|| On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 11:35:36 +0000 || Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com wrote:
ah> You're arguing that, but you're not addressing the concerns I'm ah> raising.
I did address your concerns in the first article
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/novells_danaergeschenk
because it essentially confirms and reiterates the first mechanism that MS tries to bring to bear against ODF, which I called
1. Incompatibility is always the fault of the competitor
As I agreed in the article, that mechanism is undoubtedly powerful, and there are indeed many people who are likely to punish the competitor for misbehaviour of the dominant player by choosing the dominant players' product.
But putting OpenXML into OO.org will not solve that problem in reality, as there will be plenty of incompatibility left that can be blamed on OO.org, which people will use as justification to switch to Microsoft Office -- theoretical OpenXML support or not.
As explained, having such theoretical OpenXML support in OO.org WILL serve to undermine ODF, however, and make sure that it will not get the wide adoption it deserves.
ah> OXML doesn't open up a new migration route away from free ah> software: we already have one, the binary formats. The support ah> will be basically equivalent.
See above. I also addressed the difference between those situations in the wrap-up, available at
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/openxml_wrap_up_after_d12k
in the section "Difference to .doc import?"
Regards, Georg