Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Do not support writing to OOXML format

Hi Larry, all,

Larry Gusaas schrieb:
> On 2011/01/02 12:47 PM  Italo Vignoli wrote:
> > If you want to have a say in software development you are welcome to
> > contribute to the code

As I know Italo (not being a programmer himself) quite well, I know that 
his reply could have been easier for you to understand, if he added more 
information:

Our community consists of several groups with several tasks. Every group 
has it's own expertize and inside these groups people know each other 
and know about their expertize and position in our community.

Software development is done by code contributors. They can write the 
code they want, but only the code bringing more positive aspects than 
negative ones will be included in the package.

If other groups see problems in some code contributions, they start to 
discuss this topic with the coders, providing them with the expertize on 
the specific context (User Experience is a good example, the topic here 
might belong to Marketing) and trying to convince them, that the 
negative aspects are more valid than the positive ones.

If they don't get to a common conclusion, the last decision will be 
taken by the Board of Directors, at the moment by the Steering Committee 
until the BoD will have been elected.
> So only people who write code have a say in the development of
> LibreOffice? What about people who do the QA? Or the people providing
> support? (I mainly provide support for OOo, mainly for Mac users)

I hope you understand the basis of meritocracy - so all the contributors 
are relevant in *their specific area of expertize*

This thread shows several thoughts and positions towards the OOXML write 
support in LibO.

Some people want to get rid of it, some want to have it moved to a 
different place in the program (export, extension), some want to provide 
a clearer description of the negative aspects of the format.

Others want to keep it as it is and evolve it towards better quality.

So how can we find out, which way is the right one to go?

Surely not by following the loudest or most active posters in this thread.

I don't know if you are involved deeply enough in our community to know 
about the position of one of another contributor to this thread.

I'm quite sure that I miss some of the relevant people, but please have 
a look at the postings by the Steering Committee members:

Thorsten Behrens (code developer), who mentioned that it is necessary to 
work on the OOXML filters now, because this is the only way to provide 
high quality at the time MS drops their .doc support.

Italo Vignoli (marketing expert and official marketing contact for TDF) 
pointing several times to the necessity to provide the best solution for 
our (present and future) users, proposing to avoid any marketing 
strategy against Microsoft and to leave education about "more open 
standard" in ODF to our marketing group instead of removing existing 
code from the sources.

I could mention Charles-H. Schulz, Sophie Gautier, Cor Nouws and others, 
but the main fact is:

All the points mentioned in this thread have been taken into 
consideration by the Steering Committee and the developers.

Thus it was really important to raise such kind of questions.

We are a community where concerns are heard. But repeating them don't 
impose a higher relevance to them.

So despite good reasons to abandon the write support for OOXML from our 
standard save-as dialog, the reasons to keep it are more important.

It might be quite easy to change the wording of the warning text when 
saving in non-ODF document formats (different texts for MS proprietary 
and "quasi-open" formats might need more programming skills), so if 
someone provides an improved text as patch - or finds a programmer 
willing to build a patch from such wording - I'm quite sure that this 
will find positive consideration.

In my eyes this thread has been reached a size that covers most of the 
aspects of the subject, so I'd like to see it ending soon.

If someone is interested in collecting all the opinions mentioned here 
in a wiki page, it would be easier to point there, when someone (without 
knowledge of all the mails here) restarts a similar topic again.

> You can take your elitist developer attitude and stuff it.

Pleas stop such comments, they don't lead to any positive result.

Thanks in advance!

Bernhard

PS: And to come back on your very first statement, the agreement between 
Microsoft and Novell: Even if some Novell employees work on our code, 
even if they contributed Go-oo code - this doesn't mean that they have 
to follow their employers opinion in their spare time. TDF is open to 
contributors from more than one company, so dependency is much less 
relevant than at OOo. And if you have a look at the Credits page in your 
LibO version, you can compare the contributor's names with Go-oo 
contributors (or a list of Novell employees, if you have one): Only a 
minority of our contributors are paid by Novell. TDF is not governed by 
any companies politics - neither Novell nor Oracle, nor any other...

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