From: M. Fioretti (m.fioretti@inwind.it)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2003 - 18:52:08 EDT
On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 00:33:43 at 12:33:43AM +0200, Marc Maurer (j.m.maurer@student.utwente.nl) wrote:
> > My point exactly. Personally, I can understand some of the technical
> > issues, and also the desire of a developer to show his way of what the
> > best possible format should be like, but saying to the end user "there
> > are all "brother", non competing apps" and "but they don't share the
> > way of saving information" looks, IMO, ugly...
>
> Well, lemme also throw in a slightly offtopic comment: We *are* (well,
>at least I am) competing
> with other applications like OpenOffice.
Well, as an end user I want the very same thing. I do hope that the
kind of competition that you describe remains. My point is that the
age of "that program looks faster and easier, but I can't switch to,
or test it, because it wouldn't transparently read and write my files"
should really terminate. With a common file format, applications would
finally start competing on their own merits only, just like you describe.
> Especially the functionality part might be of interest here:
> if we think of some functionality which no other application supports,
> than we would probable have a hard time adjusting the OASIS file format for it. For example: our automagically updating Fields are not supported by OASIS AFAICT...
I don't know either. Historically, however, this is the kind of argument
used by Microsoft to force people to Word, and to upgrade to each new
version of it, will they nil they. For this reason, I tend to be
extremely sceptic on this (my gut reaction is "we went from quill pen
to email keeping the same alphabet, probably just because of that"),
but that is just me, of course. And, of course, I do behave like this
with every program, nothing AbiWord specific.
When it comes to OASIS, yes, OASIS is a committee created by big
corporations, hence just slightly easier to steer than a buffalo herd,
but is open, royalty free AFAIK, and (still AFAIK) moved by a 100%
business like will to shift away from anybody locking all others to
upgrade to their software.
Ciao,
Marco Fioretti
-- Marco Fioretti m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it Red Hat for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/en/...the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. (Calvin)
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