Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice

Hi :)
Arachaic formats (ie old formats that are almost never used nowadays but may have been popular 
once) might be something that Extensions could be used to deal with.  We might not want legacy code 
retained in the main code to read ancient formats that 'no-one' uses anymore but it might be nice 
to be able to add-on an Extension to read old love letters and such.  

Also formats that kept the same name but went through many changes.  So that one Extension might 
help people read Doc formats prior to the 1997 version and another reads the 97 one.  That might be 
something to help our poor devs deal with the 3 different DocX formats now in use.  One to read 
DocXs from MSO 2007, another for the 2010 and the 3rd for MSO 365.  At the moment it would probably 
be best to have the 2010 one by default but if that could easily be swapped-out and replaced by the 
365 one in a couple of years then we might retain a way of being able to read all of them.  

I think such Extensions would need to be released on OpenSource licenses either BSD type licenses 
that need to attribute previous artists/authors/coders or GPL type ones that don't acknowledge 
previous coders.  Then when the Extensions become outdated it might still be possible for people to 
update them so they work in whichever future version of LO we are on by that time.  
Regards from
Tom :)  





> ________________________________
> From: Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com>
> To: users@global.libreoffice.org 
> Sent: Sunday, 25 November 2012, 23:56
> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice
>
> On 11/25/2012 05:27 PM, Girvin R. Herr wrote:
> > Tom Davies wrote:
> > > Hi :)
> > > It's interesting that there has been almost no posts about articles such as this one.
> > > https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success
> > >  
> > >
> > > There are some interesting stats that are very well presented in there and it's worth using to 
> > > spread the word of how LibreOffice works.
> > >
> > > For me one of the key things that no article seems to mention is that while many hefty 
> > > companies are vanishing seemingly overnight  it seems somewhat dangerous to rely on just one.  
> > > It would be like not making back-ups of critical information!!   If we can bear to think of LO 
> > > and AOO as being similar enough that users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily and 
> > > thus as being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community then that community is massive.  Taken as 
> > > being 1 product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes the size of IBM or Google (or 
> > > RedHat or SUSE) were to simply vanish overnight then there would still be a good product out 
> > > there.  By sticking with MS people are risking everything they have by being so heavily 
> > > dependant on just 1 company and that company is losing market share to mobile devices.  Perhaps 
> > > Win8 might help them recover the OS battle but it might not.
> > > Regards from
> > > Tom :) 
> > Greetings,
> > My primary goal is to reduce, or preferably eliminate, risk to my data.  I learned the hard way 
> > many years ago that depending on M$ and other proprietary software suppliers was way too risky.  
> > I then decided to switch to Open Source software and take back control of my computer.  I have 
> > never regretted that decision. Even if LO/AOO go away, there are still other applications, such 
> > as Koffice, that will still allow me to read/maintain my documents & data.  And, if it comes 
> > down to it, I can always unzip my LO/OO files and get the data from the file(s) inside.  That 
> > allows me to sleep at night.
> > Girvin Herr
> +1
> I prefer the FOSS / open formats model better for the reasons you noted. 
> > From a general user perspective; open formats are probably more 
> important for long term accessibility. Most long term users can remember proprietary formats for 
> software that were very popular 15+ years ago that are unreadable by any software in current 
> release. To make matters worse you may even have files you would like to read in these formats. 
> You may find a conversion software that claims to accurately convert the obsolete format to a 
> currently used format - I can not vouch for anyone's claims.
>
> The problem with any proprietary format is whether someone will continue to provide software that 
> can edit it in the future or will it eventually become an orphan. Amipro and Wordstar come to mind 
> and I am sure others can be named.
>
> -- Jay Lozier
> jslozier@gmail.com
>
>
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