[odf-discuss] [Fwd: Norway Moves Towards ODF]

[Lars D. Noodén]

That is excellent news, I hope it goes through sucessfully.

For many reasons, it would be easiest to scrap MOOX and work on 
harmonizing ODF with UOF.  Attempting 'convergance' with MOOX would simply 
be an exercise in pain, even if it somehow becomes documented and even if 
it somehow gets useful licensing.

There are several big reasons to left MOOX die on the vine.

1) ODF already has industry support and UOF has the big market of China. 
In contrast, MOOX, for all practical purposes, hasn't hit the streets yet. 
And, even when MS Outlook starts churning out MOOX-formatted instead of 
MSHTML-formatted e-mails, there would then only be two applications 
supporting it.

2) Technically, support for ODF by Microsoft should be a piece of cake. 
That diagnosis was apparent as a result of the early part of MS vs 
Massachusetts, where it was claimed that MS technicians made such a 
statement.  However, even if those claims are not believed, MS has made 
vigorous marketing claims positing that MS Office can support arbitrary 
XML schemas.  If that is true, then using ODF (or for that matter TEI or 
Docbook) should be no problem.  If that is not true, then there are some 
serious false advertising issues to be resolved in the courts.

3) ODF is documented, published, and in production.  MOOX is not 
documented.  We can see with projects like AD and CIFS and pushing a dozen 
others, that undocumented formats, protocols and APIs allow MS to keep 
moving the goal posts.

-Lars
Lars Noodén
 	Ensure access to your data in the future
 	http://opendocumentfellowship.org/about_us/contribute