Open-Xchange Launches "Open Source" Browser-Based Office Suite

alphadogg writes with news on what Open-Xchange has been doing with the OpenOffice.org developers they hired. From the article: "Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced this week. OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company." The other claim to fame is that it supports collaborative editing similar to Google Docs. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to have a Free/Open replacement for Google Docs, it's not actually fully open source: the backend is (Apache/GPL dual licensed), but the front-end code is Creative Commons BY-SA-NC, which is unequivocally non-free and notoriously difficult to define. "[Open Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna] told The H that his interpretation of Non-Commercial in the licensing was such that companies could use the software in-house, but not sell it as a service to others. Companies that want support will have to purchase the software from Open Xchange."

Re:Oh good

[mwvdlee]

Never mind the software. As long as you stick to an open file format like .odt, the software become irrelevant. I'd be more worried about WHERE those files are stored.

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that hard, actually. If your XML parser isn't doing something wrong, what you write back out will be what you loaded in. All you need to do is keep it in the original format, and NOT try to convert anything (I'm pretty sure this is where every office suite messes up non-native documents).

Keep your hands of anything you don't know what means, and only change the things the user changes (i.e. if the user fixes a spelling mistake in the middle of a paragraph, don't change the paragraph formatting, don't break the paragraph into several paragraphs, and don't touch anything outside that paragraph.

To do this while supporting multiple document formats, you cannot have a native format. Instead you need an interface and a replaceable backend. You can still have your own format, but it needs to be just another backend.

Free Free not freeloading

[fermion]

The license appears to be what I use. Licensed for free to non-commercial entities, can be changed, but changes must be returned. Can't be adapted by commercial enterprises and sold. This makes sense for most purposes. Recall that copyleft became fashionable because creators wanted to let people use and modify their work, but did not want commercial enterprises to modify slightly and copyright the work from under them. In most cases complaints against OSS is by commercial enterprises that want to steal the work and use it for their own profit.

I can't really tell what the model for this software, but the usefulness of the Google Docs suite, for my purposes, is the online storage on Google Drive. It makes management of documents easier when one is not always on the same computer, but does have usually on internet. Of course it is assumed that google makes it's money by mining the documents, so I would not necessarily use it for business applications.

It will be interesting to see what happens when we have an online office suite that can be one-clicked installed on a private domain. For basic work it can't be that far away.