Sometimes Scoble still does point out something that interests me. In this case, its about Microsoft's refinement in the "opening" of the office schemas. As you may know, the schemas themselves have been around for while, but its seems that some legal types saw things in the first licensing that they didn't like. You kind of have to dig around to make sense of it, but eventually you'll find this nugget which explains the following. The changes here are:
- "We are acknowledging that end users who merely open and read government documents that are saved as Office XML files within software programs will not violate the license." Now why a reasonable person couldn't infer that from the original license, I don't understand. It says you can as I read it.
- The license rights are perpetual.
- There's some cleanup of terms used and acknowledgements of prior works and patents. Big whoop.
I was reading this morning about Microsoft's decision to finally open the Office XML standards (more on this latter) when I went down a rabbit trail about open OpenOffice. Now, understand this, I use both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office System and like them about equally as a user. From a development POV, I've found OpenOffice more difficult to work with, but that's likely my own shortcoming for not having done was much with it. But one of the reasons that I like OpenOffice is that it works pretty well platform to platform for the stuff I care about: composing text doucments and doing spreadsheets. Presentations? Well, not so much, but virtually everybody calls them "PowerPoints" anyway since that's the format they expect.
Back to the rabbit trail. It seems that the folks developing OpenOffice on the Mac are content have their product seens as something advanced -- or as they put it -- "This build is meant for the Darwin community and Unix-savvy MacOS X user community and forming a platform for us to build the Quartz and Aqua tracks for the traditional Mac user" -- rather than something for the everyday citizen of MacTopia. I guess that's okay and understandable since they also go on to talk about how certain engineering challenges have gotten in their way of having a version that works with the Native GUI engines for OS X. I understand their decisions technically. And now I can feel okay about using it on a Mac as long as I can make X11 work. Oh. Well, okay, that's been harder for me in past than I like, but its probably better now, right?
The discussion also talks about some policitical battles that the team is facing with the Mac port, and that Sun's own licensing of OpenOffice(second to the last paragraph) is a significant roadblock to moving the Mac port forward. Now that does bother because of the mixed message it sends. However, I'm having a hard time finding any substanative discussion of what the problem is and how it limits folks ability to do work. I'd really like to understand that becore I invest any time contributing any bits to the project. Hopefully somebody who knows will see this and point me at it.