A look at Open Office 2.1

Microsoft Office 2003, Wordperfect Office X3, Microsoft Office 2007, and Open Office 2. Those are your choices if you're looking for a suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, and a database application. If you need an integrated e-mail program, calendar, and task manager, you have to leave out Open Office. But do you need an integrated e-mail program, calendar, and task manager?

Open Office version 2.1 brings increased stability and bug fixes, but also adds some new features such as an extensions framework for third-party developers. That, in fact, is the feature that offers the most promise. Those who use Firefox as their primary browser can attest to the power of extensions and the ability to custom-build a browser that works the way you want it to.

That could happen in Open Office.

The program now includes entry points for the various aspects of creating and distributing extensions—add-ons, add-ins, and even templates and galleries. One of the reasons that I see this as the future of computing is that this is the past of computing. Back in the early days of mainframes, system administrators shared utilities they wrote. In the early days of PCs, nearly all applications were freeware or shareware. The Open Source community is made up of people who not only recognize the need to improve applications, but have the programming skills to do so.

Playing with Microsoft Office

Open Office proponents (and those who promote Wordperfect Office) talk about being able to trade files with Microsoft Office users. This is true. And it's false. Send me a Word file and I'll open it in Open Office Writer or WordPerfect; send me an Excel file and I'll open it in Open Office Calc or Quattro Pro. If I edit it and send it back, you might not be happy.

I just tried opening a Word file that has several screen captures in it. If I open it in Word, the formatting is fine, such as it is. There's not a lot of formatting—just some bulleted text, indents, and the imaged. Open Office Writer gets the typeface right, but the vertical spacing is off. Text that fit in a single page in Word doesn't fit on a single page in Writer. The same kinds of things happen with other office applications.

So the lesson is: If you need to be able to share and work on documents from someone else, use the same program. If your office has standardized on Word and you need to take files home, you need Word.

On the other hand, if you need just applications for word, number, and data processing at home or in a small office where you have control over which applications are used, Open Office is an excellent choice. You can't beat the price (free) and the applications have plenty of features for all but the most powerful of power users.

Which should you choose?

The question I receive frequently is whether it's time to switch to Open Office. The answer I have to provide is that I don't know. If you don't need the features that Open Office doesn't have, Open Office is a good choice. But if missing any one of the features of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or Access—or if you must have an integrated personal information manager and e-mail application—you should stick with the Microsoft products.

Although differences between the suites have become smaller with every release, Microsoft has changed just about everything with Office 2007. That could be as much of a disadvantage for Microsoft as a point of differentiation for the Microsoft Office suite. There are users who simply don't want to take the time to learn a new user interface even if it will make them more productive in the long run.

This would be a most uncomfortable time to be a product manager at Microsoft, wondering when the gigantic meteor will hit and what will happen when it does.

RIAA sues the young, the poor, the dead

The Recording Industry Association of America is trying to drop a hot potato. The association filed suit against a divorced mother, accusing her of being a pirate. Now the RIAA wants to drop the case, but the judge now says the organization has two options and just dropping the case isn't one of them. The RIAA can proceed with a jury trial against Patty Santangelo or ask to have the suit dismissed with prejudice.

If the RIAA asks to have the suit dismissed with prejudice Santangelo is the winner and can collect attorneys' fees from the RIAA. Those expenses could be substantial because the case is 2 years old. Maybe you think this would be poetic justice.

Santangelo, a mother of five fought back against the RIAA and requested a jury trial, the first time a suit by the RIAA against an alleged pirate has gotten this far. Santangelo refused to pay the RIAA's settlement center and says that she is innocent, although she does admit that a computer in her home may have been misused; the likely culprit she says, is a friend of her children.

When the RIAA files suit, it offer to make the suit go away from a settlement—usually under $5000—by threatening to sue for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most people give up and hand over the money. Santangelo fought back.

When the RIAA files suit, all it has is an IP address. This seems equivalent to the police filing charges against someone based solely on an automobile's license plate and regardless of who was operating the vehicle. Some legal experts say relying on an IP address is insufficient.

The RIAA continues to be its own worst enemy. Earlier the industry association filed suit against 83-year-old Gertrude Walton, claiming that she had shared 700 pop, rock, and rap tunes. One problem with that suit was the fact that Walton was dead at the time. According to Walton's daughter, the woman who lived in Beckley, West Virginia, hated computers and refused to have one in the house. Before the family went public in 2005 in an effort to shame the RIAA into dropping the suit, Robin Chianumba says that she sent a copy of her mother's death certificate to record company lawyers. They filed suit anyway. Later, RIAA attorneys agreed that there had been a mistake and filed a motion to dismiss the case.

