Open Source Software now chosen for quality --NOT price!

[Frank616]

Seems that there is a change taking place in the software industry. While in the past OSS (Open Source Software) was the 'poor cousin' adopted for its low costs, the trend has changed. OSS is now being chosen because of its quality, with lack of vendor lock-in being #2.

OSS is maturing.

Why do you use OSS?

Frank.

[SteveRiley]

This is good news. But one shouldn't fall into the trap that open source is a guarantee of freedom from lock-in. OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, is mostly a mechanism for vendors to grandstand about open source while at the same time exert a high degree of lock-in. Read Lydia Leong's analysis at Gartner.

[dibl]

I've evolved to a view that "vendor lock-in" is largely a state of mind, and not a real phenomenon. In 1984-6, I was "locked in" to a Commodore 64. I don't even know what became of that computer -- it was replaced about 1987 with a Northgate MS-DOS box. I worked in a small business in the early 1990s that was "locked in" to Novell Netware for their LAN. I sold a medical office management system that ran on SCO Unix 386 in the early 1990s -- I guess those customers were "locked in" for a few years, but it's far from a long term or permanent situation. It only means that an individual or group needs to be comfortable with their purchase decision for awhile, and try to get maximum productivity from whatever they chose, for awhile. Technology moves on, and pretty soon so does the market.

Today's two cents' worth.

[Snowhog]

Today's 'two cents' worth.

Hmm. Inflation has finally caught up with commentary!

[Frank616]

dibl:

I've evolved to a view that "vendor lock-in" is largely a state of mind, and not a real phenomenon.

While I see your point, I've got 20 years of Wordperfect files on my hard disk. Fortunately, they are least readable with LO (more or less). They are not readily editable in any other application unless I reformat them completely. I'm not willing to put my head in that particular lion's mouth again. ODT files can be created / edited with more than just one app. I like that much better.

Frank.

[dibl]

While I see your point, I've got 20 years of Wordperfect files on my hard disk.

I think you just proved my point!

See, the market moved on, but provided a means for you to cope with your prior choice. I also have old WordPerfect files, and old MS Word and Excel and PowerPoint files. It's amazing how long it has been since I needed to look at any them! But I can if I ever need to.

Here's to Rich Text Format!

[Frank616]

dibl:

Here's to Rich Text Format!

Yes. Truly even better than the ODT or DOC for cross application use, though limited in its formatting abilities.

Frank.

[Frank616]

dibl:

Yes. Truly even better than the ODT or DOC for cross application use, though limited in its formatting abilities.

I'll take that back.

I just took an ODT file of my notes for some public speaking I did, and saved it as RTF. I then tried to open that RTF file to see how much, if any, formatting I lost. It wouldn't open. General input/output failure.

Interesting that LO can't even open its own rtf files.

I see that it is a long standing bug that has obviously not been fixed yet. Oh well.

Frank.

[dibl]

Interesting that LO can't even open its own rtf files. I see that it is a long standing bug that has obviously not been fixed yet. Oh well.Frank.

Yes, LO has been having what I would consider an embarrassing inability to open RTF in a timely fashion. They will eventually open, if your CPU and memory are sufficient. But any other word processor in the world can open RTF.

BTW, I just tried a one-page RTF doc with LO 4.0.2.2 and it popped right open. Maybe they've put some effort into fixing it.

[Snowhog]

Same here. Opened an .odt file, gave it some basic formatting (bold) and saved it as .rft. Closed LO and then relaunched LO and opened the saved .rtf file. Opened right away.

[dmeyer]

dibl:



Yes. Truly even better than the ODT or DOC for cross application use, though limited in its formatting abilities.

Frank.

Everything but LaTeX or .txt is not necessary. One provides "formatless" text; the other provides all the formatting you could ever need. Lyx makes LaTeX super easy even for idiots, produces beautiful documents, and is super powerful! It's been around for years, and will continue to do so for a very long time. has a big community behind it and is all as open source. If you haven't, go check it out! Odt is great but it doesn't have an editor that gives me the features I want so I stay away from it.

http://www.lyx.org/

sudo apt-get install lyx

[dibl]

Wow!

