Re: Regarding OOXML and Microsoft patents

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    > Here in Portugal, in the OOXML fake-standard debate, the position of
    > Free Softwar activists has been that it's impossible to fully implement,
    > or might even be downright illegal to do it independently, closed formats.

    Well, neither OOXML nor ODF have been fully implemented by third party
    implementations beyond the products they originated with.   

If that is true, it is a red herring.

Suppose that ODF is never implemented fully by anything except
OpenOffice.  Is that a problem for us?  Not at all, because OpenOffice
is free software.  By contrast, if OOXML is never implemented fully
by anything except Microsoft Office, that could be a big problem for us,
since Microsoft Office is not free software.

The same conclusion applies if we replace "fully" with "adequately".

Meanwhile, if it is hard for Microsoft to fully implement a 600 page
spec, that just reinforces the point that it is hard for us to
implement a 6000 page spec.

This is no reason we shouldn't _try_ to implement OOXML.  As long as
we are not forcibly stopped, we may as well try to implement
everything that users want.  But we must also campaign against OOXML's
adoption, because it may be impossible to implement adequately,
and we might be forcibly stopped.

Thus we remain with the conclusion that it is very important to 
campaign for ODF and reject OOXML as a "standard".