Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw) [LWN.net]

Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw)

Posted Dec 22, 2006 12:31 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670)
In reply to: Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw) by drag
Parent article: Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw)

While I do agree with you that de facto standards often triumph over "paper" standards, it is important to note that Office OpenXML is neither. Nobody uses it and it is not an official standard (yet).

I think it is dishonest to pretend like the new document format will be widespread just because all the old Office formats are. Mass migration to a new format will take a long time no matter which format it is. So far OpenDocument has a larger marketshare than OpenXML, which has zero.

Tomorrow may be different, of course, and I may have to take all this back. Until then, however, with no documents "out there" the only thing an independent implementation of OpenXML will accomplish is increased acceptance in public organizations.

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