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

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 11:08:03PM -0500, Russell McOrmond wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Andreas J Guelzow wrote:
>
> > I believe many of us have adopted gnumeric because of the added features 
> > and correct behaviour/result.  In my personal opinion there is already 
> > much to high a value put on interoperability with XL.
>
>   The GNOME team is of course free to make whatever project direction
> decisions it wants, but I believe that this direction choice will have
> Gnumeric stuck in a niche market that won't enjoy the market share
> expansion that other FLOSS tools will.

>   Multi-vendor interoperability is what allowed V32 and related standards
> based modem technology to quickly eradicate V.fast (Hayes), HST
> (USRobotics) or Telebit's Trailblazer technology.

>   I believe that interoperability slowly moves up the stack as a
> technology becomes mature.  The time has come for communications and file
> format interoperability to exist for basic infrastructure office
> productivity tools.  There is plenty of room for innovation in other
> aspects of the software.
 
>   I may be entirely wrong, but it is something for this project to 
> consider and either accept, reject, or at least sit on the fence with a 
> well written interopability plug-in.
 
I believe we're arguing about degrees here.  Gnumeric and other
GNOME Office tools will certainly be able to read and write the
OASIS format.  That is a requirement of any format with a widely
installed userbase.  However, the behaviours of 'office' apps is
sufficiently complex that I don't see them as commoditized items yet.

If Gnumeric adds another statistical routine the exported result
will be an useless in another application.  If OpenOffice chooses to
use different error values than MS Excel the files will be a bit
different when translated from xls to swc and back.  When MS Excel
adds support for setting the colours of sheet tabs the rest of us
can either load the information (Gnumeric) or ignore it
(OpenOffice).  IMO file formats are significantly more complex than
network or hardware protocols and the underlying feature set is by
no means standardised enough yet to support a single format for
everyone.

Until things have standardised we can keep working on
Interoperability.  Ensuing that we can read/write each others
formats to the best of our abilities.  Having an open implementation
is definitely much simpler than delving into binary grunge, but it
is still a long way from being the one format to rule them all.