[odf-discuss] Microsoft and Novell cooperate on document formats

[Alex Hudson]

marbux wrote:
> My guess is that it would take until the 12th of Never for such
> plug-ins to be developed. There was no mention of licensing Visual
> Basic for Applications to Novell and ditto for OLE, er Activ-X. 
> Considering the level of integration needed to marry SuSE and
> OpenOffice with Activ-X, I doubt Microsoft would even consider
> allowing it to become licensed under the GPL for use on Linux.

I don't know about OLE, but Novell's OpenOffice.org already includes VBA
scripting.

Novell have some _very_ smart people working on OOo, and they're
responsible for a number of the cooler features in current versions.
They've also been working on OpenXML a while, since they're TC45 members
- Jody Goldberg, the author of Gnumeric, has already demonstrating a
plugin for that software, so it's clear they have people capable of
doing the work.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure the deal makes a huge difference to
OpenDocument: if ODF is to succeed, it won't be because people refuse to
support OXML - that's a pipe dream.

-- 
Alex Hudson
IT Director, Stratagia Ltd.
P: 0845 226 17 13     W: http://www.stratagia.co.uk/
F: 0845 226 17 14     E: alex (at) stratagia.co.uk