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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: FYI: Petition for Microsoft to support OpenDocument
From:       Jaroslaw Staniek <js () iidea ! pl>
Date:       2005-11-03 19:24:34
Message-ID: 436A63F2.1080307 () iidea ! pl
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Alejandro Exojo said the following, On 2005-11-03 12:13:
> El Lunes, 31 de Octubre de 2005 11:34, Jarosław Staniek escribió:> >>Hello \
> KOffice users!>>>>* Microsoft has stated that they will support the OpenDocument \
> format in MS>>Office if there is customer \
> demand:>>>>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051016105739574>>>>The \
> purpose of this petition is to quantify the customer demand for>>OpenDocument \
> support.> > > Just an innocent question:> > Do you think it is really a good idea \
> to have OpenDocument in MS Office? I'm > thinking in the "embrace and extend" \
> strategy. It will suck if they figure > how to add "bugs" that make their files \
> look different in different office > suites.> 
What you're proposing is more or less: isolationism. You can play isolationism in \
parallel a world where you are enjoing 90%+ market share with your format :) Open \
standards are designed for use by everyone. Everybody here know about \
embrace-and-extend dirty tactics developed by MS. But don't forget that with ODF you \
will be able to stand up and say to your software evendors: ODF support is poor in MS \
apps, while our organization depends on it. Improve it and back here _or_ go away. \
For now you have _no_ such ability. MS has its super-dirty super-secret set of \
"memory dump" binary formats + a set of "open as long as you buy us" XML specs (I've \
seen that these do not even support styles!).Customers from government who are in \
process of migration to MS XML, being in trouble, keep sending XML files and asking \
to company I work for: <citation>They - We are unable to open that with OpenOffice, \
what to do?Me   - OpenOffice supports OpenDocument XML and (old) properietary binary  \
formatsThey - Oh. Isn't OpenOffice XML the same ad MS "Open" XML?Me   - No, it's \
entirely different thingThey - Then, we were fooled by somebody.</citation> Summing \
up: wait a few months more with ODF not being available (read: familiar) to everyone \
and people will forget about it. MS will be able to push its own 100% controled XML \
much easier.I could see a reason to push ODF to MS as a way to cause MS completely \
dropping proprietary MS XML. The petiton is not the only way, I would equally much \
(or even more) like to see _small_, _robust_ plugin for reading/writing ODF by MS \
Office.  > And I say "bugs", because many people think that the way box problem with \
the > CSS rendering of IE, is intentional, to make web pages look different in one > \
browser or another. It's a bit different story:- HTML/CSS code is usually generated \
by humans. ODF is machine-generated. Humans are lazy, they need to work harder (e.g. \
thing more intensive) if they want to comply with w3c standards. OTOH, ODF support \
can be fixed once per application.- HTML/CSS is most usually used as read-only data. \
A single ODF file can be edited by multiple people on different platforms and \
                software versions. For read-only solutions, we're still comfortable \
                with PDF.
-- regards / pozdrawiam,  Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska  Kexi Developer:      \
http://www.kexi-project.org | http://koffice.org/kexi  Kexi support:      \
http://www.kexi-project.org/support.html  KDE3, KDE4 libraries for developing MS \
Windows applications:      http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDElibs+for+win32 \
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