KOffice Developers Reply to Yates

danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."

Open FUD

[gwait]

Microsoft spreads Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, what a shocker!

Why even bother with word processors?

[CyricZ]

Why even bother with word processors these days when LaTeX is more than capable of the vast majority of document typesetting needs? It does take a bit longer to learn that Word, but everyone I know who has learned it has become far more efficient and can produce documents that are far more professional.

Allow me to say ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is ridiculous. They are trying to establish a monopoly on the word processor market, even enforcing a standard upon people so they are restricted to their products. Heed my words, and use Microsoft Word instead.

Alan Yates.

invitation to mailing lists.

[Janek Kozicki]

Dear Mr Yates,
[...]
You can also write to the KOffice mailing list and ask your questions there.

I can't wait to see his flames on the mailing list!

eh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yates ????? Shouldn't that be Gates ? :)))

When you go to PR training...

[Osrin]

... one of the first things that they teach you is that if somebody calls you an idiot, then duck the response. Don't stand up and loudly proclaim that you're not an idiot, you'll make a headline out of it.

KOffice, or anybody else for that matter would probably have better served their cause by not responding at all to this.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[ettlz]

LaTeX is more than capable of the vast majority of document typesetting needs

That's an understatement — TeX is Turing-complete.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[AceJohnny]

Remember that a majority of office workers (was it 67%?) that use office suites get mixed up between kilobytes and megabytes. They find it confusing...

And you would ask them to use LaTeX?

Re:Word processing != Typesetting

[PeterBrett]

Um, except gedit/wordpad don't offer tables, formulas, styles, graphics, or fields pulled from a database. Most geeks on /. work in technical environments where the bulk of work is either code or networks or research.

Well, the solution's obvious: they should be using Emacs! It supports all of the above features, runs on many platforms, and it's fast and has a small memory footprint too!

Re:Hi. Here. Us, too... :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you live in an entirely different U.S. than I do, since making excuses is basically the norm at every level of business. That and selling deficiencies are benefits.

Re:Hi. Here. Us, too... :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate America?