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

[Jody Goldberg]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 01:58:32PM +0000, Ian Lynch wrote:
> 
> > This is about writing the code necessary to get something done.
> 
> > The gains from having better interoperability with MS (OOX and
> > binary formats) outweigh the miniscule political cost.
> 
> You under-estimate the political cost because you are seeing it from
> your own political perspective. This discussion illustrates the fact
> that many people in the FOSS community are likely to see it differently.
> They might all be being irrational but in the end its the outcome that
> matters.

Agreed, but the FOSS community are not the people voting on the ISO
ballot.  I should not generalize from 1 data point (Canada) but none
of the people on the TC that reviewed ECMA-376 had ever heard of
Gnumeric.  The MS reps didn't mention me in the few meetings I
attended.  Nor did they mention Novell.

> > On the other hand it seems certain that there are already people who
> > will benefit from being able to use Gnumeric in place XL thanks to
> > improvements in our filters.
> 
> And they couldn't do that for the next 6 months using XLS files exported
> from the relatively few people that use Office 2007? Doesn't seem very
> likely but then I don't know how good the Gnumeric XLS filters are so it
> might be true.

Our XLS filters are better than MOOX, by a good margin.  They've
been under development for years.  However, that's beside the point.
My goal is to have Gnumeric 'just work'.  When someone recieves a
file from a colleague and wants to read, I want to just do it.  More
importantly I want the users to have the same impression.

If it makes you feel better the information gleaned from the MOOX
spec has improved the XLS filters too.  People can use our command
line 'ssconvert' utility to mass translate old files into any export
format we support.