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Interview with Sun's Florian Reuter
silentbob4 writes "Mad Penguin is running a series of three interviews with people in the trenches working to bring you OpenOffice.org 2.0. The first of these interviews, with Sun's Florian Reuter, covers some of the differences between the truly open XML found in OpenOffice.org 2.0, and the closed MS Word ML found in the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. He also discusses the importance of simple end users in the process of improving the code with bug reports."
Problem is the Microsoft XML format is proprietary to Microsoft. While the standard is "open" -- as in published -- there are restrictions as to who can implement it.
Problem comes 5-10 years down the road, if/when an organization chooses to move away from Microsoft. Maybe they're going to OpenOffice.org 5.0, or maybe they're going to GoogleOffice. Or maybe a whole other developer has come along and revolutionized the office application suite.
But, you're stuck. You have 10 years of data that's locked into Microsoft products, what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed? Buy Office and the new product for everything? Create a "legacy application gateway" with a few copies of Office accessable via Citrix or VNC?
Also, there's interoperability with external organizations. Right now, to do business with the federal or most state governments, your business must use Office to be able to exchange data. No ifs ands or buts about it.
With OpenDocument, this isn't an issue. No matter what product you buy in the future, it can work with OpenDocument. Doesn't matter what product a client or customer uses -- if it's OD-compatible, you can exchange data.