Open Letter to Alan Yates of Microsoft

In his reply to the Massachusetts decision to use only documents in OpenDocument format, the Microsoft manager Alan Yates writes: (paraphrased) Star Office, Open Office, KOffice and IBM Workplace are all derivatives of the same codebase. Thus there is only one program that supports Open Document, and that is illegal. This is, of course, not true, and here is an open letter written by KOffice Marketing Coordinator Inge Wallin on behalf of the KOffice team which clarifies these facts.

Open Letter to

Alan Yates
General Manager
Microsoft Corporation

Dear Mr Yates,

It is with great interest that I have followed the debate that started with the Massachusetts decision to only exchange data with other parties in an open format, namely Open Document. I must say that personally I find the reasoning behind the decision to be sound, but I fully support your right to disagree with this sentiment.

In your rather long, and doubtlessly well researched, reply to the declaration, you make many points which I will not address here, since others, better suited than me, have already done so. There is, however, one point where I feel that you have been gravely misinformed by your research staff.

That point is the following. On page 7, and continuing on page 8 you write:

The draft policy identifies four products that support the OpenDocument format: Sun's StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, and IBM Workplace. In reality, these products are slight variations of the same StarOffice code base, which Sun acquired from a German company in 1999. The different names are little more than unique brands applied by the vendors to the various flavors of the code base that they have developed. In essence, a commitment to the OpenDocument format is a commitment to a single product or technology. This approach to product selection by policy violates well-accepted public procurement norms.

I understand your worries, but fortunately I am able to put your mind to rest: KOffice is in fact not related to StarOffice or OpenOffice. It is a completely separate product, and a very fine one at that. One of our team members, David Faure, was an active party in the creation of the OASIS OpenDocument standard, and KOffice was the first office suite that publicly announced support for it.

Just to add a bit to your knowledge of KOffice, I would like to mention a few points:

• KOffice is the most comprehensive of all office suites in existence, comprising no less than 11 different components in one well-integrated package.
• These components include core office applications like KWord, KSpread and KPresenter, but also creativity applications like Krita (an advanced pixel based drawing tool), Kivio (flowcharts), Karbon (vector based drawing) and Kexi, an integrated environment for database applications not unlike to your own Access.
• KOffice is very well integrated into KDE, the multiple award winning desktop environment on Linux, Solaris and other UNIX variants.
• KOffice is fully network-transparent and all components can send documents as mail, print to PDF files and store and load documents from countless different network servers.
• Last, but not least: Within a year, KOffice will likely run on Windows as well.

In case you think that even two competing products will not be enough to satisfy the "well-accepted public procurement norms", I can assure you that they will soon not be alone. The fine word processor AbiWord and the spreadsheet program Gnumeric, will also soon support Open Document due to an independent effort by a Nokia research lab.

I am sure that you are now much calmer, and if you want to know more, you can always go to the KOffice website. You can also write to the KOffice mailing list and ask your questions there.

Respectfully,

Inge Wallin
Marketing Coordinator
On behalf of the KOffice Team