[odf-discuss] Response from a GNOME Foundation board director

[Inge Wallin]

On Friday 02 November 2007 10:39, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 03:55:48PM +0000, Chris Puttick wrote:
> > It concerns me to hear there are no people in the Gnome Foundation
> > interested in helping level the software playing field and perfecting
> > ODF as a format. Because that contrasts rather peculiarly with Gnome
> > Foundation associates (specifically Gnumeric developers, to be fair)
> > being the single loudest source of ODF criticism in the open source
> > world.
>
> Our (Gnumeric developers) perspective is that we are a neutral third
> party, and both specs have made our lives unpleasant.  Each has it's
> own irritations and benefits.  Neither is going to be 'perfected'
> into being the one true office format as far as I can tell.  The
> dominant organizations behind both of them have no interest in doing
> so.  These formats are the file formats of their native
> applications.  There is little appetite for extending the formats in
> ways that are unlikely to be easy to support in those applications.

This is where you are wrong.  I am a representative for KOffice, and we do 
have representation in the OASIS TC through David Faure.  He states that it 
has been fairly easy for us to get in rather big changes and additions to 
Star Office's original file formats that OpenOffice.org/Star Office has still 
not implemented.  One such example is frame based text documents where KWord 
can use both a frame and a page oriented approach, but oowriter only page 
oriented.

You may have different experiences, but we have mostly positive ones.

	-Inge

-- 
Inge Wallin               | Thus spake the master programmer:               |
                          |      "After three days without programming,     |
inge at lysator.liu.se       |       life becomes meaningless."                |
                          | Geoffrey James: The Tao of Programming.         |