[odf-discuss] Gnome Foundation and ECMA

[Jody Goldberg]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 12:02:18PM -0400, Pamela Jones wrote:
>
> I left Microsoft products to get away from them, speaking for myself. I 
> never have any difficulties.  If someone sends me an Office 2007 file, I 
> ask them to send it in a format I can read, and they do.  It has happened 
> exactly once.
>
> I hope it's an education for them too to realize that Microsoft has them in 
> a box, and that they can't interoperate with people who don't use 
> Microsoft. I personally would like people to realize it, and to know they 
> have a better choice.  But if you guys keep it up, there won't be a choice 
> that matters much any more.

A purist perspective that works in well in theory.   In practice it
raises the barrier to conversion, and dooms users to continued
proprietary lock-in.  By that logic we should not produce win32
packages for FLOSS applications, or support any of the non-approved
formats.

My approach in Gnumeric takes the opposite tack, and attempts to
minimize the cost of transition.  I've implemented importers for
10-20 spreadsheet formats, old, new, documented, or proprietary
blobs.  I wasted several days learning to cross compile the code
base and fixing win32 bugs.  This was time well spent as evidenced
by the large influx of ex-Excel users that are now happy and
productive with free software.  People use OOX, it is not our first
choice, that is irrelevant.  I'll continue to work to ensure they
can switch over to a better solution.