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Open Source Office Applications: Flippant Remarks about AbiWord 2.014

I am a Microsoft guy for historical and practical reasons---not for ideological reasons. When some Oracle guy has a smart remark, I say, Hey, smarty slacks, back in the early 1990s when I was learning SQL I could not walk into an Office Depot and pick up a $99 Oracle database (with that special, software-laundering, anti-trusting "competitive upgrade" price). But I could get my hands on Microsoft products and this got me hooked---the MS Borg assimilated another victim.

Now that my Office Depot days are over, here comes MSDN Universal Subscriptions via my W2 labors---so now I'm on the harder stuff and from my W2 point of view, I am getting Microsoft software "for free." So why would I care to write about AbiWord, this Open Source fledgling?

Well, Microsoft employees can console themselves by considering my flippant remarks a minority opinion (in every sense of the term) but I don't think I am suffering from a terminal case of brown-eyed myopia when I say that MS Office is a bloated nebula of COM objects---composed of balls of strange orange gas and truly stellar objects. The gassy part of MS Office is really starting to stink when I think of my data as cross-platform XML data sets---and I am writing this sentence being fully aware of InfoPath and the XML features in Word 2003. So when I hear that AbiWord can read and write XHTML, I sit up and take notice. Unfortunately, these are the first few AbiWord bullets flying past my head:

The main point of this rant is that I am completely unaware of a tool that is as convenient as a Word processor but it also is a built for rich data interchange. With MS InfoPath the price of entry is having a definite schema in mind. With MS Word 2003 you don't need to have a definite schema to get started (you can add that later), but the formatting of your document effectively---by default---belongs to Microsoft. Out of the box, Microsoft Word 2003 will allow you to interchange your raw text data with a custom schema but it will not let you interchange your formatting information with a custom schema---and I say this with the letters WORDML dancing in my head. I suppose you can "schema-tize" your formatting but the temptation to write your own code is not far away (and I am well beyond tempted). This limitation is unacceptable and as long as Microsoft pays little or no attention to this "minority problem" I will keep my brown eyes on tools like AbiWord.

mod date: 2005-01-13T02:03:43.000Z