04.22.08
Putting code where your heart is?
Marc “uwog” Maurer, a leading AbiWord developer, on AbiWord’s 2008 Google Summer of Code projects:
Interestingly, we did receive quite a few applications about improving OOXML support, while we got zero OpenDocument related proposals. Apparently the support for the OpenDocument ISO standard isn’t strong enough in the F/OSS community to actually make an effort to improve support for it. Even when paid. Food for thought.
Both sad and disturbing for advocates of truly free and open standards for document formats (of which I am one).
April 22, 2008 at 7:42 am
I don’t think its that no-one supports ODF, its that no-one supports ODF in Abiword. They are part of the core GNOME project, after all, and many GNOME developers are known to side with Microsoft technologies; especially .NET, XAML, Silverlight and OOXML.
OpenOffice.org’s ODF support is great.
April 22, 2008 at 8:54 am
I don’t see what’s “sad” and “disturbing” about it.
Firstly, there’s less impetus for ODF support in the community because the reference platform for ODF is already free software. On the other hand, right now your options for reading OOXML in free software are pretty limited.
Secondly, the OLPC people are already paying for better ODF support in abiword to my knowledge, and frankly given the attitude towards OOo / ODF expressed by certain Abi developers it’s hardly unusual that people who want to work with ODF are more inclined to look elsewhere than to participate in Abiword development.
- Chris
April 22, 2008 at 10:37 am
It’s wonderful that OpenOffice.org has great ODF support (after all, the format is largely based on OOo’s internals), but that doesn’t leave me, as a user, in any better position than Microsoft formats; I’ve got a choice of one (or two, if I were a Linux+KDE user) program(s) I can use if I want my document rendered with reasonable fidelity. One of those programs is, quite frankly, clunky, ill-designed, and showing its age, and I’d like a real choice of the application to use to create and edit my documents.
That’s my concern: a free and open standard for the exchange of office-type documents needs to be implemented widely (and implemented well) for it to amount to anything; otherwise, it’s just another one-shot format that limits my choice and the future of my documents. Maybe AbiWord isn’t the canary here, but it does happen to be a major cross-platform word processor.
Chris, your point about limited options for reading OOXML is good. I do hope you see where I’m coming from on the other side, though.
April 22, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Yes, but is it your itchiest itch, so to speak? Seeing as GSOC is a request for volunteers, would you imagine that it’s more fun to volunteer to write the first free software implementation of a standard or the second? And what would you put on your list of priorities between the two?
Is this really the case? How many different implementations of TeX are there? I think that when the reference implementation of a well-documented standard is free software it always reduces the impetus to go writing another. Look at the browser space: Webkit wasn’t conceived because of concerns that Mozilla would dominate the standard that it upheld, but out of an entirely different set of concerns (speed and simplicity of code).
- Chris
April 22, 2008 at 11:11 pm
We had no trouble finding people to volunteer to write the second free software implementation of tab exposé for Camino last summer; people like to bring cool features to their favorite programs, and many people like it even more when they’re paid to do so. Maybe writing an OOXML importer/exporter is cooler than making existing OpenDocument importers/exporters more useful, though. Maybe it is all about lack of love for AbiWord. I don’t know. That doesn’t make the larger picture any less scary for me, however.
I’m not familiar enough with TeX to comment on implementations, but a quick search for “LaTeX” on VersionTracker brings up a half-dozen different applications designed for editing TeX on Mac OS X alone.
Your WebKit example actually speaks to my point, ill-argued as it has been. The web is healthier with more standards-compliant rendering engines. If Gecko collapses under its own weight and the Mozilla Foundation runs out of money, I don’t have to be concerned about not being able to find another application (rendering engine) to work with (view) my standards-compliant documents (web pages). There’s WebKit, there’s KHTML, there’s Presto, there’s Trident (on Windows, and ignoring the spotty standards support), and even Amaya, and Wikipedia lists another handful of smaller engines.
Just like WebKit didn’t begin because of concerns of Gecko dominance, AbiWord and KWord don’t (still) exist just because of concerns that OpenOffice.org will dominate the OpenDocument world. These apps (and Apple’s Pages and Corel WordPerfect and Microsoft Word and hundreds of other open and closed, free and non-free word processors out there) exist to provide users a choice in UI, in features, in speed, and so forth; they exist because they feel that they can better serve some segment of users than other applications can. So long as only OpenOffice.org and KOffice support OpenDocument well enough that it can be the default file format, though, I (as a user) can’t reliably interoperate using this ISO standard. I can’t be sure that Sun (or its shareholders) won’t grow tired of footing the bill for OpenOffice.org or something happens that breaks up KOffice development (more of a stretch) and be left needing to switch platforms to keep using this ISO standard or face converting all of my documents yet again to a new document format.
To look at it another way, what if only iTunes and Songbird supported playback of MP3 files? Would they be ubiquitous? Would that standard be useful?
Simply put, OpenOffice.org is not enough. I may not be trading one vendor-specific, single-point-of-failure format for another, but until OpenDocument is widely implemented (both in free/open and non-free/closed) software, it comes pretty close to smelling that way—and that’s what really saddens and frightens me.