Weigh In On the OOXML Issue During Live Debate

lisah writes "Linux.com's Robin 'Roblimo' Miller will moderate a live debate today, Wednesday, December 5 at 1pm US EST (GMT -5), between the GNOME Foundation's press officer Jeff Waugh and fair competition advocate Roy Schestowitz. Both have strong — and opposing — points of view regarding GNOME's involvement with Microsoft's OOXML standard and vehemently defend their positions, so getting them together in the same virtual room ought to prove quite interesting. Although the broadcast will be archived as a podcast and available for free download, you can listen live as it's recorded and also call in to participate and ask questions."

Re:No point.

[aerthling]

Does it strike anyone else as strange that GNOME (which, I understand, began as an alternative to KDE because of its reliance on non-free software) is apparently such an enthusiastic supporter of Microsoft technologies like OOXML and .NET?

Re:It's things like this that bug me about GNOME

[cloricus]

What does it all have to do with GNOME anyway? Why is my desktop of choice even entering into a debate on OOXML. If the chap is supporting OOXML because he happens to think that Microsoft has struck gold in their waste land of creativity then that's fine. However if he (and others) are supporting it in the name of GNOME or its community then some thing really needs to be done to decouple this situation from my desktop.

I think GNOME is the best thing since sliced bread and I defend its design chioces. I think OOXML has nothing to do with GNOME and therefor I ignore it completely (in this context). What is different between those on this bandwagon and myself?

Re:No point.

[IBBoard]

.Net? No. OOXML? Yes.

For the developer who wants to spend his time developing applications rather than worrying about memory management then .Net is a great framework. The fact that it is cross-platform (as long as you're careful with windowing toolkits) is also a bonus. Microsoft purposefully released specs for the framework and it seems to be fairly well specified based on the amount of support in Mono.

OOXML is a bit stranger for Gnome to get involved in. Surely it's something that apps like Open Office should be concerned about, not the desktop people? I'd rather they were putting their effort into improving some of the tools they do have rather than working in things they don't have to directly support.

.

Disclaimer: I use Linux, I even use Gnome (have done since Redhat 7.3), I enjoy the freedom and power of open source, and I do dual-boot Windows XP. I code my own projects in C# and don't hate things purely because they're MS, just because they're generally not as well specified or obviously flawed compared to alternatives.

Re:No point.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no smoking gun, but Miguel's own writings on the topic suggest that even GNOME was intended to be a playpen for him to start cloning Microsoft's technologies. From http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html [ximian.com]:

At Microsoft I learned the truth about ActiveX and COM and I got very interested in it inmediately. Upon my return to Mexico Federico and I started to design a GUI control infrastructure for Unix that we code named `GNOME'. He was working as the maintainer of the GIMP back then and our efforts were targeted towards its adoption on Tk at the time. This project was the seed for what later became the Bonobo component architecture (sixteen months would pass before I started working on Bonobo).

No fancy editing on my part - he really does go straight from describing his admiration for ActiveX to describing his work on GNOME - the GNU Network Object Model Environment.

Thank God other people wrested control of the project from him years ago.

Re:No point.

[IBBoard]

Answer 2: it is also Sun's for having JAR files that aren't necessarily executable and can't be differentiated from library JARs. .Net, on the other hand, has .exe for executable and .dll for library code (normally). To your basic user then that's far more accessible and understandable than these strange JAR files that sometimes run and sometimes don't.

Even after I've installed Sun's JRE/JDK on Windows then JAR files end up with a "text file" icon. That's sure to confuse people and should be something that Sun have control over in their installer.

I'm not saying .Net is perfect, but for a .exe application then it is much closer to what the vast majority of the public consider "the norm" and is much easier for them to run (e.g. no command line with class path to mess around with as it is generally all in the right places). I've also yet to see a JAR that shows its own icon like an exe does in Windows.