this needs wide distribution

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 11:57 +0100, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
>  || 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

No, I'm not.

I'm specifically questioning the tactic of asking our primary office
suite, OpenOffice.org, to not support that file format. 

> 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.

You're arguing that, but you're not addressing the concerns I'm raising.

OXML doesn't open up a new migration route away from free software: we
already have one, the binary formats. The support will be basically
equivalent.

OXML does open up a migration route, though - it would allow people who
have documents in OXML format to migrate *to* OpenOffice.org. The
OpenDocument route will not be sufficient to do that: OpenDocument
cannot represent all the features of an OXML file (e.g., some types of
page break). Also, by asking people to install the OpenDocument
converter, you're asking them to install .NET and all sorts of other
Microsoft technology, and it won't help those users of Microsoft Office
who aren't able to install that stuff (e.g., Office 2000 users).

If the issue of OXML becoming an international standard came down to
whether or not OpenOffice.org supported that format, I might agree with
you. The truth of the matter is that it doesn't - instead, we're asking
developers to effectively try to lock users into OpenOffice.org. 

Cheers,

Alex.