And then there was the suit in 2003 that charged a 12-year-old girl with copyright infringement. The girl's computer has an MP3 file of her favorite TV show's theme. The girl's parents paid $2000 to settle the suit.

Truth isn't always the RIAA's trump card. According to Wikipedia, in a Brooklyn case, the RIAA's Lawyers wrote to the judge that they were in possession of a letter in which "...America Online, Inc., has confirmed that Defendant was the owner of the Internet access account through which hundreds of plaintiffs’ sound recordings were downloaded and distributed to the public without Plaintiffs’ consent." The defense obtained a copy of the letter, which simply identified the defendant as the owner of an Internet access account. The letter from AOL mentioned nothing about "downloading" or "distributing" music.

Nerdly News

Competition for YouTube

From the not-exactly-surprising-news department, News Corp and NBC have announced plans to distribute episodes of 24, The Office, and other programs on AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and MySpace. They'll use an embedded media player on those sites and will set up their own YouTube-like video site that will be free and supported by advertising.

Users will be able to buy downloads of movies from 20th Century Fox and Universal and they'll be able to post their own videos. Media companies have been trying to figure out how to respond to YouTube. Viacom, for example, has filed suit against YouTube, asking for $1 billion. Viacom claims copyright infringement.

The new venture should begin operations this summer.

The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg this week had some thoughts on suits such as the one Viacom filed against YouTube and about the problems of what most technologists consider to be a bad piece of legislation: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Consumers are the losers, Mossberg says. "I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea how this lawsuit will wind up. I suspect it is mainly a bargaining tactic by Viacom. But I know one thing: This fight isn't primarily about consumers and their rights, and its outcome won't necessarily make things better for Internet users."

Mossberg doesn't quibble with the concept of intellectual property rights, but the DMCA is a heavy-handed "solution" that fails to solve the problem while making life harder for consumers. In short, it's a typical federal government response that's the result of Congress listening more to lobbyists than to common sense.

Mossberg says, "Most honest people wouldn't consider it piracy to buy a CD, copy it to a computer and email one of the song files to a spouse or friend. But the record industry, backed by the laws it essentially wrote, does. Most honest people wouldn't think that uploading to YouTube a two-minute TV clip, which they paid their cable company to receive, is piracy. But Viacom, backed by the laws its industry essentially wrote, is demanding that Google remove all such clips."

He then goes on to equate such usages to "fair use", which allowed limited duplication of some materials under previous copyright legislation. "Under fair use, as most nonlawyers have understood it," Mossberg wrote, "you could quote this sentence in another publication without permission, though you'd need the permission of the newspaper to reprint the entire column or a large part of it. A two-minute portion of a 30-minute TV show seems like the same thing to me." (And, in fact, I have just quoted Mossberg without asking permission under the "fair use" provision.)

To read Mossberg's entire column, which I could not legally reproduce here, see the Wall Street Journal website.

No "fair use" of DVDs

You buy a DVD and you'd like to run it through a program that lets you watch it on a hand-held device. Question: Is this legal? Common sense would, of course, suggest that it is. But not according to Hollywood. If you want a DVD and you also want to be able to watch the video on any other device, you have to buy a second copy.

This week a copyright infringement trial got underway in San Jose. The DVD Content Control Association has filed suit against Kaleidescape Systems, the manufacturer of a DVD jukebox that connects via Ethernet to a separate player. Users can install video from DVDs on the system's hard drive and then later watch the videos on their home televisions.

"ILLEGAL!" shouts the DVD CCA. Of course it would be illegal for a consumer to buy a DVD, copy it, and then start selling the copies. But if you buy a DVD and want to store the video data locally for your own use, should this be a concern of some industry group? That's what the trial is about.

Kaleidescape servers are expensive—thousands thousands of dollars—so these aren't devices that will soon be popping up in every home. However, given the way the electronics industry works, devices that cost thousands of dollars today will probably be selling for $500 or less within 5 years.

This is the only ad you'll ever see on this site. It's for my website host, BlueHost in Orem, Utah. Over the past several years, they have proven to be honest, reliable, and progressive. If you need to host a website, please click the banner below to see what BlueHost has to offer.

TechByter Worldwide receives a small advertising payment for each new client that signs up with BlueHost but I would make the same recommendation even if the affiliate program didn't exist. (If you don't see a banner ad above and you would like to know more, this link takes you to BlueHost.)