Subject: Re: Are you working with the StarOffice/OpenOffice ppl on fileformat?
From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski (maniek@beer.com)
Date: Thu Aug 03 2000 - 15:28:23 CDT
On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 02:08:16PM -0400, Jeff Schmidt wrote:
> I hope so, and think that is their intention; since they've GPL'ed
> StarOffice/OpenOffice, they really have nothing to gain, that I can see, from
> being proprietary with the file format. I would really love to see this happen,
> personally. If enough office-productivity app makers (hope you could get Corel
> to join in such an effort) where to help develop such a dtd, and they all
> implemented it, I think that would put a lot of pressure on MS to support it
> (especially in light of their anti-trust problem ;-). If MS also supported it
> (fully, but knowing them they'd implement it half-assed like CSS in IE5), we'd
> finally have the ability of people to use whatever word-processor they liked
> best, not what everyone else is using =)
Pay attention on MS. They can accept such standard format, add many windows
and ms-office specific features (they will have to anyway, as they will
have different feature set than Abi, Star, Corel or K) and you all may
end having to implement much such crap just to stay compatible. :-(
This has happened to Web standards, and Office area is way more profitable
and imortant for them, so they can do it again.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Aug 03 2000 - 15:46:15 CDT