[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 @ 18:28 -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
> > This is Microsoft's fault, not Linux or OpenOffice's fault, or whoever
> > you are really ranting at.
> 
> It's Microsoft's fault that OpenOffice claims to be able to open Office
> documents, but, in reality, cannot usefully do so?

Well, I do this quite a bit, though probably every document I trade with Word
users is below 200 pages and not terribly complex.

But to answer your question, yes, it is Microsoft's fault.

They created a proprietary design with no documentation, and they did a bad
job of it. It has become a public standard, but they won't open it up.

For years we've been forced to run Windows to trade a common document type.

It's 2006, and I think it is about time that mundane things like documents
just plain work without idiocy like proprietary restrictions.

On the technical side, the format has been a mess for years, and sometimes
even Word cannot read Word documents. Bank of America stayed at Word97 for a
long time, because the new versions couldn't read a large percentage of their
existing documentation.

Not long ago, I used OpenOffice to read some Word documents, after being
unable to load them with Word on a Windows machine.

I certainly call those problems faults, and I can't imagine who else's
they would be.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [There is a limit to how stupid people really
are -- just as there's a limit to the amount of hydrogen in the Universe. 
There's a lot, but there's a limit.  -- Dave C. Barber on a.f.c.  ]