[odf-discuss] Gnome Foundation and ECMA

[Daniel Carrera]

Ian said:

> If there is an agreed and published ISO standard I doubt that will be
> possible. Their attempts to pervert W3C standards have not been
> successful and non-IE browsers now thrive.

As a web developer I disagreed. Microsoft has been highly successful at wrecking or slowing the adoption of W3C standards, and I don't think that 14% for all non-IE browsers together is enough to say that they "thrive". I am working on the website for the school Rosemary Musker and just yesterday I was telling Sigrid how frustrated I was that I can't do what I want on the website because IE won't support an 11-year-old W3C standard like PNG and I'm forced to limit myself to whatever IE chooses to support.

Keep in mind that ODF is easier to pervert than HTML and PNG and Kerberos because unlike those standards ODF explicitly allows extensions. So they can totally bastardize ODF and call it "ODF" through the same line of reasoning that the OpenDocument Foundation was trying to label their "ODF + dark objects" ODF.


> RMS has had more effect on the take up of free software
> from his political activities than from his coding.

I would not agree with that statement. I think RMS has been a very poor politician / marketer and in turn his coding contributions have been critical to the development of FOSS. The fundamental tools needed to create FOSS (compiler and C library) and the fundamental tools needed to run a free OS (the GNU utils, which are vast) are from him.

Daniel.