In concrete terms, what sort of things would people reasonably hope to achieve by joining ECMA?
Of course, I'd be more comfortable with it if we put out a press release saying something to the effect of 'we see no way to avoid implementing OOXML without screwing our users, so we're joining ECMA to make sure it sucks as little as possible. All other things being equal, we'd much prefer to implement a spec that has a much better patent grant, was developed through a more public process, uses open standards like mathml, etc., We are going to implement the other specs too, right? So we shouldn't treat this as a matter of choosing one or the other. but since MS has a dominant market position, we don't have much of a choice in the matter.' We don't need to be bullied into implementing formats that users want to use. We want to support all formats that users use, to the extent we can. However, it may be true that we don't have much of a choice in this matter. Certain aspects of OOXML are patented by Microsoft, in the US and some other countries. Microsoft offers a gratis patent license, on conditions that do not allow free implementations. To change OOXML enough that we could distribute an implementation of it in the US would be a very big change. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/microsoft-new-monopoly.html. _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list