Advocating FDL University-courses

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 11:28:10AM +0200, Alexandre Dulaunoy wrote:
> > IIRC .doc specification is available somewhere. There are obviously
> > some minor incompatibilities between standard and Microsoft implementation,
> > but that's true for every other format.
> 
> 	I'm not sure of that. I have made some search (on
> msdn.microsoft.com) and found only the RTF specification. Could you
> provide an url ?
> 
> 	minor incompatibilities ? minor for proprietary software... not
> for Free Software.

Minor incompatibilities happen everywhere. GCC has minor
incompatibilities with ANSI standard, Mozilla, MSIE and Konqueror with
HTML etc.

> > It's not. It was designed with single program in mind but there's
> > nothing in it that prevents other people from implementing the standard.
> 
> 	It's not ? Have you tried to import old word format into current
> word version or third-party Free Software supporting word format ? I don't
> agree with you at all regarding the Word file format, It's a an opaque one
> and for multiple reasons :
> 
> 	- There is some patent owned by Microsoft regarding Office. I
> think some description could be valable for Word format description.
> 	(did you remember the silly trick of Microsoft regarding the
> CIFS license ?) So we could have a restruction of using the description.

So far they haven't sued creators of any proprietary or Open Source
program that uses .doc so even if it's true it's not for the format.

> 	- The format is not described anywhere from a standard
> place/organization (please provide an url, if you can found one).

I'm not WYSYWIG guy, why should I know such things.
Ask on OpenOffice or other relevant mailing lists.

> 	- The evolution of the format is linked to one company/product.
> 
> 	- The evolution of the format is linked to proprietary software.

These two point are true in case of majority of formats and has little
to do with "trnasparency".