this needs wide distribution

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:53:30 +0000
 || Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> wrote: 

 ah> To be honest, you didn't - you're looking just at potential
 ah> danger of supporting OXML. You're ignoring the potential danger
 ah> of _not_ supporting it, and I don't see how you can reach a
 ah> conclusion without doing so.

The whole point is about the danger of incompatibility.

But as I wrote, that danger seems only partially dependent on whether
OpenXML will be officially included, as too many of the containers
will never be supported and there are too many quirks to really get
things right.

In other words: Yes, if you put OpenXML into OO.org, people will be
able to read parts of the documents, some parts won't work at all,
others will display in broken ways and their general impression will
be that OpenOffice is crap because they see how it all works
marvellously at their friends machine that is running MS office.

To some extent a similar problem exists with binary formats, yes, but
those were never supposed to be interoperable, so people are less
critical about such bugs. Also I expect these problems to be worse.


 ah> What we _need_ is people using free software which talks
 ah> OpenDocument natively. Like Bristol, not MA.

On this we agree entirely.


 ah> My point is that if you think OXML is simply a migration path,
 ah> then we're already in that situation and OpenDocument is already
 ah> undermined, because we have the binary formats.

Yes, I understood that you tried to say that, but it seems that I am
not able to explain to you why I see the situations as fundamentally
different.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
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