Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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An Office-ODF Converter Regatta

Hmm, “Regatta” might be a good interoperability-product name.  You saw it here first.

I have grave doubt about the efficacy of da Vinci, the Open Document Foundation’s cut at making ODF a native format for Microsoft Office. 

{tags: orcmid ODF OOX Sun MicroSystems OpenOffice StarOffice conversion technology}

But this announcement from Sun Microsystems gets serious attention.  The remaining test is whether it can provide pure ODF or at least pure ODF with clearly-documented extensions so that OpenOffice.org and Star Office won’t be the only ODF-using applications that can play.  If Sun’s approach works, we can finally stop listening to the raving about da Vinci’s legendary fidelity.

What I like about the approach at Sun, the largest code contributor to open-source projects on the planet, is how their OpenOffice.org participants quietly and publicly chug along doing the work.  Simon Phipps can rant all he wants.  I’ve stopped reading him.  What I care about is what the developers do and how responsibly they do it.

I can still see needs for other converters, and also for special-purpose applications that ingest either (i.e., both) OOX or ODF. 

I think there’s more to look at later.  I want to go on record that this is the kind of work that it is important to pay close attention to and to work to understand how the different document models of OOX and ODF are reconciled.

Thanks, Sun.  This works sounds very promising and I look forward to being able to put the preview through its paces.

posted by orcmid at 2/07/2007 04:51:45 PM