root@imerabox:/home/don# apt-cache policy lyx
lyx:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 2.0.3-3
  Version table:
     2.0.3-3 0
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://http.debian.net/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
root@imerabox:/home/don# apt-get install lyx
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  dvipng elyxer fonts-lmodern fonts-texgyre latex-beamer latex-xcolor libboost-regex1.49.0 libboost-signals1.49.0
  libgraphite3 libkpathsea6 libptexenc1 lmodern luatex lyx-common pgf preview-latex-style prosper ps2eps tcl8.6
  tex-common tex-gyre texlive-base texlive-binaries texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-extra-utils
  texlive-font-utils texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-generic-extra
  texlive-generic-recommended texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-extra-doc
  texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-luatex texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc
  texlive-pstricks texlive-pstricks-doc texlive-science texlive-science-doc tipa tk8.6 ttf-marvosym
Suggested packages:
  rcs dvipost libtiff-tools gnuhtml2latex wv chktex noweb sgmltools-lite linuxdoc-tools writer2latex latex2rtf
  texlive-xetex etoolbox lyx-dbg tcl-tclreadline perl-tk purifyeps latexmk xindy dvidvi fragmaster lacheck
  latexdiff t1utils libfile-which-perl dot2tex
Recommended packages:
  wish
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  dvipng elyxer fonts-lmodern fonts-texgyre latex-beamer latex-xcolor libboost-regex1.49.0 libboost-signals1.49.0
  libgraphite3 libkpathsea6 libptexenc1 lmodern luatex lyx lyx-common pgf preview-latex-style prosper ps2eps tcl8.6
  tex-common tex-gyre texlive-base texlive-binaries texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-extra-utils
  texlive-font-utils texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-generic-extra
  texlive-generic-recommended texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-extra-doc
  texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-luatex texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc
  texlive-pstricks texlive-pstricks-doc texlive-science texlive-science-doc tipa tk8.6 ttf-marvosym
0 upgraded, 48 newly installed, 0 to remove and 52 not upgraded.
Need to get 668 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,048 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Oh, what the heck -- disk space is cheap, life is short .... I'll try it.

[dmeyer]

Wow!

root@imerabox:/home/don# apt-cache policy lyx
lyx:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 2.0.3-3
  Version table:
     2.0.3-3 0
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://http.debian.net/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
root@imerabox:/home/don# apt-get install lyx
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  dvipng elyxer fonts-lmodern fonts-texgyre latex-beamer latex-xcolor libboost-regex1.49.0 libboost-signals1.49.0
  libgraphite3 libkpathsea6 libptexenc1 lmodern luatex lyx-common pgf preview-latex-style prosper ps2eps tcl8.6
  tex-common tex-gyre texlive-base texlive-binaries texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-extra-utils
  texlive-font-utils texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-generic-extra
  texlive-generic-recommended texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-extra-doc
  texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-luatex texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc
  texlive-pstricks texlive-pstricks-doc texlive-science texlive-science-doc tipa tk8.6 ttf-marvosym
Suggested packages:
  rcs dvipost libtiff-tools gnuhtml2latex wv chktex noweb sgmltools-lite linuxdoc-tools writer2latex latex2rtf
  texlive-xetex etoolbox lyx-dbg tcl-tclreadline perl-tk purifyeps latexmk xindy dvidvi fragmaster lacheck
  latexdiff t1utils libfile-which-perl dot2tex
Recommended packages:
  wish
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  dvipng elyxer fonts-lmodern fonts-texgyre latex-beamer latex-xcolor libboost-regex1.49.0 libboost-signals1.49.0
  libgraphite3 libkpathsea6 libptexenc1 lmodern luatex lyx lyx-common pgf preview-latex-style prosper ps2eps tcl8.6
  tex-common tex-gyre texlive-base texlive-binaries texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-extra-utils
  texlive-font-utils texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-generic-extra
  texlive-generic-recommended texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-extra-doc
  texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-luatex texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc
  texlive-pstricks texlive-pstricks-doc texlive-science texlive-science-doc tipa tk8.6 ttf-marvosym
0 upgraded, 48 newly installed, 0 to remove and 52 not upgraded.
Need to get 668 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,048 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Oh, what the heck -- disk space is cheap, life is short .... I'll try it.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add Lyx pulls in full latex which essentially means a huge download but it is worth it. Lyx seems odd at first since it uses the WYSIWYM paradigm. To view the output of your work just hit Ctrl+R for a pdf render. Its also worth noting that certain things are frustrating at first but quickly begin to make sense once you realize that you classify text and objects and then you don't need to manually determine their formatting. Its a huge change in work flow but its always worth a try.

[lesleepyfox]

I use it not because I'm worried about vendor-lock in or for price either. I've always used it because of quality. I mean generally yes, sometimes you have to tweak things, but the end results are always much more significant. And in the years of using OSS I've seen things come a long way, pretty much where dual booting proprietary is the furthest thing from my mind.

[Frank616]

dmeyer:

Interesting. I don't see a spreadsheet / database module, however. Is it capable of that as well?

I may give it a try just to round out my knowledge, but I have a lot invested in ODT now, and I don't feel a need to change just for the sake of changing.

Thanks for pointing it out to me, however. I knew of LaTeX, but not Lyx.

Frank.