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____/ Rex Ballard on Saturday 16 August 2008 12:24 : \____
> On Aug 16, 12:01 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> ____/ Rex Ballard on Saturday 16 August 2008 06:54 : \____
>> > <quote>
>> > Big Blue’s 20,000-strong techies have been advised to ditch Microsoft
>> > Office and use open standards software such as Lotus Symphony instead.
>
>> They should stick with OOo and accompanying FOSS mail/calendaring
>> instead (e.g. Thunderbird, Evolution with Sunbird, Chandler, or whatever).
>
>> Lotus is /proprietary/ software. IBM asks these people to just swap masters.
>
> Many at IBM are already using OO, and FOSS, which is one of the
> reasons that Lotus dumped Smart Suite in favor of ODF based Symphony.
>
> Many large corporations like the idea of ODF and even Open Source, but
> they also want some vendor support at an enterprise level. Symphony
> is based on the OSS Eclipse framework and uses ODF java framework.
> The proprietary part is the layouts that make it look and feel like a
> Lotus app. Notes 8 is also based on eclipse, and has symphony built-
> in.
>
> Many corporations, especially brokerages, insurance companies, and
> financial institutions still use Lotus Notes because they are required
> to provide a detailed record of all communications in and out of the
> company if there is suspicion of insider trading. For example, a
> mutual fund manager might send coded e-mails to a family member or
> friend who will invest just ahead of the investment activity of the
> mutual fund. Since brokers and bankers know that their e-mail is
> being recorded and can't be deleted from the main server (only from
> their desktop), they tend to be less willing to take the risk.
>
> One of the big problems with MS-Office attachments in e-mails is that
> they tend to fill up the mailboxes quite quickly and are very hard to
> locate once they have been archived. The ODF attachments are similar
> to the RTF format used in Lotus notes files, giving the ability to
> send well formatted e-mail, revisions, comments, and other rich text
> feedback, but using a verifiable Open Standard format.
>
> The Idea of Open Standards isn't new. There was a big push for them
> back in 1989, as a way to help manage the rapidly growing pile of
> documents in proprietary formats that were very difficult to manage.
> Ironically, DEC, HP, IBM, and Sun were all for it. But of course,
> Microsoft was rabidly against it. In 1992, Microsoft started dumping
> Office on the OEMs who shipped illegally bundled Office software with
> Windows 3.1 on every computer they sold. This effectively killed the
> "Open Standards" movement for almost 2 years, until 1994, when the
> Internet, based on IETF public standard formats, and FOSS based
> software started exploding onto the scene. OSS software including
> trumpet WinSock and NCSA Mosaic began spreading virally throughout
> corporations, schools, and institutions, and within 1 year, over 2
> million people downloaded the upgrade to Mosaic in the first DAY.
> Within a month it was discovered that about 10 million people had been
> using Mosiac. Improved counting technologies such as cookies made it
> possible to more accurately count users, and soon what we now know as
> the Web, and the Internet, had gone from "What's that?" to "Gotta be
> on the Web".
>
> DEC is gone, HP is not doing much in desktop software, (in 1989, they
> made the Apollo and HP-9000 workstations), and IBM is using OSS to
> give Lotus the ability to get maximum customer business value, by
> eliminating proprietary infrastructure as much as possible.
>
> The good news is that Symphony and Open Office documents look
> identical to each other. This was the goal of ODF in the first
> place. I think IBM even licenses the software for the ODF engine from
> Sun, but I'm not sure about that.
It still won't inhibit the freedom of users, including businesses that
gradually depend on the software (there are lock-ins /beyond/ file formats).
Chris Ward mailed me about it saying that IBM might still let people view the
source code if they really need it, but that's not Free software. Sutor is mum
on this issue as well, although people do bring this up.
So again, if a business wants the benefits of Free software, KDE (KOffice) and
OpenOffice.org are among the better options. Maybe they can latch onto other
things to complete the functionality offered by Lotus.
There's no point in having one devil replacing another (say, Microsoft using
crime to push IBM aside) and then overthrown for sheer corruption just to
restore the power of that same old devil. Non-free software is a lock-in and
it gives power to its vendor. Microsoft-free it may be, but it's not Free
(libre). It's free samples.
BTW, the arrangements IBM has with Novell boggle the mind. Novell is now run by
an IBMer and they may be playing that IP game, thus proving that they never
really 'get' Free software. They want to leverage it, so in that respect, Sun
is still ahead.
For a company that sells services and hardware, it's just a poor decision to
serve people non-Free software. They don't need to work this way.
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | YaSTall Linux to figure out the magic
http://Schestowitz.com | Open Prospects | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Tasks: 160 total, 1 running, 159 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
http://iuron.com - knowledge engine, not a search engine
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