[ILUG] word processors

[Caolan McNamara]

On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 09:45:25 +0000, Mark Finlay wrote:
>  > What problems ? Anyone can use the format, big documents and dtd's at
> > http://xml.openoffice.org/, did I miss something.
> 
> 
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-office-list/2000-October/msg00007.html
> 
> here's the link...

Old messages must be understood in the context of their time, that's a
pretty old thread, and a lot of the issue raised there are no longer
relevent and were mixed up at the time with the simultaneous
announcement of the gnome foundation and suns involvement in that.
That's pretty close to the beginning of the OOo process, and if I recall
the circumstances correctly and understood them then Sam felt that
abiword was being ignored by the *gnome* people in their plans for a
possible gnomeoffice suite of applications. 

On the specific point of the format, when StarOffice was released as
OpenOffice the file format was already pretty much developed. So no
deliberately snubbing was going on. The "reference implementation" stuff
is an element of the SISSL licence and doesn't apply under the LGPLed
varient of the licence. And so on, I think OOo is very open to input
from others, but there are a lot of back seat coders out there, and as
in any project hard edged code, or specific plans can be achieved
quickly while more general handwaving plans such as "projects should be
merged", "one dtd for all" can be difficult to gather momentum.

C.
-- 
Caolan McNamara               |  caolan at skynet.ie  
http://www.skynet.ie/~caolan  |  +353 86 8161184
What if there were no hypothetical situations?