this needs wide distribution

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 08:34 +0100, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
>  http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/openxml_wrap_up_after_d12k

I have to confess to being worried about asking people not to improve
free software applications for specific political purposes.

For example, the comments on the Microsoft-funded ODF<->OXML converter
(which is actually the software Novell propose to use, in the short
term) really confuse me. We should improve software for users of
proprietary systems, but not use that functionality ourselves?!

Making ODT export from Word easy is one thing. Enshrining Office's
continuing position as the number 1 implementer of office file formats
is quite another. For example, I have a document preparation system
based entirely on ODF, because it's an easy format to develop for, but
also because by building on top of OpenOffice.org, I can output to a
variety of other formats.

By giving Office the lead in that area, people like me are going to stop
using tools like OpenOffice.org and use Office instead, because their
output will be more widely compatible (if they even care about ODF
support at all - last time I looked, there were fewer than six hundred
ODF documents on the *entire* web according to Google, and those few
webservers which make them available using the correct MIME type do so
mostly at my persuasion).

*By all means*, people need to support OpenDocument. There are many,
many useful things people can do - for example, login to Apache's
bugzilla and vote on my bug to make OpenDocument mime types work by
default:

	http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=38301

(This bug is almost a year old, even though I supplied a patch!)

I agree with much of Michael Meeks' analysis:

	http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2006-12-11

The "open standards" thing is less important than getting people to use
free software. Improving the quality of the software and the feature
set, especially in the office world, is one of the main drivers we have
to get people to use it.

Militating against OXML may end up serving no useful purpose than to
make OpenOffice.org and friends more unusable than they are now.

Cheers,

Alex.