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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 ____________________________________koffice \
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