__/ [ Peter Kai Jensen ] on Saturday 29 July 2006 18:25 \__
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> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>>> It won't be long now before OpenOffice overtakes MS Office.
>>
>> In the government space in particular. See some of the recent progress:
>>
>>
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060728073716584
>>
>> New friends are gained for the ODF alliance (on a daily
>> basis even). And Microsoft Office has no proper support for
>> ODF ,despite its stealing of Open Source code from
>> SourceForge. This looks encouraging for Linux because many
>> of these migrations break the shackles of key proprietary
>> formats.
>
> I think that it is pretty much inevitable that ODF, and probably OO.org,
> will be taking over MS Office's dominant position. The MS resistance to
> ODF has generated its fair share of publicity and subsequent interest in
> OO.org, and I think that MS's interests would have been better served by
> just implementing ODF as another save-to format (doesn't even have to be
> the default one either), and thereby allowed themselves to be considered
> for many of the government contracts they have now (perhaps permanently)
> excluded themselves from. It wouldn't even be a technical problem to do
> so, due to the open nature of ODF, but they just hate losing any control
> over file formats.
>
> Anyway, I would not go as far as to describe how they obtained their ODF
> code as "stealing". AIUI, what they did was legal and acceptable within
> the terms of the license in question (I think it was BSD, or what?). It
> may be very hypocritical of them, but it's not really "stealing". Maybe
> leeching is a better word for it. Oh, and could you perhaps not do that
> even margin thing like that? The variable spacing makes it a bit harder
> to read, and it's not really necessary. If you must do it, try doing it
> by carefully picking your words. It's a great linguistic exercise! :-)
I should have gone with the word "nicked", but ended up intensifying it,
Either way, as you say, it was an act of hypocrisy and proof that
Microsoft's anti-OSS crusade is a sham.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Software sucks. Open Source sucks less."
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