[odf-discuss] Fwd: W3C Lead on CDF says OpenDocument Fellowship Position on CDF Makes No Sense

[M. Fioretti]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 08:25:48 AM -0800, Christian Einfeldt
(einfeldt at gmail.com) wrote:

> It is inevitable in any open and free society that there will be
> pitched disagreements.  But let's also recall that the tactic of
> divide and conquer has long proven an effective tool

of course. The problem is when one starts to apply it the others are
unlikely to take it nicely.

> [one of the member of the Board of Education]... specifically said,
> and I quote, that she was not going to support or vote for any
> projects that would "pull the rug out from under" the SFUSD tech
> staff who are familiar with Microsoft products.

this is probably the single issue is at the real core of all the
current discussion, the "absolutely perfect interoperability
everywhere without glitches" thing. Most of the rest is just secondary
technical details or personal attacks.

Gary/Marbux/Hiser see this as an absolute untouchable dogma. If you do
start from there, probably what they want wanted to do makes a lot of
sense. Most others instead, including me, have come to the conclusion
that this is really a fake issue:

- That when you go to check how things really stand, that kind of
  interoperability has never existed or been guaranteed, unless sender
  and receiver of a document had identical sw and hw configurations

- that nobody really cares in the real world about it (including the
  same CFOs who publicly make declarations like above, then just live
  daily without making a fuss with the inconsistencies)

  (and I've seen on more than one occasion people noting that in
  court, that is in that one in one million cases where 100% fidelity
  would matter, what would matter would be what the involved parties
  SAW and printed originally, that is something that requires
  duplicating their exact configuration or having PDF versions, so
  what are we worrying about?)

- that the problems behind roundtrip fidelity, when present AND
  meaningful, have often nothing to do with the formats (e.g. "smart"
  employees doing databases with spreadsheets or viceversa or placing
  unnecessary macros at every corner of a file, making everything
  unportable regardless of MOOX, ODF, CDF and what not)

- that if we can't really break this totally idiot belief that a
  private stakeholder can CONTINUE to create and change at will the
  way we can express and store our thoughts, we'd better do something
  else entirely.

in a nutshell, that a break with the past MUST happen, that its real
consequences would be immensely smaller than MS advertises, that the
sooner it happens the better and that, while we DO have to find now
temporary compromises with public officials like the one above, we
should at the same time start requiring that they are all replaced
with somebody who has a clue.

> She also said that when she saw reports of the Novell - Microsoft
> deal in the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle, she
> thought, "oh, Linux must be making a lot of progress" because she
> felt that Microsoft would never make a deal with a Linux vendor
> unless it was FORCED to do so.

this is the exact danger against which I warned in "Just Say no to
OpenXML", see the Wal-Mart paragraph:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9594#mpart8

> To summarize, all I'm saying is, can we please exercise some caution
> as we sort out how we are going to break the Microsoft monopoly

personally, as I already said last week answering to Jody, what
worried and worries me the most in his and other people behavior and
reaction is simply the fact that _they_ behaved as if all this were a
merely technical issue, without any far-reaching consequence

Ciao,
	Marco
-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on
how software is used *around* you:    http://digifreedom.net/node/84