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

[Ian Lynch]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 14:41 +0100, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Friday 03 November 2006 13:26, Ian Lynch wrote:
> > > The spec we are talking about is many thousands of pages long with
> > > all the bugs that were made in Office being put into the spec as
> > > well.
> >
> > Well that is also true for reverse engineering filters for OOo
> > without the documentation as well as developing ODF and a whole host
> > of other things in a lot less than 10 years so I can't see why it
> > would take 10 years even with these other constraints.
> 
> Just FYI;
> 1) OOo is more then 10 years old (well, the codebase is, ~12 years)

And XML file formats? XML itself is barely 10 years old and XML 1.0 was
not W3Cd until 1998, only 8 years ago.  Even if the code base is 12
years old the relevant document format could not have been designed
until more recently. Are you saying that with unlimited resources, all
the improved tools and libraries available and the benefit of hindsight,
the development time for the XML file based versions of OOo could not be
reduced to less than 10 years? Doesn't seem at all likely to me.

> 2) OOo implements just a part of ODF [1] The ooMath part is said to be 
> just implemented about 20% of the whole spec in OOo.

Which is precisely the point. No-one defined the 10 years thing as
implementing everything in one application AFAIK. If that was the
intention it needed to be stated a lot clearer.

> 3) ODF is about 1/10th the size of MOOX.

> Do the math :)

Too many assumptions needed to do any maths that would give a sensible
answer! If you can get all the functionality of OOo in a subset of the
spec of ODF, I can't see much problem in getting a single application
from a subset of the MOOX spec in under 10 years.

Ian
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