[wplug] Book published using Open Source software

[Bryan J. Smith]

Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well that was very informative.

Oh, that just "scratches the surface."

Most people don't know that Boeing was a founding sponsor of
OpenOffice.org's OASIS standardization.  Among Corel, IBM, Sun,
etc..., here is "Boeing" -- not a software firm.  Why?

In 2005, I was involved with Boeing's workflow on all major,
classified/confidential R&D projects.  Boeing was still supporting
old MS Office file versions on the F-15/F-18 factory floor.  Why? 
Because engineering "broke down" years ago and _stupidly_ started
using MS Office/Word.  The documents are _not_ readable in new
versions, or just blatantly missing information.

Engineer, Law, Medicine can_not_ afford Microsoft's profit model of
what I call "BackOne" -- forcing people to upgrade every version by
not supporting older documents correctly, reusing tags, and -- as a
bonus -- preventing reverse engineering (i.e., by the time tags are
reverse engineered, they are no longer good with the new version).

That's why I wrote my 2-part "Licensing Risks, Not Revolutions"
series for SysAdmin in 2005:  
  http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0501h/  
  http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0502g/  

Nearly _all_ of my consulting work comes by first-hand recommendation
inside of my clients (not headhunters or otherwise), including
Boeing.  ;)

> The bit about Scribus working on Mac too (well, and "what the
> heck's this Scribus thing that's always being mentioned")
> just got me started on downloading it here at work. 

Both LyX and Scribus leverage TrollTech's Qt, natively, and are _not_
KDE applications.

I.e., there is a difference between GTK+ and GTK+/GNOME applications,
the former will run on a variety of platforms.  Same deal with Qt
versus Qt/KDE, the former also runs on a variety of platforms.

Qt has been GPL on MacOS X (Darwin-Cocoa/Aqua) for some time now.  Qt
has only more recently been GPL on Win32 (NT-GDI/Winforms).  While
it's not LGPL, it is GPL, meaning it can be statically linked into
other GPL programs.

> We've had issues with going from this Mac to the Windows
> computer

If you ever want to hear how *BADLY* MS Office/Word is designed, talk
to a Microsoft Office for [MacOS] X developer.  They will curse out
their Windows developer counterparts on how they are utterly ignorant
of data alignment (let alone endianess).

> at the printer's and Corel Draw not reading Inkscape .svg's 
> correctly for ads,

What version of Corel Draw?  Understand early SVG implementations
were not exacting, but most, newer versions work correctly.

> so this may be what's needed.

The great thing about standardizing on OpenOffice.org (even if you
have to run it under Darwin/X11) and Scribus (nice and native Qt on
Mac ;) is that they are _fully_compatible_ across platforms. 
Microsoft and many other solutions have serious data alignment and
endianness issues -- especially cross-architecture.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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