Going on Microsoft’s record it’s a pretty safe bet that this is a classic case of “Embrace, extend and extinguish.” Microsoft will “open and standardise” their document format to keep their market dominance, only to change and corrupt it, along maybe with its licence, ensuring that it is not really open at all.

You can read more about this strategy on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

At JPL the kindest word used for the collection of SW and HW used would be heterogenous. NASA said “thou shalt use MS” and JPL and the other centers largely said “Not if you expect us to do serious work for you”, and the bosses wisely said “OK”..

There are a lot of Mac users at JPL.

The point however, is that no American reading and participating here could possibly be offended. The ones who would be are the ones who offended us, and they aren’t here (except that I don’t doubt that the CIA/FBI/NSA may take an occasional look).

respectfully
BJ

Yes, ok, I’m a Mac user with Firefox installed for wireless; so don’t flame me yet!

I’ve grown up around open source, even my kids use open office on the PC; if a 12 year old can use the interface, it can’t be that hard, can it? Ok, their Dad was/is a unix geek, but that’s not so unusual these days, there’s a lot of second generation unix-kids around, they just don’t always know that the software they’ve been using is open source. My kids just know that Mozilla Firefox works on their PC when the other one doesn’t, ditto OpenOffice for wp; I’ve resisted getting any “Microsoft for Mac” product, and so far, it isn’t hurting me in the least.

Victoria University in Wellington, which was historically a unix site, has just been going through a big upgrade to linux systems; while getting my laptop configured to work on the Student Computing Service network, I had several of the smart young things compliment me on my choice of Mac over anything else available; most of the post-grad SCS geeks had their own iBook or Powerbook, and raved about Tiger, Mac OSX. They certainly have helped to bring me up to speed on the best functionality of my new workbench.

I’m not going to get into a rehash of the old “Steve Jobs is on the devil’s left hand, Bill Gates is on his right” argument; yes, there are many great open source products, and I’m a user, not a coder, so I evaluate things by how easy & reliable they are to work with;
Ubuntu I have seen, but not experienced first hand, although I’m reliably informed that it’s excellent. My choice of Mac platform was mostly about virus resistance, as it’s an issue which has crippled my elderly pc, which the kids rely on for games, msn, etc ( oh and homework)

What’s going to drag the PC software developers into the future will be the behaviour of big government sites. While the US military has proprietary software contracts tied up, that other alllied defence forces must integrate
with, there will be no complete government rollover to one source; although Fujitsu and Sun have still got a pretty good hold on the short & curlies where it counts here in NZ (to the best of my knowledge).
IBM and Microsoft will be positioned as advantageously as they can manage, but it always pays to remember that ARPANET was the originator of the www; and the US Defence forces net is still the primary arbiter of hardware & software issues, simply because of the incredible investment in R & D infrastructure that they support through defence contracts.
Iraq is merely a plug’n'play developement environment to some of those people.

OK, I’ll get off here before I offend any more americans (it’s not your nationality I dislike, just your military-industrial complex. Oh, and McD’s)
or the serious coders amongst you. katie

One of the main reasons is that it is - well - Open Source. The KhmerOS team have created Khmer versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and KDE. This software will find their way into the source tree and will be included in many Linux distributions. It is likely a branded KhmerOS distribution will be available before long.

In contrast, the KhmerOS team have written software to enable Khmer keyboards and typefaces on Microsoft XP Service pack 2. However, a Khmer version of Windows Vista will not be available, and enabling Khmer language will require a seperate download. We need to ask Microsoft to include it and … well they don’t want to and there is nothing we can do about it.

Our Library Management System - a closed source proprietory product - will be difficult if not impossible to convert into Khmer. We will need to ask the vendor to support Khmer. Watch this space.

We cannot modify the software to work with other software - such as the Open Source Digital Library software we are evaluating. Instead we will need to buy the vendor’s product. The Digital Library software is developed in New Zealand.

This software - which is in use in places like MIT - was donatated, but we will probably buy an Open Source but not free package from India because we *can* modify it. We can make it work with whatever other software we decide to use.

*That* is benefit of Open Source software. It is built with Open Standards and published API’s. It saves data in open, published formats. It can be taken and manipulated in any way you see fit. You can make an install CD with custom scripts which will install and configure a complete system for a specific purpose. For us it will be for small librariesWe are moving most of our Library systems over to OpenSource software - and it has nothing to with cost. Software costs about $US2 per CD for whatever is available. A DVD with every MS OS ever released is about $10

One of the main reasons is that it is - well - Open Source. The KhmerOS team have created Khmer versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and KDE. This software will find their way into the source tree and will be included in many Linux distributions. It is likely a branded KhmerOS distribution will be available before long.

In contrast, the KhmerOS team have written software to enable Khmer keyboards and typefaces on Microsoft XP Service pack 2. However, a Khmer version of Windows Vista will not be available, and enabling Khmer language will require a seperate download. We need to ask Microsoft to include it and … well they don’t want to and there is nothing we can do about it.

Our Library Management System - a closed source proprietory product - will be difficult if not impossible to convert into Khmer. We will need to ask the vendor to support Khmer.

Watch this space.

We cannot modify the software to work with other software - such as the Open Source Digital Library software we are evaluating. Instead we would need to buy the vendor’s product.

This software - which is in use in places like MIT - was donatated, but we will probably buy an Open Source but not free package from India because we *can* modify it. We can make it work with whatever other software we decide to use.

