Sun-Microsoft Pact Excludes OpenOffice Users
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Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have agreed not to sue each other or their customers for patent infringements, but the pact announced in April specifically states that the protection does not apply
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Facing growing competition from open source software providers, Microsoft has decided to allow governments and international organizations access to source code for its Office 2003 productivity suite.
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A panel of software experts unexpectedly rebuffed Microsoftâs bid to have its open document format, Office Open XML, recognized as an international standard.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has failed in its attempt to have its Office Open XML document format fast-tracked straight to the status of an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization. The proposal must now be revised to take into account the negative comments made during the voting process. Microsoft expects that a second vote early next year will result in approval, it said Tuesday. A proposal must pass two voting hurdles in order to be approved as an ISO standard: it must win the support of two-thirds of voting national standards bodies that participated in work on the proposal, known as P-members, and also of three-quarters of all voting members. OOXML failed on both counts, according to figures provided by Microsoft, and by other sources with knowledge of the voting process. ISO has not yet officially announced the results. Microsoft could miss out on revenue from the lucrative government market if OOXML is also rejected next year. Some governments, worried that the need for access to electronic archives held in proprietary formats leaves them hostage to their software vendor, have mandated the use of document formats that comply with open international standards. Others are considering such a move, which could put Microsoft at a double disadvantage to open source products such as OpenOffice.org, which not only store files natively in the standardized Open Document Format, but are free.
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After a few years of flirting with the idea of developing its own suite of applications, perhaps under the Lotus banner, that support the OASIS OpenDocument format, IBM has decided to join Sun Microsystems in the development of OpenOffice.org, the principal open source ODF applications suite.
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British schools should not upgrade to Microsoft's Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) said in a report on the software. It also supported use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) for storing files.
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Interested in trying out the free OpenOffice.org 2.0 office suite without having to install it on your computer?Now's your chance.That option became possible Tuesday when OpenOffice.org and online application vendor Ulteo launched a beta project that hosts OpenOffice.org 2.0 on Ulteo's Online Desktop infrastructure, giving users online access to the applications and up to 1GB of related data storage.In an announcement, the two groups said the project will be open to 15,000 beta users who will be able to access the applications using a Web browser on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.Beta users will also have access to the project's instant collaboration features, which will allow participants to invite other users to join them online in working on a document together in real time. Users can send invitations to others via e-mail, allowing access to documents in either read-only or full edit mode through a clickable link in the message."Now everyone can use OpenOffice.org from any connected PC, anytime, anywhere," Florian Effenberger, marketing project co-lead of OpenOffice.org, said in a statement. "You even can work together on documents online and collaborate with others. This especially is an interesting option for trainers and workgroups.""Ulteo is very proud to deliver OpenOffice.org to the community in a new, useful and exciting way: online and designed for collaboration," Thierry Koehrlen, CEO of Ulteo, said in a statement. "We expect that it will ... spread OpenOffice.org to even more users now that it is simpler than ever to try and? use it in a couple of clicks."Users can register for the beta program at Ulteo's Web site.
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Office for Mac 2008 incorrectly assigns ownership of some files, Microsoft has confirmed, creating a potential security problem for businesses installing the new application suite.Joel Bruner, a Chicago-based Mac consultant, was the first to notice the ownership snafu. "[Microsoft] moved to Apple's Package Maker (.pkg) installer files, good news for the enterprise, [but] unfortunately, they've created all the packages to install most all of the files with the owner set to 502."In a shop where employees run with limited privileges -- a practice very common in an enterprise -- and IT is the only user with full administrative rights, Office 2008's ownership assignment means that a user who wasn't supposed to have complete control over those files actually does. In other words, whomever is assigned user ID 502 has full read/write access to Office's files."So let's say, Mr. IT installs this on a user's machine where the first user is the admin[istrator] (501) and the standard user is Joe User (502)," said Bruner in a post to his blog on Monday. "Well, when after all's installed, it will give Joe User (502) ownership of these folders and their installed contents:/Library/Automator/ (if it doesn't exist already) /Library/Fonts/Microsoft /Library/Application Support/Microsoft /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008"The screw-up could present a corporate security problem, at least internally, said Bruner, if that Mac's second, standard user -- user 502 -- decides to make changes to the folders and files by, say, deleting some or moving others.A Microsoft developer left a comment at Bruner's blog confirming that the company knows about the problem. "The MacBU (Mac Business Unit) is aware of this issue," said Erik Schwiebert, a software design lead in the group.Microsoft, however, did not immediately respond to queries about how it intends to correct the problem and what users can do in the meantime.Other commenters at Bruner's blog hesitated to blame only Microsoft, however. "The truth is that this is a long-standing flaw in Apple's Installer," argued someone identified as Not Required. "Maybe Microsoft should have known better, but maybe Apple should also have improved their installer years ago. Apple clearly hasn't cared enough about smaller developers to make a fix, so hopefully Microsoft has a high enough profile that something finally gets done."In a follow-up post also on Monday, Bruner added that all the Office for Mac 2008 files owned by user 502 are also erroneously set as executable. "Now tell me does '/Microsoft Office 2008/Read Me.html' need to be executable for you to look at it?" asked Bruner. "Tick, tick, tick, *ding*! No. It does not."
