Cooperation in the implementation of LibreOffice

users
#1

Normally I don't reply to such blatant FUD but I have a lot of free time
today and I'm bored.

Hello, my name is Alexander , at the moment I am a programmer in OGAOU SPO " Belgorod College of industry and services " , country: Russia , city of Belgorod.

I want to introduce into commercial operation institution package LibreOffice as an alternative package of MS Office, in order to move to the format ODF, which in our country is a national fixed state standard ( ISO / IEC 26300-2010 . Came into force on June 1, 2011 ) . However , implementation of this project gives me concerns about the advisability of this step for the following reasons :

What does your country's implementation of ODF have to do with open
source software?

I know in many business organizations and educational institutions was an attempt to introduce LibreOffice and OpenOffice, but they all failed. Even where people were friendly to the use of these products later returned to the MS Office package due to the low quality software LibreOffice and OpenOffice ( because of the continuing occurrence of bugs and endless expectations of new releases in which errors have not been corrected ), the appearance artifacts for viewing and printing of documents created in MS Office and other non- ODF (Open Document Format). In general, the situation is that there is a standard but actually exists only on paper , in addition to MS Office 2013 support is implemented ODF, which makes it even more attractive to use.

The above is a symptom of lazy or incompetent IT departments that don't
or can't learn to use the software.

In my opinion , free software does not justify its poor quality. Many IT professionals and PC users have an opinion about LibreOffice and OpenOffice as a " shitty " software, which can not be used in the workplace.

You're right, that's *your* opinion.

How do you account for the fact that open source software is in worldwide use every day in
production environments. Just few of the many cites:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/open-source-what-you-should-learn-french-461
http://opensource.com/government/12/11/france-latest-fully-embrace-open-source
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-272299.html

In contrast to system administrators trying to implement packages LibreOffice or OpenOffice, I am a professional programmer and familiar with the process of software development. In my opinion the industrial application package LibreOffice is possible, but subject to personal contact with the immediate developers package their interest in creating a quality product and responsiveness to the comments , suggestions for improvement and immediate response on the error of the package , as well as providing operational fixes without having to wait for the official release. I believe that developers care about their product and frankly, I know that in the case to contact technical support patches can wait for years

That's a feature of some closed source software, notably Microsoft. You
can email them with your concerns until you're blue in the face and they
will produce an update months later if then. Open source developers will
cure problems usually in a few days.

and a direct appeal to the developer can take it to cure is not more than 15 minutes .

You must think that developers have nothing to do but wait for you to
contact them. They're not on your payroll. 15 minutes is laughable
except for isolated instances, not in general. Also, as a programmer, as
you claim to be, you should know a 15 minute fix to a problem can
introduce more bugs than it cures.

My idea is to introduce a distinctive package LibreOffice is in close interaction directly with the developers and their interest in this cooperation .

What in the hell does the above sentence mean?

As a result of successful implementation , the package will have the right to life

What does "the right to life" mean?

and begin to be implemented in other educational institutions of Russia ( as exists between educational institutions experience exchange program , usually a methodological associations ) , as well information about the successful implementation of the same will go to the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation and respectively wave on other ministries. This collaboration will raise the quality of software , as it will be used in the work (in the " battle" conditions and not on the bench) .

Waiting for your reply on this proposal and look forward to working ...

Don't hold your breath waiting.

What tells me you're a troll is the fact that you don't know what you're
talking about. If you actually are a programmer you would know better.
Also you're using a broken mailer that puts long passages on one line
and makes inline replies very difficult.

#2

Hi :slight_smile:
I don't think it's good policy to be rude to trolls. One of the
things they are aiming for is to make the list seem unfriendly and
then be able to quote those examples out-of-context.

I agree with most of the points but just feel they could have been
explained less antagonistically. On the other hand it was good fun to
read and made me chortle a bit! :slight_smile:

Wrt formats i wasn't sure whether;
1. we were getting the blame for not being able to correctly read
proprietary implementations of formats where the specs are unavailable
or
2. we were getting the blame for MS failing to implement ISO
standards correctly where the specs are easily available

In either case it seems the fault of MS, rather than us, so maybe do
try posting a bug-report where-ever you are getting 15min responses
from! If MS could implement their own spec correctly (or the one we
use, or both) then it really might make interoperability a reality.
Then almost no-one would ever need to buy any new versions of MS
Office because even really old versions did everything almost all of
us need and tons more too.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
No worries! It was good to hear from you and also good to get a
chuckle on a day which is otherwise quite depressing or annoying for a
lot of people. Plus, i had been taking the initial post waaaay too
seriously before you pointed out 'the obvious'.

Then, to cheer myself up further, i looked for "BolgenOS". Apparently
the story has moved on.