*That* is benefit of Open Source software. It is built with Open Standards and published API’s. It saves data in open, published formats. It can be taken and manipulated in any way you see fit. You can copy a CD with custom scripts which will install and configure a complete system for a specific purpose. For us it will be for small libraries.

Try doing that with closed source software.

Don
Hun Sen Library
Phnom Penh .

When someone sends me something with a VBA add-in it is USUALLY an attempt to take my machine away from me. It isn’t necessary for ANYTHING, as there are other NON-proprietary ways to do those things that may be less convenient but which leave your machine more secure because there is no automagical execution of code embedded in anything.

That’s really the issue, the trade-off if you will, between people and apps that grab a VBA solution to whatever problem they encounter and the ones who write to the formal DB API in whatever language they happen to like.

I’ve never seen well written or necessary VBA code. Ever. In 25 years of SW Engineering. It is CONVENIENT, and quick, but I also have never had a machine succumb to a virus or exploit of any kind.

The major issue is the trade between security and convenience. MS has made it clear where they stand on this and the business community that backs them is several billion dollars poorer for that convenience. Is it several billion dollars better off because of that convenience? I personally think not… but you can make the case that the convenience of VBA has saved them $$$ in SW Engineering time… maybe.

The minor issue is the fact that MS provides this tool on top of an OS that has a monolithic security model. Basically any code that allows an exploit into an MS system potentially allows control of the entire system. I reckon MS can fix it in time, they HAVE been working hard at it (credit where due) but it is inherently difficult to deal with a situation where the browser and the mail client can allow exploits that actually compromise system ownership. On a linux system and the very worst that can happen in an exploit is to mess up my browser and MAYBE my local files. Monoliths make for convenient interconnections between programs, but they also make for convenient exploit propagation.

Me, I don’t like Microstuffed. I haven’t liked them since before Windows was a gleam in little Billy’s eye. Their code has been consistently second-rate (DR-DOS and CPM-86 and their compilers were better then) , now I can turn to the open SW and get most of what I lost when MS killed Wordperfect. Which was better than Office right up until it was sold up the river… (you can check the reviews, that’s a VERY consistent finding).

So when someone in government goes gaa-gaa over the latest $500 MS product that I can replace for free with an open SW equivalent, I have to wonder what they’ve been smoking.

Have you even TRIED eclipse?

Help is on your man page and on the web. I have never found it wanting.

Tools are free or you CAN pay for better ones. I really don’t see what you’re griping about since all this stuff is THERE.

The only thing you could possibly have difficulty doing is opening an Excel spreadsheet with the OpenOffice Calc when the spreadsheet uses VBA for its interface to something ELSE or uses a proprietary macro. OOCalc has its own macro tools.

… and I am talking about a Linux desktop, no MS software at all… and it was easy to install and use. Dead easy. Easier than reinstalling Windows from the rescue disk.

So I don’t know what other apps you think can’t be had. I rather tend to think that you have been. ( had that is)

respectfully
BJ

Then look around at commercial apps which link Excel to their databases. Via add-ins. Count ‘em. From my own experience in Govt systems, they’re crawling with them. Document management systems use them. Accounting - bigtime. Then ask where the support nightmares are. Not in this stuff. It just works.

As for OSS desktop apps: where’s the equivalent? Where are the tools? the object models? the code fragments? the IDE’s? the help libraries?

Now: answer the original question: how do I do this in OSS again?

Two points:
a) Yes, MS does integration well with other MS products. At the cost of limited backwards compatibility, and poor integration with anyone else’s products (though various anti-monopoly regulators keep pushing them on that).

b) The “who you gonna call” issue is not nearly as bad now as it was 3 or 5 years ago. If you want a support contract for linux, there are a variety of providers who offer that. Likewise for JBoss, OpenOffice, etc. Yes, it’s companies like IBM, Novell and Sun doing it. So? What’s the problem with that? The point of OSS is not to undo capitalism: it’s to avoid monopolistic control.

c) WTF are we talking about the desktop and MS Office dbase queries from excel for? The vast majority of govt dept work is big enterprise computing systems. I’ve built this shite: you do NOT write a 4-liner VBA query to access an enterprise dbase, not without a project team jumping up and down on you afterwards and your manager calling you in for a little chat. That’s where OSS is needed (and, actually, is often used): the big, meaty systems that calculate electoral votes, figure out how much ACC levy you owe, etc.

‘Who ya gonna call’ was me (and prior to me - noone). I was not always available, and by the time I left we had 5 people where there was one before (there was just too much work), supporting 5 hacks. We were responsible for many of the hacks ourselves since VBA apps are pretty much always very hacky. So far as I know from reports from ozzie, these reams of unowned not-understood poorly performing playthings are a major thorn in the company’s side.

I think the barrier to OSS is not anything to do with the quality of either product, and everything to do with inertia, and conversion costs, which can be substantial.

There is absolutely no equivalent to VBA, which works, unaltered, everywhere in MS Office, for tasks such as using Excel as a viewer of accounting data.

OSS also suffers from the ‘who ya gonna call?’ problem, and at the server level this has only been solved, as your posts suggest, by being folded under the wing of a long established company (who, BTW, had it’s own proprietary OS and have basically abandoned it…).

Such OSS desktop apps as do exist are essentially free-riding on the standards, protocols and conventions long established in the Unix, Apple and MS universes.

And let’s not forget that Linux is rewrite #666 of Unix, the creation of that well-known open source foundation member, Bell Labs.

So when I need to populate a spreadsheet with a recordset from a SQL database in MS Office, I write four lines of VBA. How do I do that in OpenOffice again?