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Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org 268

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the coming-a-long-way dept.
[vmlinuz] writes "O'Reillynet is running an article about 'Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org' which explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects. The article also discusses the importance of a shorter release cycle."
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Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org More

Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org

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  • Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eosp ( 885380 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:07PM (#13591971) Homepage
    If something's in beta, people won't want to use it because it just doesn't sound reliable. If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.
    • 90% of people don't know what Beta means. Sure corporate support IT folks might know, but your average household probably has no clue. Plus, the distinction between Beta and General Availability software isn't always clear. I've used GA software that should be beta, and vice versa. I don't think this point is valid in todays computer world.
    • If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.

      Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for.
       

      • Nope, it sounds worse (Score:3, Informative)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 )
        "Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for."

        Well, no. Actually MS does have a policy of not shipping with known deffects. (I.e., literally, they won't release until there's no bug report left.)

        Now I won't argue whether their software is higher or lower quality than OOo (that's another flame for another time), but just saying that the "hey, let's mis-label betas as releases so unsuspecting people will beta-test them for us" idea is really sinking even lower than MS ever did. MS's Q

    • Re:Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @04:07AM (#13594217)
      Hi,

      I don't like that idea and here's why.

      If something is announced as stable, I want *it* to be stable.

      I do use a lot of beta software (writing this in Firefox 1.5b now) but at home where I choose to. When I'm at my office computer, I expect no crashes, especially from my Office Software.

      I use Open Office and am very happy with it and as I'm happy to get the updates whenever they come out - partly because it's free (much more to pay that than $500), partly because I've been disillusioned by the MS upgrade glitz with the greatest latest new features I can't live without yet never use (normal users call this bloat) but mostly because I'm happy with the current package.

      People who want the greatest/latest will use beta anyway - and they are the ones who can/will make bug reports if anyone. The rest of us will grumble quietly and move onto something else - so I don't see why this will result in quicker bug fixes.

      What you are suggesting is essentially false advertising (misleading labelling) and OO.org doesn't need that hit to its reputation. That's the sort of thing that will drive people back to MS complaining while that "buggy office package."

      Linux or FreeBSD didn't get their good reputations this way. This is their most valuable asset now because Linux is spread by the most valuable advertising medium - word of mouth - regardless of essentially meaningless version numbers.

      Please let's not emulate Microsoft.

    • How about not BEING a beta? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Monday September 19, 2005 @06:50AM (#13594680) Journal
      I'll have to side with rolfwind on this one. "Let's mis-label it a release, so people will beta-test it for us" is the kind of idea that really disgusts me.

      Now I'm not opposed to smaller incremental releases, meaning less features added, and easier to thoroughly test before release. But nevertheless, I expect "stable" to be just that: stable.

      You have to understand that while maybe for you "yay, I contributed a bug report to OOo" or "yay, I dug for a week through kernel sources and made my old ISA SCSI board work" may count as fun, for most people it doesn't. In the real world it's more like "fuck, why doesn't this POS print my document right?" Or I can tell you first hand that at work we're not like "yay, it's so cool that we contributed a bug report", but rather "fuck, I'm opening yet another PMR for this POS software. Someone remind me... why are we using this crap anyway?"

      What's attractive about OSS to most people is the "because lots of other people have inspected the code and made it better for you" part. It's not the "because you too can spend weeks debugging our code and fixing our bugs, or just beta-testing our unstable stuff and waiting for months for a fix" part. Forcing people to be beta-testers against their will, isn't really going to make your software popular.

  • Mmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Saiyine ( 689367 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:08PM (#13591979) Homepage

    Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names.

    --
    Superb hosting [dreamhost.com] 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, $7,95.
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    • Re:Mmm (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names."

      So?

    • Re:Mmm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A little tacky, but not as much as your _two_ trashy adverts in you sig. Suck it up.

  • Change the default (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:08PM (#13591982)
    One of the reason I am stuck with Microsoft office is because others will send me office documents and I have to use Micrsoft Office suite to open/change/modify them. As many others have noticed, openoffice doesn't work well with all the documents (Especially complex tables, etc).


    Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.


    • Re:Change the default (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

      man diff, bitch.

    • Re:Change the default (Score:5, Funny)

      by jshaped ( 899227 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:28PM (#13592086)
      Thank you for bringing up LaTeX.
      As a grad student in CS, the benefits of LaTeX are obvious.
      But it's surprising how many educated people still do not understand what LaTeX is or how beneficial it is.
      Example, last semester I turned in a project proposal (written with LaTeX) to a professor.
      His response: "Aren't your margins a bit too big?"
      I was speechless.

