Re: Euro-Office 1.0 Is Here

On 2026-06-12, Rich wrote:

> Nuno Silva <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 2026-06-12, Retrograde wrote:
>> 
>>> On Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:37:20 -0000 (UTC)
>>> Lawrence D’Oliveiro <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> That’s not the only controversy over the project, of course; many
>>>> people are pointing out that it would have been much less troublesome
>>>> to start from a well-established code base like LibreOffice. But it
>>>> seems like the EU specifically wanted something that would work as
>>>> seamlessly as possible with Microsoft’s native document formats,
>>>> rather than any open standard.
>>>
>>> I understand the reasoning behind it, and they've made their choice.
>>> But if ever there were a moment for the world to unite behind ODF, this
>>> is it.  Very sorry to see the opportunity pass.
>> 
>> This is puzzling me, indeed, there have existed alternatives to MS
>> Office already, and LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have been one for
>> years.
>
> The original quote implies the EU fools wanted to continue to use "DOCX 
> files" but without the "DOCX tax" included.
>
> Yes, they would have been much better off going with LibreOffice, and 
> switching their desired format to ODF, and simply making DOCX "legacy".  
> But the sound of things is they may have wanted to continue to DOCX 
> everything.

If that's true, that's insane (for one thing, it really is hunting an
undocumented format, at least it used to be said that Microsoft
themselves were not complying with the Office Open XML specification),
and that also smells of sabotage a little bit.

I mean, if someone wanted to sabotage the effort, that's one way to do
it...

-- 
Nuno Silva