|| On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:37:09 +0000 || Alex Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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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