Subject: Re: Are you working with the StarOffice/OpenOffice ppl on fileformat?
From: Ashleigh Gordon (agordon@bigpond.net.au)
Date: Fri Aug 04 2000 - 22:21:29 CDT
>They would probably first put as much Word-specific bloat as they can
>into standards (standards comittee will have to agree on some compromise
>with them, or MS will ignore standards completely), and then they
>will add even more Word-specific bloat and ``forget'' to add many central
>features. See IE-JavaScript and CSS for reference.
>
>Combined market share of altercnatives is about 5-10% of whole userbase.
>If they will ever make Office for Linux (plus probably Solaris),
>they could even stop other alternatives from gaining much bigger
market-share.
>
>Otoh, if this will be XML, we will probably be able to re-perl-script it to
>usable form, so not all hope lost.
>Or they can ignore this until it's too late, as they did with Internet.
>
If the filter, or implementation/use of it was released under GPL, then they
would have to release any modifications to it, so everyone else could just
change anyway. So this wouldn't be a problem, just very annoying.
Ash
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