[dot] Open Letter to Alan Yates of Microsoft

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1127515635/

From: Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se>
Dept: umpire-strikes-back
Date: Friday 23/Sep/2005, @17:47

Open Letter to Alan Yates of Microsoft
======================================

   In his reply to the Massachusetts decision
[http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/] to use only documents in OpenDocument
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument] format, the Microsoft
manager Alan Yates writes
[http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/docs/policies_standards/etrm3dot5/responses/microsoft.pdf]:
(paraphrased) Star Office, Open Office, KOffice and IBM Workplace are
all derivatives of the same codebase. Thus there is only one program
that supports Open Document, and that is illegal. This is, of course,
not true, and here is an open letter written by KOffice Marketing
Coordinator Inge Wallin on behalf of the KOffice team which clarifies
these facts.

     Open Letter to

     Alan Yates General Manager Microsoft Corporation

     Mr Yates,

     It is with great interest that I have followed the debate that
started with the Massachusetts decision to only exchange data with other
parties in an open format, namely Open Document. 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, reply
[http://www.mass.gov/Aitd/docs/policies_standards/etrm3dot5/responses/microsoft.pdf]
to the declaration, you make many points which I will not address here,
since others
[http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09/21/0811222], better
suited than me, have already
[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/09/10/Mass-Opposition] done
so
[http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=384&ca=drs-bl].
 There is, however, one point where I feel that you have been gravely
misinformed by your research staff.

     That point is the following.  On page 7, and continuing on page 8
you write:   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.

     I understand your worries, but fortunately I am able to put your
mind to rest: KOffice [http://www.koffice.org/] 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.

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

    * KOffice is the most comprehensive of all office suites in
      existence, comprising no less than 11 different components in one
      well-integrated package.
    * 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 not
      unlike to your own Access.
    * KOffice is very well integrated into KDE, the multiple award
      winning desktop environment on Linux, Solaris and other UNIX
      variants.
    * 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.

     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
AbiWord and the spreadsheet program Gnumeric, will also soon support
Open Document
[http://www.mail-archive.com/gnumeric-list%40gnome.org/msg00322.html]
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 KOffice website
[http://www.koffice.org/].  You can also write to the KOffice mailing
list [https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel] and ask your
questions there.

     Respectfully,

     Inge Wallin Marketing Coordinator On behalf of the KOffice Team