It started years ago with a Russian school-kid forking Ubuntu and
replacing all the logos with his own one, allegedly including for 3rd
party apps such as Firefox (although i can't quite believe that bit
and you'll see why). When he presented it to his IT Tutor as "all his
own work" (which i also have trouble believing but lets not mess-up
the story!) the tutor really believed the kid had really knocked
Microsquish for six. The national news covered the story with a
mini-documentary about how this kid had apparently knocked-up
something that rivalled MS Windows and further exaggerated it that
he'd done it over a couple weeks holiday, or maybe just a weekend!
Then the national school board 'looked into it' and got so excited
about it that they were allegedly keen to roll it out across all
schools across the nation after first test-driving it in a few
districts.

Apparently BolgenOS continues but now admits to being a fork and has
put the relevant logos back. There are some claims that the community
has reached around 10 million people but having looked at the site i
find that hard to believe. The main thing is that it seems to still
be supported and has followers.

When my mum went to college she was set an assignment to write a short
ditty for music classes. Suddenly a short refrain popped into her
head that she couldn't recognise it from anywhere so she wrote it down
quickly and handed it in and got a "B +" for it. Later the teacher
played it and my mum was shocked to hear it was Beethoven's 5th, well
maybe not that one as it's the number 1 most easily recognisable piece
and even says it's own name over and over again in the music, but
something along those lines. My mum went a bit red but none of the
other music students recognised it and neither did the teacher!!! The
bit i find most amusing is that the music teacher thought Beethoven
(or whoever) was only worthy of a B+.

Obviously a LOT of people were upset about the BolgenOS story but for
me the most upsetting part was that
1. an IT Tutor had no idea about non-MS OSes. Even if he/she was a
more generic science teacher i'd have hoped for a little less
ignorance! That national news put the work into filming a
mini-documentary but failed to do any kind of research into trying to
find similar examples is no surprise. There ARE a lot of good journos
out there but sensationalism seems more profitable most of the time.
2. That the school-boards might flee back to MS to avoid the
embarrassment rather than latch onto the stronger OSes that have
better support-structures.

Of course the Russian and other space-programmes are largely built on
unix and unix-based platforms, certainly for their command&control
critical systems. Amusingly on the space station they occasionally
have to send up someone to fix all the astronaughts/cosmonaughts
laptops and free them from viruses, malware etc. Apparently at least
once all the laptops went down due to malware. However none of the
command&control systems have needed as much as a reboot in all the
decades they have been up there. There was some talk of the laptops
going over to Linux too but i dunno if it ever happened.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
No worries! It was good to hear from you and also good to get a
chuckle on a day which is otherwise quite depressing or annoying for a
lot of people. Plus, i had been taking the initial post waaaay too
seriously before you pointed out 'the obvious'.

No problem. Actually, I like to see stuff like this occasionally. It
breaks up the monotony.

       .......snip......

Obviously a LOT of people were upset about the BolgenOS story but for
me the most upsetting part was that
1. an IT Tutor had no idea about non-MS OSes. Even if he/she was a
more generic science teacher i'd have hoped for a little less
ignorance!

That's common in the school systems. There's a story circulating about a
principal who reamed some kid for using linux, telling him that "that's a
hacker's OS". Yeah, it makes me livid too.

       .......snip.......

Take care.

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
Ahh, i love to see these urban myths grow.

That one was an Australian school teacher, not a principle. The kid
then introduced her to the owner of [either a local charity or a
cyber-cafe (i forget which)] who was able to help the teacher become
better informed. Unfortunately the teacher then started receiving
very unpleasant emails from quite a lot of people who were not quite
up-to-speed and hadn't realised she had completely turned around so
quickly. The cafe-owner stood up for her and got a few of us, in
different forums, to calm things down as quickly as possible. It was
quite turbulent time emotionally, with a lot of us suddenly being
ashamed even for fairly innocuous posts but then quite chuffed at
playing a part in sorting it out. I got the impression that the
charity worker was then encouraged to run a computing club in the
school. I think the school considered moving to linux although that
might have been another place. So, there were a lot of good outcomes.

Actually, it seems that what the teacher had initially said was not so
much a reprimand rather it was more of a wise warning, along the lines
of "there's no such thing as a free lunch". In OpenSource a lot of
people end up volunteering some of their time to help others or to
help develop the software but many of us see that as an additional
benefit of the OpenSource world.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

.......snip......

Wow! Never realized it was an urban legend....however, it's only that if
it *never* happened. Any info on that?

#7

Hi :slight_smile:
Sorry! I've been a total moron with that and other recent posts
haven't i :frowning: Sorry about that!
Apols and regards from
Tom :slight_smile: