[plug] Linux Desktop Market

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 02:34:25PM +0800, luca at trifelli.id.au wrote:
> I would say that implementing OpenOffice would be discouraging the
> users to send out documents in the original format, therefore adding
> an extra degree of security for your files.

When referring to PDF, it depends a lot on what you mean by "security".

A password-protected, encrypted PDF is AFAIK fairly secure against
people who do not have the password. I could be wrong here.

An encrypted PDF that permits viewing without a password, or a
password-protected PDF in the hands of someone with the password, is not
all that secure at all. It's really only the PDF viewer that chooses to
enforce any limitations the document creator has set; a modified PDF
viewer or one that simply doesn't support the restrictions can let the
user do whatever they want. I've had cause to use GhostScript, which
lacks support for PDF restrictions, to generate PostScript or TIFF
documents from "protected" PDFs before - usually because of clients that
are incapable of turning off "security" in their PDF creation software.
Heck, half the time I can just disable "document security" in Acrobat
because they haven't even set a password...

Similarly, PDF is not in fact read only like many people tend to rely
on. It's harder to modify, but with Acrobat Pro there are a fair variety
of changes you can make. With a tool like Enfocus PitStop you can
radically rework the PDF (albeit clumsily). If you're patient you can
edit it by hand, though that's a highly frustrating process.

> The only thing I can think of right now is that, PowerPoint
> presentations might not work as supposed under OpenOffice (not sure).
> Some presentation may represent a serious security risk for your
> business if they fall in the wrong hands, just because some user puts
> so much information on them to impress a potential customer, that
> reveals almost everything about your Company.  Image if the
> competition will have it!!!

See, here's a case where PDF security is likely to actually be useful,
at least if you can convince your sales reps not to send the PDF viewing
password by email, or at least not in the SAME email as the PDF.

I can think of another issue pretty easily, though. Not all document
exchange between companies and individuals is read only. Rather the
opposite - collaboration is very common, and the last thing you want is
any chance that the document will get mangled each time it travels back
and forth. It's also going to be frusrating to be limited to only those
document features that both apps support, import, and export correctly.

It helps that you can just send OO.o to the people you're working with,
but probably not enough for many.

I have quite a lot of the users at work using OO.o, and it's been very
handy. I won't pretend that there are no problems with using it for some
purposes though - sometimes due to flaws in OO.o, and sometimes due to
the stupidities of document formats that're largely unavoidable at
present.

-- 
Craig Ringer