On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 11:57 +0100, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
|| On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:37:09 +0000 || Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com wrote:
ah> I'm talking about militating against OpenXML support in free ah> software, which I think actually harms those applications which ah> support OpenDocument, and provides disincentives to people using ah> it.
You are making the assumption that every Free Software project can implement a 6000 pages specification
No, I'm not.
I'm specifically questioning the tactic of asking our primary office suite, OpenOffice.org, to not support that file format.
Indeed I don't think we should invest any time into undermining our own efforts and wasting our own resources only to create a channel that will only serve one purpose: allowing people to migrate away from Free Software towards Microsoft Office.
You're arguing that, but you're not addressing the concerns I'm raising.
OXML doesn't open up a new migration route away from free software: we already have one, the binary formats. The support will be basically equivalent.
OXML does open up a migration route, though - it would allow people who have documents in OXML format to migrate *to* OpenOffice.org. The OpenDocument route will not be sufficient to do that: OpenDocument cannot represent all the features of an OXML file (e.g., some types of page break). Also, by asking people to install the OpenDocument converter, you're asking them to install .NET and all sorts of other Microsoft technology, and it won't help those users of Microsoft Office who aren't able to install that stuff (e.g., Office 2000 users).
If the issue of OXML becoming an international standard came down to whether or not OpenOffice.org supported that format, I might agree with you. The truth of the matter is that it doesn't - instead, we're asking developers to effectively try to lock users into OpenOffice.org.
Cheers,
Alex.