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

[Mark Preston]

Hi all,
Thanks for the link Tom.
It's worth pointing out that it is also possible to easily get a look at the 
plain text of a saved OO document by opening up the content.xml file in a 
browser such as konqueror.
Regards,
Mark Preston

On Wednesday 07 January 2004 8:37 am, Tom Yates wrote:
> 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).
>
> 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. To further
> this goal, they have contributed the file formats to a new technical
> committee (TC) of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
> Information Standards (OASIS)."
>
> the format is also published at xml.openoffice.org/xml_specification.pdf .
> i realise that any other example of a free project using an unpublished
> specification would be as good for Chris' point, but it can't have escaped
> his notice that proprietary software derives a built-in advantage from
> locking down its formats, or (worse, imho) publishing its formats and then
> subtly varying their own implementation of them (e.g., proprietary
> "extensions" to HTML in IE and netscape).
>
> free software cannot pull this trick, because (however uncooperative the
> dev team) the first person who needs the spec is free to extract it from
> the source, and republish it freely, and for any package with more than
> two users, the odds are against you personally being that first user.  it
> is certainly true that i have never been stymied by free software when i
> needed to understand a file format, or a db schema, or a file system.  i
> have been thus stymied so often by proprietary software that i have given
> up working with it.