ReHi Everybody: I have been using Oo for some years, often in non-profit environments. I use it in English, French and Spanish. I also like Lars' comments about the competitive aspect of Oo and its competitors.
Ideally the open source concept also stands for the moral principal that over-competition or under competition in any market are undesirable. Since I love language and cultural diversity, I am happy to see Oo support as many languages as possible, which makes me also think of the languages of our diversity of native North Americans. I often say to people around here: "When you live in Montreal, you don't have to spend money to get on an airplane, the whole world is at our doorstep - 50 or more languages in a day!" Culturally, it also reminds me of the reason why Gloria Estafan put out her CD "Abriendo Puertas" - as a protest against all of the petty linguistic pride (orgullo, or condescending pride) between different Spanish-speaking countries and their different dialects. The CD won a Grammy, and Kudos! When, from Canada, I think about smaller and/or less fortunate countries who have adopted Oo, and the ISO approval for the open formats, I think this is global progress. < Qu'on se le dise.> In my 4 years in Toastmasters, I have also used these 3 Languages in my speeches a number of times to make a point. I also use Oo in Linux (Fedora 12) and do a lot with Oo Draw and its CADoo add-on. Typically, I save in Open format first, then resave in the MS format, and/or as a .PDF, as many of my circle of people communicate from employers' computers where they are not free to install anything more than they are given. Since I also own a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ, for that I am forced to export to MS or .PDF, as that device uses Windows Mobile 5. Eventually I will phase that device out for a number of reasons. Sometimes when Vector graphics (such as Oo Draw are involved) I find it is better to print to a Ghostscript printer driver to get the .PDF, but generally from an .ODT, the built-in works better. Cheers, everybody! Bruce Martin. -----Original Message----- From: Lars Nooden [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: April 21, 2010 4:51 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [discuss] OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument Format On 04/20/2010 10:51 PM, James E. Lang wrote: > My first reaction while still reading this proposal was the same as > Noop's. That is because I had not read the whole proposal yet. > > Jean-Baptiste's proposal has great merit. My experience with files that > needed to be available for a Windows user but that I wanted to keep in > odf for the master copy is that I need to _remember_ to save the file > twice after each update. This is because a Save As ... operation is > considered to be equivalent to a Save operation and thus when closing > the file OOo does not prompt me to either Save or Discard my updates. > Exporting the file as .doc or .xls gets around this problem. > > I heartily support this proposal. +1 I had to think about it a long time, too. It looks to me like the idea is to ensure that it is as simple and clear as possible to keep the original as ODF. The save / save as dialogs regarding the format are also a bit unclear, but I have not thought of any better alternative to the wording we currently have. And since this is a discussion, one of the monopolies we are having problems with is the monopoly on office formats. Steering people away from ODF helps re-inforces that monopoly, making it harder to use OOo. It also increases the revenue available to our competition, because having a monopoly results (or is defined by) being able to set the prices far above the proper market value. /Lars --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
