I’m back from the OpenOffice.org conference in Lyon. Unfortunately, I was able to catch only the last 1.5 days of the conference, but from what I saw the sessions were informative, the hallway conversations illuminating, and the hospitality superb. I participated in a roundtable panel on “OpenDocument, Open Revolution” and gave a presentation later that day with the exciting title, “A Technical Comparison — ISO/IEC 26300 vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (Ecma International TC45 OOXML WD 1.3)”. The streaming media for these and other sessions are provided online by Kiberpipa.
I’d like to especially draw attention to John McCreesh’s “why.openoffice.org” talk. Usually my eyes glaze over at “marketing” talks. But even with jet lag and loss of a night’s sleep I found this to be an engaging and compelling statement of the OpenOffice.org value proposition.
A noteworthy item announced at the conference was the opening of an OpenDocument-focused web site at XML.org (http://opendocument.xml.org/). This is the “official community gathering place and information resource ” for the OASIS ODF TC and ODF Adoption TC, and is a great place to go with questions about ODF and browse the content there. I encourage you to make it a regulary visit in your browsing habit, or sign up for one of the feeds.
Next stop: OpenDocument Day at the KDE Akademy in Dublin next Tuesday. I’m going to give a lighting talk on “A Standard ODF Object Model”. I also plan to buttonhole everyone I see and try to convince them of the need for a unified effort to make an OpenDocument Developer Kit (ODDK).
An open source OpenDocument Developer Kit (ODDK) is a necessary tool to encourage adoptin of OpenDocument. More than once I am put off good technology by the fact that I have to develope everything from scratch and use my own custom thing instead.
Having a development kit is going be a great weapon against the _other_ effort. It lowers the barrier to entry for developers. I hate to see the other party wins on development kit issue.
Also, GPL will be too “viral” and will severely limited ODDK use. Something like LGPL where you are forced to contribute back your modification will be ideal in an idealistic world. ODDK should probably be licensed under Apache-like license.
I think KOffice seems a brighter prospect than OpenOffice.
OpenOffice.org carries a lot of legacy bagage and is still very much under the control of Sun developers. KOffice is less mature but can adapt much easier to take full advantage of the Opendocument format possibilities and find new ones.
I think OOo is not a good thing for the future development of the standard format as it has so much relation to the formaat that it would be very hard to get new functionality in that other OSS projects could use but that OOo has no intention of supporting.
My money would be on true OSS community products for the future of ODF and not on a so much Sun related organisationas OOo.