Drew Jensen wrote:
Quick warning it's a Sunday email and I ramble a bit...
On 09/26/2010 07:46 AM, Christoph Noack wrote:
Hi everyone!
Am Samstag, den 25.09.2010, 22:21 -0600 schrieb Larry Gusaas:
On 2010/09/25 9:16 PM Harold Fuchs wrote:
Ah. OK Now I see, thanks. The icon for each type of *document* -
text, spreadsheet, presentation etc.
Yes, I agree. That's very poor and should be changed. Has someone
filed an issue? What Issue Number? -
I'll vote for it.
Issue #112141. Currently 240 votes for it. The new icons were
imposed on us by the ODF cabal and Oracle
despite protests and lack of proper community input. Despite
protests the decision has not been changed.
It seems to be a political decision beyond the control of the
developers or the community. So much for
the fiction that OOo is a community driven project.
Without being able to add something substantial at the moment; there is
also a request to the OpenOffice.org Community Council to discuss this
issue. Besides the issue, it might help to know more about the involved
parties.
In the agenda table, please scroll down to "2010-04-29#2".
The page:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council/Agenda
Bye,
Christoph
Hi Chris,
I've pretty much avoided this whole conversation, the color in icon
part of it anyway, but a good time to jump in and yes hijack this
thread perhaps.
I say hijack because, IMO, the root cause of the longevity and the
evolving tenor of this issue is not monochromatic icons. Nor is it the
absurd amount of time it's taking to all nod in agreement on a logo
and it's uses, or the broader question of Branding.
However, Branding may be the term that gets closest to the actual,
IMO, issues at play.
OpenOffice.org is FOSS - by definition then there is always the option
for members of the project to fork to another. There is in the end
nothing the parent project can do about it, short of keeping folks in
such a mind that they choose not to do so.
If however some segment of the project members do choose to do so,
there really isn't any way to stop them.
What the parent project can do is control copyrighted materials - the
branding.
Sun had, it appears, a rather liberal policy, by action perhaps more
then stated policy, when it came to who could do what with these
branding items. Which can be stated another way - they did very little
to defend their copyright claims with regards to OpenOffice.org
branding elements.
I recall that one of the first discussions I joined on an OO.o mailing
list was in regards to vendors on the internet selling download links
for OpenOffice.org binaries - pretty much a straight off scam, if
nothing else a totally un-ethical business. Time wise that was
somewhere in late 2004, early 2005. I will not make a long story out
of this point, as most reading here already know it. When however did
the owner of the project finally get around to enforcing the
copyrights - just before the Oracle buy out. Do you not think this was
Oracle insisting that Sun actually get about doing their fiduciary
responsibility with regards to the item for sale, OpenOffice.org. Of
course it was, IMO. A good thing for the common person, sure, the
driving reason for the action, less certain.
I think that of more concern to Oracle were the members of the
OpenOffice.org community already developing and supporting shallow
forks of the code. Those that used not only the code but the branding
elements also, being of most concern, yet not exclusive of those with
much different branding.
Right here I want to say one thing - there is nothing in any of that
which is inappropriate from the perspective of any organization
looking to acquire the assets of another.
<text section cut>
OpenWorld is over - Oracle Cloud Office has been revealed and is
TTBOMK a proprietary software application, built with proprietary
tools, specifically JavaFX.
The Sun folks in Hamburg and the Oracle staff had to know that if this
was to be the Oracle plan that it would test the strength of the bonds
within the OpenOffice.org community. Here I do not mean only those,
like myself, acting as individuals, but that it would stress the bonds
with the different commercial vendors and non-profit organizations
that make up the bulk of the community.
The last word, as found in the referenced Community Council minutes
above, is that some modification to the icons, for UX reason, would
begin - that this will now include the wider community, but with
limits. OK, actually that's fair enough.
I would suppose that given the covers are finally off the new Oracle
product the time to openly discuss, in detail, the future of the
current OpenOffice.org code line is also finally here. Icons included..
Best wishes to all those that read this, those I know personally and
those for whom I have not yet had the pleasure,
Drew
I could very well be wrong in this, but I think that Oracle could
without a huge amount of trouble or effort turn their own fork of OOo,
the one that Sun always sold as Star Office, (Oracle has a new name for
it IIRC) into a real competitor to MS Office. First make a substantial
change in the manner of upgrades so that an upgrade only consists of the
portion of code that is actually changed and not the entire package,
also therefore permitting you to retain your personal dictionary. (I
have been very reluctant to upgrade from my current version of OOo
(3.1.1) because I don't want to have to enter over 1000 compound words
all over again, (whoever set up the spell checker dictionary seemed to
have an aversion to compound words) and I have actually turned
AutoCorrect into a fairly powerful grammar checker, which I would loose)
I will probably upgrade when version 4.0 comes out. And add an
equivalent of MS Outlook, as well as integrating a full function
database, not just a front end, or whatever Base is properly called.
Although I just used it to set up a database of my DVD movie collection
and it seemed perfectly adequate for that. Most of the rest of the
things that people complain about as keeping them from switching from MS
Office to OOo are minor tweaks and making the Presentation module much
better. I suspect that Oracle would do well to sell several versions
of whatever it is they call their retail version of OOo, one for
consumers, one for businesses, and a third for novelists and
screenwriters and playwrights. OOo Writer is already better for this
purpose than MS Word which tends to become unstable with documents the
length of novels.
