Here's just one example. By: cryptareopagite
-------------- Novell the Enemy and OpenXML For those who missed it (hah!), Novell have embraced Microsoft, blown their rights to distribute Linux under the GPL, and announced they're going to help Microsoft try to kill OpenOffice. I just posted this on Groklaw under the title "Remember one thing about OpenXML". Before I say what that is, let me say that I'm so glad that, after being a very happy Suse user from version 6 on, I switched to Ubuntu four months ago. Novell have so blown it. The point about "OpenXML" is that it is *impossible* in any practical way to do a 100% two-way translation between it and *any* open format, OO XML or anything else, for the simple reason that "OpenXML" includes closed, proprietary, binary, extensions - the definition of important parts of multi-component documents explicitly includes M$oft proprietary formats. Exporting from Open formats to closed proprietary is easy; the definitions are clear, what anyone has to do is at most know how to write *one* method of getting the required result in the proprietary format. The other direction is the problem. I'd give good odds that even M$oft don't have the full definition of what all their proprietary file generators do; and to be able to reduce all possible methods of doing particular things to a simple clear open format is virtually beyond the wit of Man. The practical outcome is clear, if Novell produce something worthwhile. M$oft Office is OK as a creator of content - with the Novell code, OpenOffice can read M$oft docs. The reverse is *not* true; many OO docs will not be properly rendered in M$oft Office, so OO is not OK as a creator of content. Result - M$oft wins for another generation. What should we do? I think the answer is clear. This is a resounding declaration of war on Open Source by Novell. We have to fight them as strongly as we have fought SCO. Novell is now as much the enemy as Microsoft. -------------- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
