31–40 of 161 posts
It was a pretty big deal when OpenOffice.org's 2.0 release came with OpenDocument as the default file format. Very easy for someone to misread this MSOffice screen and click on OOXML expecting it to mean OO.o.
Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…
> Thus, the primary goal for this new format wasn’t to be elegant, universal, or easy to implement; it was to placate regulators while preserving Microsoft’s technological and commercial advantages.
That sounds quite anti-competitive to me
That sound exactly like it is an anti-competitive format.
Keeping the own advantage sums pretty all anti-competitive behavior.
(I wonder what the specification-pages-to-man-years ratio is...)
ISO/IEC 29500 should be open to evolution, no? Just like all the open collaboration on it before it was confirmed as a standard.
A better format would have made us geeks a lot happier, but the average user just wants things to work the way they always have.
It's as complex as it needs to be to losslessly convert old binary office files. A better format would have made us geeks a lot happier, but the average user just wants things to work the way they always have.
The XML version likely carries a lot of baggage having to be compatible with that.
Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…
Google completely flipped the game and then cloud collaboration became everything.
Dead on. Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementati…
Wow, big undertaking!
What we really need, though, is a for-profit alternative to Excel, that's not Google. I think Excel is more of the Killer App than Word has ever been.
