this needs wide distribution

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 11:35:36 +0000
 || Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> wrote: 

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

I did address your concerns in the first article

 http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/novells_danaergeschenk

because it essentially confirms and reiterates the first mechanism
that MS tries to bring to bear against ODF, which I called

 1. Incompatibility is always the fault of the competitor

As I agreed in the article, that mechanism is undoubtedly powerful,
and there are indeed many people who are likely to punish the
competitor for misbehaviour of the dominant player by choosing the
dominant players' product.

But putting OpenXML into OO.org will not solve that problem in
reality, as there will be plenty of incompatibility left that can be
blamed on OO.org, which people will use as justification to switch to
Microsoft Office -- theoretical OpenXML support or not.

As explained, having such theoretical OpenXML support in OO.org WILL
serve to undermine ODF, however, and make sure that it will not get
the wide adoption it deserves.


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

See above. I also addressed the difference between those situations in
the wrap-up, available at

 http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/openxml_wrap_up_after_d12k

in the section "Difference to .doc import?"

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)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 306 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20061212/75cb4fc5/attachment.sig>