am wrong, (1) is way more important). Also, I suspect you can't use OpenOffice because you are used to word. My brother, who is not so used to Word, actually prefer OpenOffice. It is a bit like 3DsMax vs Blender. I know no one who learned one first and liked the other.
Now, it should be clear why a non-tech person should be able to tell proprietary format from free ones: it is about a very basic, universal concept: freedom. So they'd better learn the necessary technical skills before they lose their freedom.
This has happened before. When most people didn't know how to read, those who did had a tremendous edge. They could access more ideas, and therefore have more choice, more freedom. The printing press magnified this effect, and ultimately lead to the generalization of democracy in the western world. The catch is, you have to learn to read before you benefit that. And until you do, you will have a hard time to see the need.
Oh, and please don't bring out the "fix it yourself" argument; enough time has passed, OO should be better already.
By rejecting all files created in Microsoft Office and Apple iWork,
you can send a strong message to your friends, colleagues and
businesses that you do not support the actions of these companies.
By rejecting these files, you can open a friendly dialog with the
person, and ask them to support a free society by using a free
format like OpenDocument.
(2) Yes, that's makes you look like a moron. No, freedom doesn't mean that. If you want to maximize your (immediate) freedom, then I understand. If you also want to be ethical and stop at the freedom of others, then you should restrict yourself to open formats.
all files created in Microsoft Office and Apple iWork
2) So you want total freedom, for yourself. Carried to it's ultimate conclusion, your total freedom can have me enslaved, should you decide so. More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe. And here, your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose my freedom to not use them.
There is no way around that. Most of the time, the larger my freedom, the smaller the rest of the world's. Some compromises are just better than others at maximizing (or sharing) total freedom.
2) His freedom to use any format he likes does not impact on your freedom not to use those formats. You are free to ignore the documents he creates.
If I decide to invent my own language and speak only in that, that does not impact your freedom not to learn my language.
(I'm not sure the analogies are making these arguments any clearer)
(2) In that case, I have limited options: either I ignore the document, or I keep my (more important) freedom. If you sent me an open format, I could have my cake and eat it too, which ultimately results in more freedom.
2) Where do you get that stupid idea that I want freedom for myself only? If I happen to like Pages I just use it. You are free to use whatever you want, be it Word or OpenOffice. FSF on the other hand wants me to ditch everything in favour of that ugly piece of software. Why should I?
More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe
And here, your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose
my freedom to not use them.
And please, don't mix proprietary formats and software — they are not the same. As I said, I can produce pdf or rtf or plain text in Pages.
All this is just a lame attempt to replace quality with politics.
(2) Sorry for the confusion, that was careless. Of course your using proprietary software doesn't restrict me directly, unlike your sending me documents in a proprietary format. Now you should still ditch them, because once you're hooked, who knows what evil scheme they could put upon you? (like expensive updates, or even spying)
Now, to make it clear, I still use proprietary software (mostly games). But when I do, I am not proud of it, and I tell myself I should stop, eventually.
All this is just a lame attempt to replace quality with politics.
.odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the cloud.
On a related note, I hope we eventually have some sort of cloud-transfer legislation, that makes it easy for people to move all their docs from Google to say, Zoho without any hassles.. this would foster more innovation in the online office suite space
That would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. And I mean every single word.
The number one reason why proprietary formats are bad is because they don't give you full control of your data. Documents in the cloud give you even less control, and no guarantee. No amount of legislation will prevent bad things from happening (like, semantic analysis of your documents).
The cloud as we know it should die. Trust me, I am not the extremist, here. Or better, don't trust me. Just listen to the arguments (one sided and very well said): http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-20... (video, audio and transcript).
I get what you are saying, and there are a lot of good reasons to believe in using the basic file formats (read: old formats, not better formats), but I think that this is a poor way of looking at the spreading of information.
While a .txt file is accessible anywhere, it is certainly not always more readable. Just because someone could write their thoughts out in a linear fashion, doesn't mean they should. Slide decks are great, and they are sometimes the best option for presenting vital information to a large group of people.
There are good reasons for wanting very basic encodings of thought, but there are also very good reasons to make things more complex (internally) to make them more simple (externally).
Also, OpenDocument is hard to use, as is OpenOffice.
To that end, I don't think you can create an office document format that is wholly divorced from the client that reads, views, and writes it. Even if I believed that you could agree on a perfectly future-proof and extensible data format, you would need a whole suite of tests available so that clients could test that they are rendering them to the screen and print {pixel|point}-perfectly. The closest analogue we have for this scenario is HTML, and look how imperfect the browser space still is; and browsers don't even need to provide editing functionality for what they are rendering.
We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort to install (you need at least a few clicks). So we have to teach.
Why not? People don't want to learn how to install software. They want to do their jobs. Apple (with the App Store) and Google (with Chrome) understand that.
If the (very low) level of pain of the Apple store is low enough for you, then yes, that's definitely possible. We just need a "Free Software Store". The repository system found in Linux distributions is very close (or even on spot, depending on the UI wrapper). Maybe such a system would be desirable on Windows. That could ease the transition to fully fledged Linux systems.
Personally all my writing etc for anything nontrivial is via latex, a file format which happily enough is human readable (and much moreso than word or odf or whatever), and I can be reasonably confident that if i want to regenerate any documents i have in 20+ years, these files will likely be still machine readable barring cosmic radiation flipping bits or computers switching from binary to ternary representations etc.
In all seriousness though, for all but the simplest of documents, theres a lot of ways that meaning formatting/data can be lost when two different word processors are respectively creating and reading a document file, and thats even ignoring how with a lot of these programs the formatting for a document will be rejiggered if these two computer have different default printers!!
This sort of behavior is harmful (and dumb), so I am glad the FSF is calling it out.
Yeah.
OpenOffice may be free, but it certainly comes at a cost. For starters: the cost of learning a new UI. And the cost of dealing with compatibility issues while most other people are still using Office.
For my own needs, OpenOffice is fine. But for those who write a lot more documents, and have more invested in Office, the time cost alone is likely to outweigh the price difference.