    • Re:Change the default (Score:3, Informative)

      by qbwiz ( 87077 ) *
      But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

      This sounds like a job for cvs or arch or monotone some other version management system. LaTeX files are plain text, so a proper versioning system would work with them much better than it would with ugle .doc files.

    • LaTeX Change Tracking (Score:3, Informative)

      by Noksagt ( 69097 )

      . But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

      Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion [tigris.org]. In addition to this, latexdiff [tug.org] is quite handy. Running this perl script on 2 tex files can produce a 3rd file with appropriate color coding/strikeouts/etc.

      • Re:LaTeX Change Tracking (Score:4, Interesting)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @11:03PM (#13593162)
        Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion.
        Sure, until some editor moves the linebreaks (which are not significant to TeX). Then diff'ing is screwed.

        Anyways, that isn't the real problem. The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is highly non-portable. Everybody uses TeX in a different way, an since Tex isn't very self-contained that leads to problems.

        The fact is that LaTeX isn't an analogue to MS Office, or even MS Word. For instance, how do you make a figure? The answer is some external program. And what format should the figure be in? That depends a lot on what output you're working towards - a .png works great for .pdf output with pdflatex, but not for .ps files. And for that matter, "compiling" a text document (some indeterminate number of times) is a completely obsolete idea.

        LaTeX is perfect for one or a small number of highly technical people to compose a document, and that is about it.

        • Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion.

          Sure, until some editor moves the linebreaks (which are not significant to TeX). Then diff'ing is screwed.

          Subversion & other revision control systems would still handle this fine. latexdiff (as opposed to GNU diff) would also handle it fine.

          The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is high

    • Re:Change the default (Score:5, Informative)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:19PM (#13592350) Homepage Journal
      Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

      Keeping track of changes is as easy as RCS/Subversion/version control system of choice (I've even used Visual SourceSafe when I was in an MS shop). Sharing changes can be done easily enough via PDF annotations [adobe.com], or LaTeXdiff [tug.org] depending on what tools you have available.

      LaTeX also offers possiblities that simply aren't available in word processors like MS Word and OO.o Writer. Using packages like xcomment it is possible to write a single document that is both a paper report and slide presentation - just change the document class and recompile. I've written document classes such that I have a couple of extra environments available: \begin{summary} and \begin{shared}. Anything in a summary environment is included in the presentation, but not in the report, and anything in shared is in both report and presentation. Anything not in either environment is left out of the presentation. With that done it is easy enough to start writing your report, adding a little set of bullet points summarising each paragraph in a summary environment as you go (and sharing any equations and diagrams as needed) and once you're done you've got your presentation complete as well as your report. You've also go the whole package encapsulated in a single file: any changes are easy to propogate from report to presentation of vice-versa, and maintenance is far easier. Try that with your standard office suite.

      Jedidiah.
      • Do you know of an easy way of getting PDF annotations back into LaTeX source? It would be really nice if there were some way that, in conjunction with something like pdfsync, the PDF annotations could be translated back into \annotation{this is a note} style sections in the LaTeX source.

    • Re:Change the default (Score:4, Informative)

      by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:23PM (#13592373) Homepage
      Complex table issues have been addressed quite a bit in OOo v.2.

      Some oddities will remain, though.

      For example, if you highlight something (say, mark a word yellow) in OpenOffice, you can't change it with the same tool under Word. You have to use the formatting paintbrush. Why? Word has 2 seperate levels of highlighting while OpenOffice has one. Got me why Word benifits from 2 different types of highlighting...but it has them. This difference is an artifact of Word.

  • All the more important... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:09PM (#13591983)
    ...now that Office 12 has been demoed. That means the specs for OpenOffice.org 4.0 are almost complete!!

  • Developers Needed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by C-Diddy ( 755183 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:09PM (#13591984)
    I didn't realize that the OpenOffice project had only 100 developers. Many more will be needed to establish the kind of release schedule mentioned in the article. Interesting stuff. Is this a potential weekness of open source - an inability to attract more developers who will donate their time?

    • Re:Developers Needed (Score:3, Informative)

      by johansalk ( 818687 )
      Most of those 100 developers (80!) are pain Sun employees - the article states that there are "less than 10 active external coders involved in the project".

      • IIRC, this was discussed around these parts a few weeks back, and the number of active external coders at the time was four. One of those four developers posted (sorry, can't find the link now) about how basically it's a Sun show, and almost impossible for anyone who's not in the Sun management team to have any influence over the direction of the project at all.

    • Only 100 developers? Are you crazy? That's more developers than most software houses. How the hell can Sun justify that expense?

    • Re:Developers Needed (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Is this a potential weekness of open source - an inability to attract more developers who will donate their time?

      Not at all. I think it's particular to OpenOffice.

      I *wanted* to contribute to OpenOffice. I even downloaded it and compiled it myself. Here's what I saw:
      - it's huge: it takes forever to download
      - it doesn't use a standard build system; in fact, typing one of the typical build commands ("make all", perhaps) would actually *delete your changes*
      - there was a wiki page describing how to get it all

  • As long as they don't get release-happy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by menorikey ( 915085 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:18PM (#13592036)
    I would agree with more frequent release cycles up to a point; they would have to ensure, however, that they don't begin to mimic M$ by releasing new builds simply for the sake of releasing them just to keep the name fresh in people's minds. Release schedules should only be to either implement beneficial features or to resolve any outstanding issues that benefit the user base as a whole.

    • Release schedules should only be to either implement beneficial features or to resolve any outstanding issues that benefit the user base as a whole.

      So, assume the scenario: every release fixes exactly one bug (or adds exactly one feature). (And: no release adds a new bug or removes an existing feature.)

      Is this an acceptable release schedule? If so, why, and if not, why not? (It sounds like it fits your definition, literally, but not exactly spiritually.)

  • OpenOffice.org is great, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:34PM (#13592118)
    Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org takes like 10 minutes on my computer. It's not going to win any awards for speed.

  • bigger #s dont always mean better (Score:3, Insightful)

    by a_greer2005 ( 863926 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @07:45PM (#13592167)
    Sure, a shorter releaese cycle may seem better, but is it really? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is the short release cycle and shareholders constant demands for "more more more" that got MS office to be the bloatware that it is today; honestly, what can anyone do in todays MS office that couldnt be done in Office 2000?

    I agree that the OOo guys need to draw a line in the sand soon with 2.0, go gold, if for no othere reason than the current 1.1 is so insainly lacking compared to MS office or OOo2 beta. But just because the number is higher doesnt make it better, want proof, look at Adobe Reader, what can 7 do that 5 can not?

    • honestly, what can anyone do in todays MS office that couldnt be done in Office 2000?

      Switch off Clippy effectively? :o)

      But just because the number is higher doesnt make it better, want proof, look at Adobe Reader, what can 7 do that 5 can not?

      Install the Yahoo! toolbar?

  • Chip away, not sea change (Score:5, Insightful)

    by banglogic ( 702448 ) * <Ken@Knicker.nuveen@com> on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:10PM (#13592297) Homepage
    I agree that Open Office is one of the most important open source projects. This is because it won't be a Linux derivitive that makes its way onto the desktops of the masses first. It will be open, free applications that can reliably provide the benifit of expensive commercial applications on the *Windows* desktop. A company I work for is interested in an open source "Save to PDF" tool because, well, have you priced Adobe's Acrobat lately? Not cheap. So, they are willing to consider this open source replacement to distribute to the general population. It provides most of the functionality that most of their user base needs and saves them money. The users don't even need to learn anything new. But ask them to swap out their enterprise desktop? Forget about it. If Open Office can get there (and it will *long* before Linux deriviti do), the Corporate World(TM) will open its loving arms.
  • My suggestion is just to follow the mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox approach and break the suite up and develop the components separately.

    Break off the wordprocessor and strip it back to essential functionality as was done with phoenix 0.1. Go for a rapid release cycle again as happened with phoenix with new updates at least every month. This will reinject vitality into the project. The full office suite will still be available as Mozilla is to this day.

    The essential thing that Mozilla had was the gecko rendering engine and XUL. None of this was lost in moving to single app development. The essential thing that OpenOffice has is its well-developed ability to read/write MS office file formats and its own OpenDoc format. This also would not be lost by splitting off the wordprocessor.

    The Office suite as a monolithic application was really a marketing innovation, not something that was user driven. Let's free ourselves of the unwieldy bloat it has given us.

    • The only way I could justify a monolithic suite, is if somehow you could have a master-document setup in which you could seamlessly integrate different documents into a single document. For instance I have this thesis work, and a few pages of the appendix are composed from a OOdraw slides, a few others from spreadsheet directly, and some more word processor files. It would take work to make this all show up into a seamless compound document, but if someone came up with a neat way to do it, then yes a mono
    • How does this get modded as interesting? I continue to argue, while being ignored, that this was a mistake for everyone except those that ONLY use a WebBrowser or Email client and neither at the same time. For everyone else, it was better to slim down the Mozilla Suite.

      Anyone ever look at the memory footprint of having FF and TB open at the same time and compare that to the footprint used by the Mozilla Suite? I didn't think so. The former combination is huge when compared to the latter. Why have 2

  • Sorry OO just doesn't compare (Score:5, Informative)

    by enmane ( 805543 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:15PM (#13592334)
    Disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboi. In fact, I dislike a lot of what they do. I'm no OO fanboi. In fact, I'm quite disgusted with what they've done with the product.

    The delta between Excel and Calc is too large to ignore.

    The delta between Powerpoint and Impress is small at the moment and can be tolerated.

    The delta between Word and Writer is negligible for _most_ users. For a basic word processor Writer is better but _a lot_ of people I know love the collaboration features of Word. I hate how Word keeps "thinking" for me and screwing with my documents.

    The delta between MSO and OO in terms of speed is just a tad smaller than the distance from one end to the other of the Grand Canyon.

    Now considering all that, OO is trailing, hugely. Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1147 20 [msdn.com] and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO. I've done my best to use OO and even to try and help. I am so disgusted by the developers and their responses to my pleas for improvement in key areas that I've stopped promoting OO to people that need a cheap office suite. If they need a free one then I still show it off. If they have some $$ then I show them where to get MSO dirt cheap. The new MSO 12 looks to blow the socks off of anything out there. If it all works like it is supposed to (huge IF) it will be a remarkable product.

    In that case, I thank the OO development team for putting pressure on MS. Like everyone, competition causes one to raise their performance and I think MSO 12 will be a killer app. I just wish OO could have moved quicker.
    • Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114 7 [msdn.com] 20 and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO.

      And many are are content to keep on using Office 97 - just witness the ads MS is running comparing Office 97 users to dinosaurs.

      MS seems to be just slightly aware of customers needs in data retention - especially for governments (So what's the exact wording of the law I'm supposed to be violating and what do you mean that the law is in a now unreadable version of MS-Word??). Small case in po

    • Thank you for pointing out the obvious, I've been waiting for someone in the Slashdot community to notice this fact: The next MS Office is at LEAST half a decade more advanced than OpenOffice.

      I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the word, and I REALLY cringe when some PR bozo starts spouting words like "innovation" to describe their company's products. Having said that, MS Office 12 is the DEFINITION of innovation. Yes, I just cringed at myself, but it's true. If you watch that video, you simply can
    • Sorry, It WON'T be killer app. For that cause that MOST features of collabration is not needed by common crowd. Yeah, managers and busness people would love that (and I DON'T downplay it's importance), and they are significant, but just a part of market.

      This app won't go on Win98, Win2000, etc. So forget it. These people WON'T change their computers for that cause.

      Therefore to say that, OO.o could have more commercial sollutions for collabration, AFAIK, there are lot of free ones.

  • A web service converter (Score:3, Informative)

    by holloway ( 46404 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:51PM (#13592520) Homepage

    If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org [holloway.co.nz] to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.

    I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?

  • I tried... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rongage ( 237813 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:51PM (#13592522)

    I tried to contribute to the OOo project on the marketing team. It was incredibly difficult to be taken seriously when your "product" moniker could not be distinguished from a web site.

    I tried to contribute to the OOo project by submitting valid and repeatable bug reports but I was told that getting label and envelope printing working CORRECTLY was a feature request, not a bug, and would not be addressed in the upcoming release.

    I tried to contribute to the OOo project but could not because the software build system REQUIRES PAM so I could not build the current tree (Slackware user). I WAS going to work on a stand alone viewer for Impress.

    I would love to contribute to OOo, but the OOo team seems to want to make things as difficult as possible for outsiders to come in. Why on Earth would an Office Suite need PAM???

