Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Adam Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

> > What you are thinking
> > of as added feature may actually be considered a liability by the market
> > which is more interested in compatibility than functionality.  
> I believe many of us have adopted gnumeric because of the added features 
> and correct behaviour/result.  In my personal opinion there is already 
> much to high a value put on interoperability with XL.

Agree. 

Personally, my version of interoperability would be the ability to run 
gnumeric as a service via an standard RPC and communicate with it to read 
or write data from gnumeric files.  File format interoperability issues 
are just a pain, use the code that was meant to work with them.

The above is possible with Open/Star Office, and the documentation isn't 
bad.  I don't know if it can be accomplished with gnumeric.

One must be careful how seriously one takes all that stuff one finds in 
"big thinker" books about software developement, and all their assumptions 
about "the market" as though it is an intelligent, far-sighted, and 
homogeneous entity.  Lots of historical and current trends indicate that 
none of the above criteria are neccesarily true.