From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2003 - 18:46:53 EDT
> > But besides that, maybe 1-2 million people use
> > OpenOffice on any sort of regular basis. Maybe 1-2
> > billion people use Microsoft Word. And those
> MSWord
> > users can't possibly import Oasis documents, nor
> is
> > Microsoft likely to add such functionality.
>
> Microsoft will add it only some eons after hell
> freezes over, unless
> it's forced to do it by governments asking for it
> explicitly.
> This can happen only if they are shown/asked by
> people to go for a
> truly non-locking alternative. That's why I am
> hoping that users of
> all apps can have the same Free file format.
Well, I don't honestly expect MSFT to ever do this,
even if governments ask them to. MS Word has an
excellent plugin API that basically speaks RTF. This
would allow a 3rd party (ISV) to provide such a plugin
for MS Word (or excel, or ppt, or ...), and depending
on the approach that they took, might not be too much
work.
This is also why we want to do our best to support
reading/writing the OASIS/OpenOffice file format. We
definitely want to be able to interchange documents
between AbiWord, OpenOffice, KOffice, ... as
flawlessly and seamlessly as possible. SXW/OASIS looks
to be an excellent choice for a common interchange
format (as is RTF, for that matter).
Unfortunately, there will likely be some flaws in our
representation of that format, which in itself is an
excellent reason to keep the AbiWord, KWord, ... file
formats around. But this is also an excellent reason
to let the users and various distributors change the
default file format to RTF/DOC/SXW if they so wish.
Cheers,
Dom
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