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With automatic download of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) enormous SP2 security patch to the Windows XP operating system set to begin, the industry still waits to understand its ramifications. Home users that have their preferences set to receive operating-system updates as they are made available by Microsoft may be surprised to learn that some of the software they already run on their systems could be disabled by SP2 or may run very differently.
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Sun has released the final version of its Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office, designed to allow the ODF standard to better compete with Microsoft&#39;s dominant Office formats.
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InfoWorld - Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.
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Microsoft signed a rare deal with an  open source software group on Thursday, taking a step to meet  sanctions imposed by the European Commission in 2004 for  antitrust violations.
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A RED HAT vice president has slammed Sun for refusing to open source its Java code and hanging on like grim death to its patents. The bone of contention is the April agreement between Sun and Microsoft.
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Redmond's 'open' standards approved Massachusetts is back on the Microsoft bandwagon. Nearly two years ago, the US state unveiled a policy that required its agencies to abandon Microsoft's Office applications in favor of apps that use "open" standards, such as the OpenDocument format (ODF).â¦
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Open source developers who contribute to OpenOffice should stop donating their code to Sun Microsystems, open source advocate Bruce Perens has urged.
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TechWeb - OpenSuse 10.2 includes the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, the Firefox 2.0 Web browser, Beagle desktop search, GAIM instant messaging client, multimedia tools, and graphical software.
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(InfoWorld) - People apparently are already tuning in to IBM's Symphony. The company reported Wednesday thatÂ its free rival to Microsoft's Office suiteÂ was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release. "To be honest, we were surprised at the speed with which people jumped on this," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of both IBM Collaboration and Lotus Software, in an interview Wednesday. To keep up with the number of people interested in downloading Symphony, IBM tripled the number of download servers it had for the suite of productivity applications in the first few days of its release, he said. At first, users had to sign up for an IBM ID and password and enter identity information to download the first beta of Symphony, a free suite of office productivity applications made available last Tuesday, but users complained that this process was "too onerous," Rhodin said. IBM tweaked the process so now all people need to get Symphony is a valid e-mail address. Because of this, it's been hard to track whether it's consumers or businesses that are downloading Symphony, he said. But IBM is less interested in who is using the software than in getting it into as many hands as possible, Rhodin said. Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse framework and is meant not only to give consumers and businesses an alternative to Microsoft Office, but also to promote the use of ODF (Open Document for XML), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). "The end goal here is the proliferation of the open standard," Rhodin said. Microsoft Office 2007, which has more than 90 percent market share, does not natively support ODF and instead uses the company'sÂ OOXML (Open XML) format, which failed to pass a recent ISO vote for standardization. IBM and ODF supporters like Sun and Google have been waging a public battle against Microsoft to promote their interest in ODF, on which all three companies have based productivity applications. The Microsoft competitors are hoping that because ODF is a standard and Office does not support it, more users will begin purchasing ODF-friendly software, thus giving competing players more of a chance against Microsoft's dominance in the productivity-application market. Symphony joins Sun's for-fee version of StarOffice as the latest software suite based on OpenOffice.org code to go up against Microsoft Office. So far, neither the free nor for-fee versions of OpenOffice.org have achieved any real success in cutting into Office's market share or revenue. IBM only recently joined the OpenOffice.org communityÂ after holding off for many years, and Rhodin said Symphony is not meant to be a slight against the suite that is freely available from that organization. But IBM is clearly interested in being more successful than its rivals in presenting a true alternative to Office as a way to promote ODF. "This isn't just another OpenOffice suite," he said. "We have made investments in OpenOffice.org to create an enterprise experience around it." As a part of this, IBM based Symphony on the Eclipse open-source development framework so it would be easy for third-party ISVs to build plug-in applications for the suite much like third parties have built applications for Office. In fact, one company in Brazil, Totvs, is already building an ERP application on Symphony, he said. And before Symphony was released as a stand-alone product,Â IBM had already included it in Lotus Notes 8, the latest version of its collaboration software, another arena in which it is tweaking its strategy to battle with Microsoft. Office is playing an increasingly important role for Microsoft in this market as the company hopes to leverage the ubiquity of Office among business users by making its applications the front-end interface for worker collaboration. So far, Symphony is getting decent reviews among users, and analysts think IBM, because of its successful software history, has a better chance than others at giving Microsoft Office some real competition. "IBM is the 800-pound gorilla in enterprise software, and Microsoft's main rival for information worker productivity tools," wrote IDC analyst Melissa Webster in a research report published Wednesday. "And Symphony addresses the concerns that potential OpenOffice.org users might have had in regard to using open-source software: Symphony is backed by the IBM brand and is provided as a commercially developed and supported product suite." IBM plans to release a second beta of Symphony in the next six to eight weeks with a general availability release of the software to come early next year, Rhodin said. At that time, IBM will offer enterprise support for the suite for a fee, though he acknowledged that IBM doesn't really expect to sell much of that support and is only providing it so enterprises will feel more comfortable implementing Symphony.