Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Russell McOrmond <russell flora ca>]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> A stand alone converter ?  That is very interesting.

  This group of students are only around long enough to start a project.  
We needed to be realistic in what they could accomplish.

  Since I didn't have extensive knowledge of the Gnumeric team yet, I
didn't suggest that they try to do a project with you.  I knew William of
the libwpd team from Montreal, and he already met the group of students
when he was here in Ottawa on other business.


> >   OASIS thus far has been evaluating the OOo formats, but will not stick
> > to them if they are fundamentally deficient.  They may just not be
> > receiving the level of feedback that you could provide on the spreadsheet
> > side of things.
>
> Quite possible,  I'll attempt to make the relevant connections.  I
> do not want to characterise the format as deficient.  It has several
> nice features.  Gnumeric could easily store most data using the
> proposal.  The flaws relate to whether it is convenient and
> efficient to do so.

  Whether the OASIS Open Office format is convenient or efficient may be
secondary to the strategic value.  Sometimes you hold your nose on
technical issues to be able to push things forward.

  I could be entirely wrong, but this seems to me to be a huge possible 
breakthrough in the market for Free Software.  We have been able to 
grow on the server side without a problem, but have problems on the 
desktop because of the huge network effects that exist to the benefit of 
the incumbent vendor.  The Operating System is not where the strength of 
these network effects really are - it is in the office productivity tools 
and file formats.

  The rumbling I am hearing from key people in the federal government 
suggests we need to get our stuff together quite quickly if we want to 
take advantage of some possible movement.   A move from (as an example) 
Lotus SmartSuite to "tools compatible with the OASIS Open Office TC file 
format" could be a huge win for our community, especially if the 3 major 
Free Software office suites supported the format.



  My support of OpenOffice.org is based on two factors:

  a) File format is on a standards track.  Other than OASIS Open, I don't 
know of any other groups dealing with office productivity.

  b) Tool has Microsoft Windows as a primary development/testing platform.  
It isn't realistic to expect Linux on government desktops outside of 
research and scientific organizations (Such as NRC), and Free Software on 
Microsoft Windows desktops will be a critical piece in the migration to 
Free Software.


  I started to use OpenOffice.org only after I decided to promote the
standards track format and Windows port, not previous ;-)


> > I am actually surprised that RedHat, Ximian, Xandros
> > or other such vendor aren't sending GNOME Office folks given how important
> > this TC may be to the adoption of Free Software on the desktop.
>
> GNOME Office has no official corporate sponsors at this time.  Given
> the current economic landscape many distributors are content to rely
> on Sun to market and promote OO.  There aren't many financial
> resources available for marketing GNOME Office.

  I thought of these folks (well the first two) as large GNOME supporters,
and thus have a stake in GNOME Office.  The sponsorship idea is to get
GNOME Office folks onto the OASIS Open Office Technical Committee to move
the format forward, not to do more promotion for the separate
OpenOfice.org project.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, 
 VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen 
 and not a third party.   -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/