Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Dienstag Oktober 31, 2006

More from IBM's Rob Weir on ECMA Office Open XML
"By mandating the perpetuation of this bug, we're asking for trouble. Date libraries in modern programming languages like C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby will all calculate dates correctly according to the Gregorian Calendar. So any interpretation of dates in OOXML files in these languages will be off by one day unless the author of the software adds their own workaround to their code to account for Excel's bug. Certainly some will make the "correction" properly, at their own expense. But many will not, perhaps because they did not see it deep within the 6,000 page specification."

... and this one:

"But we need to keep in mind that there is a difference between a specification and a standard. A specification tells the plain facts of what a particular technology does without comment as to whether it is good or bad. I could drop a box of toothpicks on my desk and write up a detailed specification on how they landed. An open standard, on the other hand, goes beyond mere specification, and promotes a preferred way of achieving cross-vendor and cross-application interoperability."

Found here and here.
( Okt 31 2006, 04:26:50 PM CET ) Permalink

ODF at IGF in Athens
"Sun Microsystems Inc and like-minded organizations will promote the use of open standards, including the OpenDocument Format much feared by Microsoft Corp, at the Internet Governance Forum summit this week in Athens, Greece."
The full article can be found here.
( Okt 31 2006, 04:16:49 PM CET ) Permalink

French Ministry for Agriculture and Fishing choosing OpenOffice.org
Great news! If I understood this article correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong!), the French Ministry for Agriculture and Fishing chose OpenOffice.org due to the EOL of Microsoft Office 2000. The article also refers to the recent Danish TCO/cost study which mentions the possibility of significant cost savings based on OpenOffice.org.

The French people reading my blog might be able to provide a more detailed summary.
( Okt 31 2006, 04:11:03 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

phpMyAdmin with ODF support
I just realized that I had overlooked this blog entry by Florian Effenberger. As you can read here, phpMyAdmin now offers ODF support.
( Okt 31 2006, 03:54:30 PM CET ) Permalink