[odf-discuss] Gnome Foundation and ECMA

[Daniel Carrera]

Ian Lynch:
> Its relative. 10 years ago web sites routinely stated "best viewed in".
> 5 years ago IE was pretty well 100% market share.

I see it the opposite way. You only write "best viewed with xyz" if you think that a significant portion of your visitors may have something other than xyz. The "best viewed with" disappeared not when Firefox came out, but earlier, when IE became dominant, because then it was "obvious" that "everyone" had IE.


> While some sites still require IE they are becoming few

This isn't due to a change in the website, but to the addition of an IE-emulation mode to Firefox.

> Again you chose not to consider the political ramifications. If they did
> do that and it destroyed interoperability the lawsuits would follow

Why should they be sued for something that conforms to the ODF standard? You can bastardize ODF while adhering to the letter of the standard. It's much easier with ODF than with HTML, PNG, and Kerberos.

Daniel wrote: 
> I would not agree with that statement. I think RMS has been a very
> poor politician / marketer

Ian wrote:
> You have to take into account that whatever he has done to piss people
> off, he has raised the profile of free software. Whether you are hot or
> cold I'll swallow you up etc. RMS is an extreme but extremes and
> conviction often put ideas on the map

Who said anything about him being extreme? I didn't say anything about him being extreme. That has nothing to do with why he is a bad marketer, and no, he has not particularly raised the profile of free software, other people have done the marketing. Almost nobody knows what GNU is or what Free Software is, but "everyone" knows what Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice and Open Source are. While he was the guy in charge, the profile of FOSS hardly grew, but when Linus and Eric Raymond and others took a different track, it suddenly grew rapidly. Start with the marketing term open source. The single most greatest marketing success for FOSS was convincing Netscape (a widely known company at the time) to release the source of their browser as open source. This was not accomplished by RMS, but by Raymond. Then there is the support of IBM, also not due to RMS, and there is all the work of the Mozilla team, also not related to RMS. There are many great marketers in FOSS, but RMS is not one of them. Your statement was that his marketing was better than his code. This is not true, his marketing was poor and his code great.

Daniel.