[ILUG] on the MS ISO standard thing (fwd)

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 07:04:17PM +0000, Conor Daly wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 06:30:36PM +0000 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
> Colm MacCarthaigh thought:
> > 
> > So what if MS get an ISO standard? That'd just show how relatively
> > worthless an ISO standard without any context is anyway. It sounds like
> > it's just part of a marketting war and people want to brandish the "ours
> > is ISO standardised" tag-line, as if that means something. Mneh :-)
> 
> If MS get their format registered as an ISO standard, they can ignore the
> open document format.  If they don't they will have to be seen to be
> ignoring the registered format or support it.  Either of the latter allows
> us to promote OpenOffice and others as being compliant with mandated ISO
> standards and therefore better than MS Office...

So, it is just a marketting war? Like I said; "Mneh". 

Btw, if you think implementing an ISO will make OO.O better than MS
Office, hah! I'm an oo.o user (well I use NeoOffice), and it's miles off
:-)

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of OpenOffice XML being the only
ISO standard, but for completely different reasons - more to do with
getting governments into the habit of using properly standardised
and open formats for public information - but I think it's really
stretching things to try and frame this as a Linux issue. I mean,
MS Office doesn't even run on Linux anyway.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net