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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: [Fwd: MS Office filters...]
From:       David Faure <david () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2000-04-16 17:36:31
[Download RAW message or body]

This wouldn't help people that receive a Word document by mail and
only have Linux installed... If the document needs to be processed by
a VBA script first, they're out of luck...
Whereas a native filter is able to read it directly.

Good idea though...

On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 09:18:32PM +0200, Werner Trobin wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> As I'm no license expert I choose to forward that mail.
> I don't know if the author is subscribed, so please CC
> your ansers to him!
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>                 Apr 2000 19:36:41 +0200
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> From: "Erwan HAMON" <ESHamon@NormandNet.fr>
> To: "Werner Trobin" <wtrobin@carinthia.com>
> Subject: MS Office filters...
> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 11:44:35 +0200
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> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am very interested in Koffice from a user point of view. Have feeling Koffice + \
> KDE2 will be a killer app. 
> So I've been reading your call for help on the development of import/export filters \
> and the difficulties in reading proprietary undocumented file formats. I came with \
> an idea I though you might find interesting. 
> The MS Office applications are very good at reading MS files :-). Using VBA it \
> should be easy to write some macro that would open a document, loop through the \
> internal object structure (word, paragraphs...) and dump it in a format such as XML \
> that any open source/free software could easily read. 
> The big advantage is that a single VBA macro could read any version of MS Word \
> document :-). 
> The big drawback is that you need an MS Office licence :-(.
> 
> However, imagine some guy has that MS Office licence. This guy is very kind. All of \
> his friends can email him documents that he converts and sends back. This guy is \
> also clever and he has taken full advantage of the personal productivity tools he \
> has. Therefore the process of receiving a document, converting it and sending it \
> back is fully automated. 
> In the same way, a company could have a robot searching for *.doc files on a Samba \
> server and convert them automatically, incoming emails would be filtered and \
> converted. A single windows workstation would transparently convert files for all \
> employees. 
> If you are a free software purist and believe my idea is crap, please, let me know \
> and read no more :-( 
> On the other hand, you might believe that the end justifies the means. If you think \
> this needs further investigation I think the next step is to get legal advice from \
> one of KDE's sponsors. Basically I cannot imagine Microsoft been too happy at \
> having its software used in such a way and helping the spread of Unix on the \
> desktop. Although I cannot see anything wrong with it. I believe a legal expert \
> should read the MS Office copyright licence and answer the following 2 questions:- 
> - Can VBA be used to write a GPL document conversion piece of software ?
> - Can such a piece of software be used to provide a free, public, fully automated \
> document conversion service using a single Windows(tm) workstation and a single MS \
> Office(tm) licence ? 
> I look forward to reading your comments,
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Erwan Hamon
> (FRANCE)
> 
> 


-- 
David FAURE, david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://home.clara.net/faure/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
See http://www.kde.org/kde1-and-kde2.html for how to set up KDE 2


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