Michael Leone wrote: >>I think Civileme's point was that if/when the UCITA law passes in >>Washington, USA, then Microsoft (headquartered in Washington) will be >>able to make a minor change to their proprietary .doc/.xls/whatever >>file formats, and it will be illegal for Sun or anyone else to >>reverse-engineer that file format to create a new filter for their >>competing office suite. >> > >Sun licenses the file formats from MS, don't they? They didn't >reverse-engineer them, I thought. > Well, no one requires Microsoft to offer such licenses, but the point again is that your data is hostage if they want it to be, and you will have to purchase upgrades on their schedule or lose what you have. If you do not keep your data on windows proprietary formats now, it is wise to remain in that position.
You may have to run their OS to communicate with their captives, but you don't need to keep your data there. Send stuff out as HTML, and they can read it, or use .rtf, their open format, and run one Winsystem with Office to receive their communiques. (Printing to a file might help or to a computer which is masquerading as a plain-text printer, under Samba, for as long as the free software community can keep Samba compatible). Civileme
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