this needs wide distribution

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:37:09 +0000
 || Alex Hudson <home at 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 written around Microsofts quirks
and bugs, which Andrew Shebanow calculated to an effort of around 150
person years according to Microsofts own information, while Steve
Ballmer already stated that it won't work 100%.

But that would only give the minimal support, as it would lack all the
Microsoft environment around it, which means reimplementing Microsofts
proprietary version of lots of contained data.

That's why Bob Sutor of IBM said that people would probably have to
clone much of the Windows infrastructure, which he considered both
technologically and economically unfeasible for IBM.

Besides this being an entirely undesirable goal, I think it is totally
unrealistic to believe that Free Software projects would be able to do
this well enough in one or even five years.

Whatever the support would be, it would only be good enough to allow
migration from Free Software to Microsoft Office, which is why Bob
Sutor calls it a "one-way standard."

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.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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