  • Interface update? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mnemonic_ ( 164550 )
    Maybe someone can create a new GUI for OOo that doesn't like that of Office 97. Sad but true, much open source software clings to GUIs of old closed source designs (Nautilus : MacOS 9, Epiphany : Netscape 4, AbiWord : Word 97 etc.). I wonder when open source developers will make GUIs that are innovatively good, rather than creatively bad (Blender, Grip anyone?).

  • OOo Web Innovation? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PineHall ( 206441 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @10:15PM (#13592927)
    Jon Udell has an interesting [infoworld.com] idea [infoworld.com] of reinventing the office suite for a networked world. He says it should include "service orientation, peer-to-peer capability, workflow, federated identity, and new ways to query and visualize data." With the source code, someone could develop a system that could improve inter-company communication and collaboration using Open Office. We need to think 21st century.

  • What about AbiWord and Gnumeric? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by massysett ( 910130 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @10:18PM (#13592940) Homepage
    OpenOffice gets all the press attention. I'm not sure why. It seems sluggish and takes an extremely long time to load, in Linux and Windows. The download is massive. My impression of Gnumeric and Abiword has been much more favorable in both Linux and Windows: they're sleek, quick to download, and quick to load up. Also, OO screws up even basic Excel imports, which Gnumeric handles without a hiccup.

    I understand Abiword and Gnumeric can't replace the entire MS suite, but surely word processing and spreadsheet are the most common office suite applications (except maybe email, which OO doesn't have either.) I certainly don't understand why an integrated bloated "Office Suite" like OO is needed to replace MS Office, when Abiword and Gnumeric seem to me to be doing a much better job right now than OO.

    We don't necessarily need a single office suite like OO to replace MS Office. Right now I would support Gnumeric and Abiword.

  • Can anyone point OOo at that? The OOo tarballs are so huge, because they include everything -- expat, jpeg, BerkeleyDB, dmake, you name it.

    I'm glad, Sun's license is restrictive, or else they would've bundled their own Java too.

    Such bundling is wasteful of not only the memory/storage/bandwidth resources, but also the development efforts of people, who maintain all of those "3rd-party" software packages.

  • Linux/*BSD are not typically desktops because... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19, 2005 @12:54AM (#13593641)
    1. Lack of Microsoft Office

      Sorry all you OpenOffice guys, you have to face facts though, Microsoft Office is THE BUSINESS STANDARD. Just about every major business under the sun uses the Microsoft Office suite, it is installed on all desktop workstations from the Janitor to the CEO.

      Once OpenOffice provides all the same functionality as Microsoft Office in a consistant way, offers technical support (excluding forums, because mom & dad want to be able to call someone), and can be purchased, even at a nominal price in places like Costco, then it will become more popular and has a chance on the desktops of corporate America, provided of course that it is 100% compatible with whatever the current version of Microsoft Office is.

      Oh and OOo or OpenOffice.org is a stupid name to call the suite, drop the .org and just call it OpenOffice.

    2. Typically, people don't want to go to the command-line and 'apt-get' or 'make install' or 'emerge' et. al. their software. Most people want to be able to go to website XYZ and download something that shows an icon on their desktop. That icon when 2x clicked will launch an installer and do everything for them in a little user interaction way such as:
      • Launch Installer
      • Click "Next"
      • Click "I agree to the soul sucking license agreement"
      • Click "Next" a few more times
      • Click "Finished"

      and then have a nice little icon in their "Start" menu or on their desktop that they can lauch the application with.

    3. The installer for the Operating System must be as easy as Windows or MacOS X
    4. Linux/*BSD need to have the following:
      • Pre-Configured Systems at retail outlets such as:
        • Wal*Mart
        • Costco
        • BestBuy
        • Circuit City
        • Fry's
        • Sears
      • Support from Major software vendors such as:
        • Microsoft
        • Apple (Quicktime/iTunes)
        • Macromedia
        • Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat)

          Sorry, The GIMP doesn't cut it

        • Alias/Wavefront (Maya)
        • Quark
        • Other Major vendors
      • A Call Center

        Without a place where users can call and speak to a live person for support, Linux/*BSD will never gain significant marketshare outside of the server room.

      • The user should have a standard command-line available, but should not ever really need to touch it if they don't want to
    Between Linux and *BSD, I believe that the very nature of the GPL hinders Linux in becoming a serious desktop OS. By the very nature of the BSD License, BSD is more ideally suited to be supported by major software vendors than is Linux. (This thought is incomplete as I have to leave) I will explain why I believe this on my own website and post the URL here for anyone interested.

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