- FREE SUN ODF PLUGIN FOR MS OFFICE ON MAC SYSTEMS PDF
- FREE SUN ODF PLUGIN FOR MS OFFICE ON MAC SYSTEMS LICENSE
- FREE SUN ODF PLUGIN FOR MS OFFICE ON MAC SYSTEMS ISO
This announcement obviously indicates that they’ve gone a bit beyond that by funding and managing these efforts, but I suspect the answer one would get from Microsoft is that they’re simply outsourcing what they believe to be a non-strategic feature to third parties – hardly an unheard of activity in this industry. * Despite the above, nothing precludes an extension or plugin from being built by a third party to provide such support, although Alan was not aware of any specific efforts in that regard that he could speak to * Microsoft will not be supporting the Open Document Format for some of the reasons listed above, but also because it’s an immature customer base, the difference in technical approaches between their Office Open XML formats and the ODF, and finally because they don’t see what problems they’d be solving by offering such support In a conversation I had with Microsoft’s Alan Yates in September, here’s what I recorded: Q: Ok, but why would Microsoft not handle this work itself?Ī: Microsoft has maintained fairly consistently that they would not support the format themselves, but were not opposed to seeing others perform that work. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing for everyone involved.
FREE SUN ODF PLUGIN FOR MS OFFICE ON MAC SYSTEMS LICENSE
Transparency can be very helpful, and this external hosting – not to mention the very permissive BSD license – should allow for considerable external oversight and monitoring. Not all, perhaps, but a high percentage of them. Q: So there are three separate parties, all of whom are likely to be unfamiliar to mainstream audiences, and all of whom are funded and managed by Microsoft? Aren’t there likely to be issues of trust here? Is this not begging for conspiracy theories?Ī: It’s possible, but I think Microsoft’s decision to make the project open source and host it externally at Sourceforge – rather than, say, Codeplex, will calm some of those fears. Īn Indian firm that has apparently been tasked with exhaustively testing the downloadable component. Ī German firm that has significant visibility into document requirements within EU governmental agencies. Anyhow, they’ll be responsible for much of the development and the actual project maintained at Sourceforge. The rumor mill was right for once – go figure. The firms involved are:Ī French firm that has done work in this area before – and probably the source of early rumors that a French firm would be providing ODF support. The third party, as it turns out, is actually three firms – all of whom are operating under the guidance of Microsoft, who is project managing the effort.
To make things more interesting, the third party application is an open source project, governed by the BSD license and hosted externally at Sourceforge.Ī: Well, I asked that question and initially suspected that it might be some of the Novell folks as they would seem to be a good fit, but I was wrong.
FREE SUN ODF PLUGIN FOR MS OFFICE ON MAC SYSTEMS ISO
The news, then, is this: Microsoft is announcing support, via a non-bundled, third party application, for the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF).
FREE SUN ODF PLUGIN FOR MS OFFICE ON MAC SYSTEMS PDF
I’ll exclude the PDF portion of the announcement for now to focus strictly on the ODF aspect of the release if anyone would like further coverage of the PDF news, drop me a line. Q: For those of us that haven’t seen the news yet, or have only heard a partial summary, can you recap your understanding of what Microsoft has announced?Ī: Certainly. The output of that thought process follows, in the Q&A format most of you are probably familiar with by now. With the advance notice, I’ve had both the opportunity to ask some questions as well as think on the answers I received. This analysis was made possible by the folks from Microsoft who were good enough to brief us – Cote and myself – on this news last week. Breaking with my long-standing tradition of bringing you the news long after it’s broken, I’ve got some early commentary on the news that Microsoft has announced support for the Open Document Format.
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