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

[marbux]

On 11/2/06, Alex Hudson <alex at stratagia.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I don't know about OLE, but Novell's OpenOffice.org already includes VBA
> scripting.


VBA or a clean room reverse engineered clone? I would really be surprised if
it is VBA, given that it's GPL.

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.


As I said in an earlier post, I suspect that you too have missed just how
big a job it would be to fully implement MOOX in OOo. Someone (Rob Weir?)
recently estimated that it would take over 10 years to fully implement MOOX
in an app other than MS Office, if ever.


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.


I agree, so long as we're talking about partial support. On the other hand,
I don't expect to see a stampede of current MS Office add-on developers
rushing to support MOOX natively, scrapping years of work built atop
Office's APIs, particularly given Microsoft's history of scrapping file
formats every version or two. The APIs are a lot more stable than the file
formats. :-)

Best regards,

Marbux
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