Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Sat, 2007-11-24 at 23:53 -0500, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 04:11:11AM +0100, BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
> > On Nov 24, 2007 8:27 PM, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
> > > There is no "neutral game" being played here. Concerns were raised that the
> > > GNOME Foundation's participation in EMCA TC45-M suggested that we supported
> > > OOXML becoming an ISO standard. Thus, the answer was simple: We do not.
> > 
> > Well except that our representative on that committee supports OOXML
> > becoming an ISO standard... Please stop the charade, getting involved
> > in the process was a stupid mistake to begin with and continuing to do
> > it while the hypocrisy shines through is just boneheaded.
> 
> I'll ignore the troll-ish words like 'stupid', and 'boneheaded'.
> Be civil, or debate in an echo chamber.

yeah it would be nice to keep it civil

> 
> The status of MOOX's ISOness has no bearing at all on my actions.
> There are a limited set of possibilities
> 
>     1) MS and it's shills drive it through soon.
>     2) MS and more shills drive it through later.
>     3) MS invents a non-ISO way to declare it a standard (ala Mass).
> 
> There is no
>     4) MOOX vanishes in a puff of smoke.


MOOX is most likely to become irrelevant IMO

Firstly the de facto standard is doc, xls ... And that will not change
for a long time

Office 2007 has less than 10% of all office versions (50m out of 500m)
and even though the company I work for has given us office 2007 we still
transfer everything as doc and xls. So backwards compatibility hampers
adoption of MOOX more than anything else

People that go on about MS monopoly power forcing standards on people
seem to forget that MS biggest competitor is itself and consequently Im
very sceptical MOOX will become widespread

If companies will continue to use doc and xls formats for
compatibilities sake then why is it so essential for us to implement
support for it?


> 
> I do not follow the politics of the national bodies, and make no
> predictions on the relative probabilities beyond the simple fact
> that they total to 100%.  What seems much more interesting is that
> from a technical perspective none of them have more than a marginal
> impact on number of people using Office 2007.  It is already
> shipping, and MS has made a commitment to it's software ecology to
> conform to the published spec.
> 
> Any user that wants to use a new feature (eg sheet > 64k rows) must
> move to the new format.  Whether it is an ISO standard, or not, we
> will need to interact with the format, and it significantly easier
> to do that if I can ask MS questions and get answers.  The ancillary
> benefit of having some overlap between the logical content in MOOX
> and the old binary formats is gravy.
> 
> > How on earth can offering constructive criticism, feedback and
> > helping develop a specification NOT be supporting it??
> 
> By that logic all of the national bodies, and IBM are 'supporting'
> the process.  They've all offered criticism (some more constructive
> than others) and feedback.  The only difference is that we've had
> some of our questions answered already, rather than buried in the
> pile of 3000 or so the TC is digging through now.
> 
> Our developers (GNOME and OO.o), and our users are better off with a
> clearer spec.

Would it hurt so much to have a moratorium on MOOX dealings til after
February next year when ISO standard is determined?

Personally I would not want Gnome to touch it with a bargepole but I
dont have a problem with spec improvement *after* February next year.

I can see MS spinning this to their advantage and I believe playing safe
here would be better for us in the short term


jamie