On Thu, Aug 30, 2007, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote about "Re: Open standards": > > The chances of Microsoft Word2003 documents being readable five years from > > now is not good. > > I disagree. I think MS Word documents will be readable for a long time > because people want them to be. A better argument would be all of those > Hebrew word processing programs that were popular in the 1980's that > no one has a copy of.
Who can gurantee you that in 5 years (or 10, or 50) years, Microsoft Word doesn't becomes as unpopular and rare as Qtext is today? 20 years ago, Qtext was so popular noone could ever believe that it could go away. But it did. And it did because only one company supported it, and only one codebase existed that read it, and this codebase died with its company. Ironically, the situation of MS-Word in this respect then Qtext is better because of free software! A lot of free software can read (and write) MS-Word after years of reverse-engineering efforts. But still, only one company - Microsoft - has any real interest that this format lives on. This could be a problem in the future, even if you don't see it now. P.S. "Open Standards" is a sexy, politically-correct slogan, as well as being a very good idea. But still, I believe that "Free Software" is much more important (even if less politically-correct and communist-sounding). Take a look at troff, for example. It is, believe it or not, 34 years old - older than Qtext (and older than me...). People have rarely been using it for more than a decade (it was replaced by TeX, OpenOffice, XML, and other things). It was never an "Open Standard", or even a "standard" at all, just something that the late Joe Ossanna, and later Brian Kernighan, whipped up in Bell Labs. But the free implementation - groff - gave it immortality. Almost exactly 30 years after Ossanna's death, I can still view troff documents on my new computer, and will probably be able to do so also 30 years into the future - as long as just one crazy guy continues to maintain the groff program. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Aug 30 2007, 16 Elul 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |If con is the opposite of pro, is http://nadav.harel.org.il |congress the opposite of progress? ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
