Re: [Fsfe-uk] Gnu/Linux and freedom (was Linux in Thailand.)

[alex]

> On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Chris Croughton wrote:
> > I can't take an OO.o .sxw (or whatever it is) file and expect anything
> > else to understand it, even though it's "free software", because it
> > doesn't conform to any published open standard (sure, I have or can get
> > the source, but I don't have time to wade through it to find the code
> > which implements the format).
At 08:37 07/01/04, Tom Yates wrote:
> leaving aside my other objections to Chris' position, this bit is just
> wrong.  according to
> http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think15 ,
>
> "The stake-holders in OpenOffice.org -- the contributors and users on the
> OpenOffice.org Web site -- have all committed to making its file format as
> open and general as possible, in the hopes of fostering greater
> interoperability and flexibility among office file formats. ....

(Hello Chris, Hello Tom, small world)

It may be worth noting that since the Open Office format is "just plain 
xml" it is sometimes used as an XML editor for document creation. It is a 
reasonable task to take an Open Office document and use XSLT to translate 
it to whatever output format you want. I used it a lot to create the 
content for this site http://www.gynae.uk.com/ )

(OO files are jarred up xml to aid in compression. Jar is just a specific 
implementation of Zip)

Alex