Re: Free office ! IBM Lotus Symphony

On 20/09/2007, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Martin Rowe

Symphony is built on the OpenOffice.org 1.x code base, whereas
OpenOffice.org is now at (as of this week) 2.3. I'm assuming with
IBM's announcement of 35 developers to work on OOo that there will be
a relatively quick catch up process. OOo 2.3 is quite an improvement
on the old 1.x versions, and it seems to cope much better with MS
Office files (though doing better still would be welcome).

Martin, I still don't fully understand the relationship between Eclipse,
Open Office and Symphony. I want to get some more information about this
because it seems to me that IBM would have done much better to release
Symphony on the newest (or at least a newer) OOo codebase.

Hi Joe

As I understand it, Symphony is essentially the latest cross-platform
Eclipse based Notes client - without the Notes part! I *think* this is
the same thing as the managed workplace client thing that IBM brought
out with Notes 7.1 or thereabouts, so it has been around for a while.
There is a Linux client for Notes 7.x, though as we're still running
with 6.51 I've not been able to try it.

OOo doesn't use Eclipse at all - that seems to be IBM's direction, and
one they've been going for a while. My assumption is that they will
bring Symphony closer into line with OOo, though hopefully they will
be feeding back improvements (file import & interface issues seem to
be strong points) to upstream.

I did see some screenshots[1] of a OpenDocument file in OOo and in
Symphony, and it was clear Symphony has some way to go. OpenDocument
format came in with OOo 2.0, though they released another version of
OOo 1.x that had the backported code to handle the files.

Regards, Martin
[1] LWN (Linux weekly News) had some interesting comments on the
subject yesterday - http://lwn.net/Articles/250452/