Peter Gutmann
Great to see Peter wearing the shirt I gave him at Foo while he was presenting at Webstock Mini last week. Unfortunately I wasn't there... hopefully he only had nice things to say about us :)
Comments
Anonymous
March 16, 2007
Nigel - we recorded the talks, so once we get them online you can see for yourself :) MikeAnonymous
March 17, 2007
Thanks Mike! You guys rock!Anonymous
March 22, 2007
Actually while wearing that shirt I ended up defending the Word .doc format against OpenOffice as a viable long-term archive format. Did you guys build mind-control circuitry into the fibres? :-).Anonymous
March 22, 2007
Good Job! I'm sure you mean .docx that's the open one ;) Having worked with xCBL and other B2B scheme standards in the past you can always get from a superset to a subset by using XSLT and if you don't want to write it yourself check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter My opinion BTW :)Anonymous
March 23, 2007
Actually I was non-specific, either .doc or .docx (.doc is a Word core dump, .docx is a Word core dump with angle brackets). My argument was more a business-case one, Microsoft both have a history of bending over backwards to maintain backwards-compatibility (see for example http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/) and a business responsibility (meaning they risk getting sued into oblivion if they don't :-) to maintain support for .doc for the rest of eternity. OTOH the OpenOffice group could pick up their ball and go home tomorrow, leaving users with nothing more than a "you've got the source code, what's the problem?". Now I'm not saying that they will do that, just that if I had to bet on one of the two still being around and actively supporting the data in ten or twenty years' time, I'd bet on Microsoft. This is completely separate from the debate over the relative merits of the technology, it's purely a business-model argument. (Maybe I should have posted this opinion anonymously :-).