[odf-discuss] Microsoft wins prize for "Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization"

[Daniel Carrera]

marbux wrote:
> And I sincerely 
> doubt that a company that has added more than 150 proprietary extensions 
> to ODF in its own implementations would be all that concerned about a 
> very small amount of dark matter that in no manner affects application 
> performance except by enhancing round-trip ability.

I think that there is a difference between OOo's extensions and dark 
matter. The difference is that OOo understands its own extensions. I 
make no claim that OOo's extensions are right or wrong, but rather that 
they feel different for Sun:

1. If they could modify OOo in a way that makes it read files from MS 
Office better, but requires extending ODF another 150 times, I'm sure 
they'd go for it.

2. If all they can do is insert a dark matter blob, that doesn't help 
OOo read files from MS Office any better. So they can reasonably decide 
that there is no benefit.

> Plus I can't see why a company that is so demonstrably dead-set against 
> high-fidelity round-trip interop with MS Office

Let's be careful to not express that opinion as a fact (see the Code of 
Conduct) (this is not a warning, I'm not the moderator). We know that 
the TC members from Sun, IBM and KDE have voted against your dark matter 
proposals. This doesn't mean that they are against round tripping 
improvements in all its forms. For example, *I* oppose the Foundation 
proposals that I saw, but that doesn't mean that I will also oppose a 
later proposal. One thing I tried to convey early on (months ago) was 
that I felt your proposal was impossible "as stated". That is, a 
different proposal that achieves a similar outcome may be possible. In 
fact, I have some ideas, but I haven't come up with anything that can 
always survive editing in another application :-(.

Daniel.