Advocating FDL University-courses

[Frank Heckenbach]

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

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

So I wouldn't call any browser-specific HTML transparent, either.
Same for compiler-specific C code (if it would be released under
FDL; GPL doesn't talk of transparent and opaque formats).

> > 	- 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.

That fact that they haven't done so doesn't mean they couldn't in
the future. I don't know if they have a patent that restricts
independent implementations of the format, but if so, then the
format is surely not transparent.

> > 	- 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.

Well, since you claimed: "IIRC .doc specification is available
somewhere.", you might want to back up that claim ...

> On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 02:35:06PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > There is no "Microsoft Word format", here is a bunch of different formats.
> > Some of them are more or less decoded by free software.
> 
> The same can be said about HTML.

HTML standards are available from W3C, so there's nothing to be
"decoded". Not so for nonstandard extensions of some browsers (see
above).

Frank

-- 
Frank Heckenbach, frank at g-n-u.de
http://fjf.gnu.de/
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