*BSD News Article 66707


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From: byron@cc.gatech.edu (Byron A Jeff)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX)
Date: 22 Apr 1996 12:22:59 GMT
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology - College of Computing
Lines: 28
Message-ID: <4lftn3$olb@solaria.cc.gatech.edu>
References: <4ki055$60l@Radon.Stanford.EDU> <31769650.284D5C90@lambert.org> <3176f2d7.2987912@news.ucs.ubc.ca> <4lfm6m$d2c@rigel.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>
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In article <4lfm6m$d2c@rigel.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>,
Anselm Lingnau  <lingnau@tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de> wrote:
>In article <3176f2d7.2987912@news.ucs.ubc.ca>,
>Eric Gisin <ericg@unixg.ubc.ca> wrote:
>
>> There are absolutely no laws preventing one from reverse engineering the
>> Word document format (as long as you don't look at the EXEs), and
>> writing software that can read and write it.
>
>Over here in Europe, you're even allowed to look at the EXEs. It's still
>a lot of work. Besides, all that work will have been for the birds when
>the next version of Word comes out.

We can care less about the new version of Word for the simple reason that
there are no documents written in the new format. There are billions of
documents in the current format.

If we can write a converter for Word 6 docs we're on the same playing field
as everyone else. We can introduce an open document format and applications
to read/write/edit/print documents in that format.

Then folks have a choice.

BAJ
-- 
Another random extraction from the mental bit stream of...
Byron A. Jeff - PhD student operating in parallel - And Using Linux!
Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332   Internet: byron@cc.gatech.edu