[odf-discuss] Gnome, Ecma, and what governments (and FOSS?) should have done

[Jody Goldberg]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 07:01:44PM +0100, Alberto Barrionuevo wrote:
> On Thursday 01 November 2007 10:44:18 M. Fioretti wrote:
> > What Gnome was doing WILL increase the number of NEW OOXML files
> > in Public Administrations in the next years:
> 
> Yes, but this is what they seem not to want to understand.

I disagree with the premise that Gnumeric's filters have any
material impact on ISO voting.

> Surelly the presence of several corporative OOXML backers in the
> Gnome Foundation could explain that impossibility to see that they
> are actually helping to their primary competitor, Microsoft

With a bit of luck you could factor in the price of tea in Bangalore
too.  A simpler explanation is that I'm being truthful ...
I work for Merrill Lynch, not Novell, or anyone else on the Advisory
board.  As far as I know no none of organisations on the ad-board
have contacted the board on this issue, and they certainly have not
contacted me at all.  Merrill has it's own issues just now, and I
don't represent them either.

> they have a real full office suite, KOffice, not as Gnome that has
> only two smaller-in-features independent applications only with
> much less development resources

Ahh, so you're not a spreadsheet user.  I'd recommend actually trying
the applications in question before making blanket assertions.
I'm not a word-processor or DB person and can not defend Abiword or
gnome-db (there are _three_ apps in gnome-office) effectively.  Both
seem pretty impressive to me.  However, I can very confidently
discuss the feature set, development resources, and stability of
Gnumeric.

> The pity is that some people in the free desktops field see as
> competitors to the other free desktops instead of seeing to the
> real competitors: Microsoft and, perhaps, also Apple, that are
> actually who are blocking the entry of the free desktops in the
> market.

So you brandish koffice as a non-OOXML polluted alternative to
gnome-office and suggest that people should switch to avoid our
tainted code.   Then imply that Gnumeric is somehow focused on
competing with KDE ?  There is a hint of inconsistency there.
Our actions speak for themselves.  We restructured libgsf (library
to read MS OLE2 files) so that koffice could share it.  I wish the
kspread developers the best of luck, there aren't many spreadsheet
implementors out there.  It would be nice to spend an evening with
them at some point.  They are not our competition, socially or
technically.  It is not be a contest.

The people working with me on Gnumeric are trying to make it the
best possible spreadsheet we can.  I'll win this on the merits thank
you.  In fact I think all of free software can do the same.