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

[Ian Lynch]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 10:58 +0100, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Friday 03 November 2006 10:57, Ian Lynch wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 00:47 -0800, marbux wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Depends how much resource you throw at it. It seems unlikely that
> > given the progress with OOo from Star Office in a considerably
> > shorter time that coping with a file format would take significantly
> > longer even if it meant re-engineering most of the code. If you took
> > just a WP (that's an app) you could probably start from scratch and
> > have a MOOX product in less a lot less than 10 years with two or
> > three full-time and able developers.
> 
> I doubt that, what do you base this on?
> Based on my years of actually programming on a WP app and seeing various 
> items in the spec, 10 years sounds plausible.

How any people full-time?

Impression Publisher on RISC OS I believe took a team of about 12, 2
years to development and that was written entirely in assembler and
included a document description language that although a lot less
complex is similar in principle to ODF/MOOX. Obviously it depends on the
application and how complex it is but if it takes longer to develop a
functionally equivalent application to one that I was using 10 years ago
with such vastly superior open source libraries etc available,
technology seems to be going backwards not forwards :-)

http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm

Saying any application is a lot different from saying a cross platform
office suite. I accept Impression Publisher benefited from not having to
work on anything except RISC OS and was just a document processor but
functionally there is nothing I have ever used in say OOo Writer that I
couldn't do in IP and some things like graphics handling were better in
many ways and certainly much faster and less resource hungry. 

There is also Ovation Pro that was down to one guy and took a lot less
time than 10 years to write - that was in C and there is a port to
Windows. http://pilling.users.netlink.co.uk/ovationpro.html

Ian
-- 
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