'Open Letter to Alan Yates, MS, about KOffice'

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List: koffice-devel
Subject: Open Letter to Alan Yates, MS, about KOffice
From: Inge Wallin <inge () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date: 2005-09-23 22:34:33
Message-ID: 200509240034.33565.inge () lysator ! liu ! se
[Download RAW message or body]

Ok, read it and comment please.  It will go to the dot, and from there to 
Slashdot and a number of other places, or at least so Danimo says.

	-Inge

-- 
Inge Wallin               | Thus spake the master programmer:               |
                          |      "After three days without programming,     |
inge@lysator.liu.se       |       life becomes meaningless."                |
                          | Geoffrey James: The Tao of Programming.         |

["KOffice-open-letter.html" (text/html)]

Open Letter to 

<p>Alan Yates<br>
General Manager<br>
Microsoft Corporation

<p>Mr Yates,

It is with great interest that I have followed the debate that started
with <a href="http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/">the Massachusetts decision to
only exchange data with other parties in an open format</a>, namely <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Document">Open Document</a>.
I must say that personally I find the reasoning behind the decision to
be sound, but I fully support your right to disagree with this
sentiment.

In your rather long and doubtlessly well researched <a
href="http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/docs/policies_standards/etrm3dot5/responses/microsoft.pdf">reply</a>
to the declaration, you make many points which I will not address
here, since <a
href="http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09/21/0811222">others</a>,
better suited than me have <a
href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/09/10/Mass-Opposition">already</a>
<a
href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=384&ca=drs-bl">done
so</a>. There is, however, one point where I feel that you have been
gravely misinformed by your research staff.

That point is the following:
<blockquote>
 The draft policy identifies four products that support the
 OpenDocument format: Sun's StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, and
 IBM Workplace. In reality, these products are slight variations of
 the same StarOffice code base, which Sun acquired from a German
 company in 1999. The different names are little more than unique
 brands applied by the vendors to the various flavors of the code
 base that they have developed. In essence, a commitment to the
 OpenDocument format is a commitment to a single product or
 technology. This approach to product selection by policy violates
 well-accepted public procurement norms.
</blockquote>

I understand your worries, but fortunately I am able to put your mind
to rest: <a href="http://www.koffice.org/">KOffice</a> is in fact
not related to StarOffice or OpenOffice. It is a completely
separate product, and a damn fine one at that. One of our team
members, David Faure, was an active party in the creation of the OASIS
OpenDocument standard, and KOffice was the first office suite that
publicly announced support for it.

<p>
Just to add a bit to your knowledge of KOffice, I would like to
mention a few points:
<ul>

<li>KOffice is the most comprehensive of all office suites in
existence, comprising no less than 11 different components in one
well-integrated package.

<li>These components include core office applications like KWord,
KSpread and KPresenter, but also creativity applications like Krita
(an advanced pixel based drawing tool), Kivio (flowcharts), Karbon
(vector based drawing) and Kexi, an integrated environment for
database applications similar to your own Access.

<li>KOffice is very well integrated into KDE, the most popular desktop
environment on Linux, Solaris and other UNIX variants.

<li>KOffice is fully network-transparent and all components can send
documents as mail, print to PDF files and store and load documents
from countless different network servers.

<li>Last, but not least: Within a year, KOffice will likely run on
Windows as well.

</ul>

In case you think that even two competing products will not be enough
to satisfy the well-accepted public procurement norms, I can assure
you that they will soon not be alone. The fine word processor
Abi-word and the spreadsheet program Gnumeric, <a
href="http://www.mail-archive.com/gnumeric-list%40gnome.org/msg00322.html">will
also soon support it due to an independent effort by a Nokia research
lab.

I am sure that you are now much calmer, and if you want to know more,
you can always go to the <a href="http://www.koffice.org/">KOffice
website</a>. You can also write to the <a
href="mailto:koffice@kde.org">Koffice mailing list</a> and ask your
questions there.

<br>
<br>
<p>
Respectfully,

<br>
<br>
<p>
Inge Wallin<br>
Marketing Coordinator<br>
The KOffice Project

_______________________________________________
koffice-devel mailing list
koffice-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 