Re: [office] Possible teleconference with Burton

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Duane,

Duane Nickull wrote:
> Patrick:
>
>
> On 1/21/08 4:21 PM, "Patrick Durusau" <patrick@durusau.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> Question: What is the purpose of an open source project when a vendor,
>> in this case Microsoft, obviously already has such a mapping in place to
>> convert from legacy files to OpenXML?
>>     
>
> By convention, open source means it can be what the contributors agree is in
> scope.  In other words, if there is something the community needs and able
> contributors, it can be built.  MS put money into this to help the community
> help themselves.
>
>   
Which doesn't appear to me to answer my question.

Let me put it another way:

Start with a source language, any source language. You want to 
standardize a target for the conversion of that source language, with 
some additional features that do not appear in the source language.

Is it meaningful to standardize a target language in the absence of a 
mapping from the source language?

If a mapping is standardized, then there is no need for an open source 
project to produce one. Unless the community wanted one that was 
different from the one specified in the standard. But as I noted 
originally, there is no such mapping in the proposed standard.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick
> For the record, I am not an MS fan and use a Mac.
>
> Duane
>
>   

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)