Open Software and Libre Office

A couple of Open-y related things:

Tim Bray on OSCON 2013

On the age thing, I bet if you drew a graph of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and older, the 40s & 50s bars would be highest, but it’d be reasonably flat. One person I was talking to raised an explicit concern that we’re not replacing ourselves and are in danger of aging away.

There’s something in that; the first generation of OSS loudmouths is still by and large active, and quite a few of them, er us, end up on the stage at OSCON year after year. I’m not convinced though; there were plenty of fresh faces among the grizzled ones.

If the young people are not so prevalent (and that's not certain) is it a good or bad? Generally it would be bad, but are we approaching a solved problem? Not sure.

I also saw this from Michael Meeks:

Karl Fogel's experience http://t.co/E2ABIl1Kwi with LibreOffice is encouraging :-)
— Michael Meeks (@michael_meeks) July 29, 2013

So I followed links and saw that LibreOffice is up to 4.1 now. A few years ago I had the intention of making suggestions to improve the Calc software so that it was more like Excel. I was particularly interested in the AutoFilter function, which fell short of what Excel was offering at the time. I can't remember the details, but I remember it requiring quite a lot of time to clearly specify what was needed, when all I wanted to say was "make AutoFilter work like it does on Excel". So I didn't make any suggestions. Since then Office 2007 and later versions have come out and the autofilter function has changed again. I'm pleased to say though that with version 4.1 Autofilter seems to have caught up with Excel 2007 at least.

On the downside though, the database ("Base") is not an Access killer yet. It does offer four different programming languages though.

I opened a document I have been recently working on and was pleased to see that the column layout was preserved well, which has been a problem in the past. It also had photos which were rotated and had dropped shadows (yes, I know, so 2010) and they were not rotated in Writer and the shadow was solid black.

In case it seems like I've got a bit of a downer on Open Source and LibreOffice in particular, let me say I'm very pleased with the way it (a version of OpenOffice before the split in fact) enabled me to create a good report writing setup which took in XML and produced RTF at the end. Also, the Graphite support means that Bibles can be worked on in many complex scripts. Also, for those who can't afford a full legal copy of Office, it's a good alternative.

Mission Information

I met someone at lunchtime today who told me about a couple of projects of interest to those involved in missions and information:

The Harvest Information System is a cooperative effort of several organizations who share a desire to facilitate the task of taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the peoples of the world. HIS assists mission sending groups in fulfilling their portion of the task, by improving the sharing of information through the standardizing of categories and codes.

It has a rather bizarrely arranged website, which for some pages requires you to download .mht files, a Microsoft archived web page format file. However anything that helps missions work together better is a good thing in my book.

The second project is Open Petra. This is a project arising out of OM's need to develop a system to manage their office information. There's an interesting history on their website including an abortive attempt to use Delphi. They've since started work on an open source solution they hope will be of use to other non-profit organisations.Something worth watching.

Linux Language software development

While I'm in Calgary I took the opportunity to visit the SIL team doing language software development for Linux. I got my first look at an OLPC running Bibledit. This has great potential for translation teams, as they don't need expensive laptops to get work done. In fact part of the reason for putting effort into Linux development is because you don't have to pay the overhead of getting legal copies of Windows and the other tools for the work (Office, Publisher, Photoshop). They're a nice bunch and they've even been so kind as to release some of their work which has general use - a library to help getting COM based Windows software to work under Linux.

Popular Ubuntu packages

I posted a series of questions on an internal open source mailing list about evaluating open source software. One of the responses mentioned a site with statistics on Ubuntu package popularity. Interesting...

ODBC aaargh!

I came across an ODBC error:

PHP Warning: odbc_exec(): SQL error: [unixODBC][Driver Manager]Driver
does not support this function, SQL state IM001 in SQLSetStmtOption

If you're googling looking for the solution, like I did, and you came here, the best I can say is that SQLSetStmtOption appears to be deprecated. So the php/odbc code is calling something the driver doesn't support.

Even after upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5, and MySql4 to 5, it still occurs. The most frustrating thing is that I haven't found out a way of finding which version of ODBC is being used in the php/odbc component/rpm/package thingy.

Any ideas?

Finding volunteers to write code

I've been pondering how to find volunteers to work on a project I'm looking after. I figured that there are thousands of people writing open source code (incidentally, if you find any good surveys or something that says what sort of people do that, I'd be interested - what are their day jobs? how much time to they spend? what's their motivation?) and as this project is for Bible Translation I'd look for some Christian open source coders. After a bit of googling I came across the Christian Open Development Network which has LightSys behind it, whom I've come across before. I also found Emptycrate.com, "Bringing Together the Christian Open Source Community".

Both sites have an air of abandonment about them, although the astute owners of these sites might come across this blog entry and beg to differ. Of course the coders don't have to be Christians, but they do have to be motivated to do the work.

Open Office "web" layout

Here's a lesson I learned the hard way: when you change to "web" layout in Open Office it doesn't just view it in a different way, it does strange things to your tables.

Spikesource is an interesting company. They do thousands of tests on open source software and sell you "stacks" of pretested software. Their supported platforms are Fedora, Red Hat and Suse Linux. So you get the features of open source software, and the comforting thought of commercial support.

I came across this with the announcement that SugarCRM are reselling their stuff.

tags: opensource