[whalesalad]

This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. For those of us who live in caves, this works, but for those of us who participate in the real world, it doesn't. It's like a hippie telling me to only buy locally grown organic produce and boycot the rest, when it's cheaper and I really don't give a shit.

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.

[mootothemax]

You know what's even more annoying? The pool of talented developers working on two office suites for Linux! So, rather than everybody working on an MS Office killer, we have crappy OpenOffice and an even craffier KOffice both competing against each other for the title of who's crappiest. Grr!

[jrockway]

Yeah, the world would be a much better place if everyone did exactly what I told them to.

For me, anyway...

[mootothemax]

Heh, sometimes I think that the only thing OSS really needs for mainstream success is a dictator ;)

[qw]

The most annoying part is that their functionality is tightly woven in with the rest of their application. Why would we need separate Word/Excel parsers? Couldn't you just separate common functionality to a shared library...

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.

[jrockway]

I think what people don't realize is that stuff like OO.org is just for show. The free software people don't use WYSIWYG slideshow generators or word processors; they already have tools that are much easier to use.

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.

[loup-vaillant]

I'm not sure I follow you here. Do you mean Power point and Word are not fit for their purposes? And, what "better model" are you speaking of?

[jrockway]

LaTeX, Beamer, etc., etc.

[anatoly]

LaTeX is not much easier to use than Word; it's incredibly more difficult to use. It requires you to remember or look up a bewildering number of strange-looking commands, a special syntax, etc.

[loup-vaillant]

LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step. The fact that you do not see what you get requires you to think a bit more abstractly. It is also less discoverable.

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.

[anatoly]

LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step.

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.

[mrkschan]

You can find out the reason why OpenOffice does not work really well from Sun CEO - http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis...

[loup-vaillant]

Apparently, most of you only value short term convenience (If you did, you would use open format as much as you could, even if it means worse current software). No wonder the world is build on exponential growth and depletion of limited resources.

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.

[rimantas]

  Please someone tells me where I am wrong

1) You assume that using proprietary formats is only short term value. Why do you think it is?

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".

[loup-vaillant]

(1) It's about freedom. It's the control of your data. The absence of vendor lock-in. We are more vulnerable when we are entrenched in a proprietary model. In the long run, it will be things like cloud computing, semantic analysis of your output, and even outright spying. Things are already pretty bad right now, and will be worse over time if we don't fight that lucrative model.

(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.