The first fruit of the recently announced Novell/Microsoft interoperability agreement arrived on Dec. 4, with Novell's announcement that its version of the OpenOffice productivity suite will now support the Microsoft Office Open XML format. The release candidate of Novell's modified version of OpenOffice.org 2.02 is now available for Windows for free download by registered Novell users.
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Member since:2006-01-02
What part of embedding additional structures into the ODF format is not "embrace and extend"? You are proposing that MSFT extends ODF so that Office produces files that cannot be fully parsed by OO.o. This is no better than having two different formats that share a similar core but have widely divergent details. Not much different than the current situation with OOXML and ODF. I think that things are going in the right direction currently because both OO.O and MSOffice are going to be able to open each others' files. Now they can compete on features and price and not on file-format lockin.
People should not complain when a company is doing work and releasing the results for free (as a plugin or as an entirely free product). Why would you want to stop someone from doing free work for you? Instead of being douchebags, just accept the files that you can open and ask senders to translate and resend if you can't open them. None of this stuff is actually a serious problem for people who use documents for important purposes rather than as topics for religious wars.
Member since:2005-07-25
Member since:
2006-01-03
Hogwash MollyC.
The ODF format is extensible and at its core is a text based XML document. So you are telling me, there is no way MS could embed these "features" into that if they wanted?
That would suggest that they are embedding binary data into their files, which is a poor solution but still could be handled via an extension.