I'm following this thread since the last week and I believe that this is an extremely important discussion for us all.
I support the initial idea of concentrating our work force on better ODF support and functionality improvements in LO, but I also understand the need that people have to use LO to manipulate MSO documents. To be honest, the far we keep 'good' MSO support on LO, the more we are contributing to maintain the status quo of MS formats, so I'm not proposing to stop it right now, but to start thinking about a date to do so (i.e. we'll keep the support until the end of 2012, and after that, we will not maintain that development... what's done is done, but we'll not put efforts on improving it after that date). This proposal is almost aligned with what Microsoft did with their ODF implementation (the "Implementation Notes" that Dennis is always talking about, where they simply stated "we will not support that" and period), and also aligned with the way we do things at standards development (we mark something as deprecated on one version, keep that as deprecated on the next one and on a version later on, when almost nobody is using that feature, we simply remove that from the spec). In summary: It's good to users that we support MSO files, but the real world side effect of that is that people will keep using MSO files... it's up to us to find a way to change the Status Quo in a smooth way :) My 2 cents, Jomar -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
