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

[marbux]

On 11/3/06, Alex Hudson <alex at stratagia.co.uk> wrote:
>
> If it works, I don't think it matters which. The point is that VBA
> compatibility is becoming less of an issue, and is an area in which
> Novell have gone beyond the specs. as they already exist.


It matters greatly from the standpoint of folks other than Novell
distributing the code. There's a claim that only Novell is immune from suit
for infringing Microsoft's patents.

[more]

> 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.
>
> Yeah, but to be fair, that's actually disingenuous.
>
> It you were writing an app from scratch, maybe it would take ten years.
> OXML is a less complex format to support than the Office binary formats,
> though, and people (eg. Abisource, Gnumeric) have written excellent
> libraries to read those formats, and developed applications which use
> them, in something less than 10 years.
>
> You can always argue about what "full support" actually means, but
> realistically, it will take Novell maybe a year to implement something
> which fulfils that vast majority of users' needs.
>
> (Not a year from now, obviously - they've already started to add support).


I think we're drifting. The discussion started with Marco saying:

"If the OO.o shipped with SUSE (and that only) got plugins that render
MSO files (complex ones, with macros etc..) correctly, it would be for
many users a powerful reason not to bother with ODF."

I understood "correctly" in the context of "complex" documents as meaning
full support. (Of course there's the added problem of more and more MS
Office bugs being exposed as document compexity increases.)

And my memory could be failing me, but my recollection is that ISO wants to
see multiple apps that fully implement proposed standards.

Best,

Marbux
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