When you go through the whole archive it looks to me like Doug’s suggestion would bring ODF to a point where it would be marginally useful to developers in an enterprise environment, rather than just being a tool for those who want to interoperate (or try to interoperate) between simple office suites.

Rob’s responses in return make very little sense, he is supposed to be a supporter of ODF, yet he seems to be doing his best to hold back functionality to a point where it suits one or more of the limited applications IBM builds in this area, I suspect he is afraid of the engineering expectations that the Symphony team would face if this type of capability made it into the ODF file format.

One more point that you have missed… adding this type of custom schema support into ODF would kill of one of Microsoft’s arguments for why they need OpenXML.

Reading between the lines, as somebody who has watched this debate with an open mind, I see something very positive for ODF in Doug’s suggestion.

It’s probably about time to have governments declare MSFT as a problematic political movement.

“We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.”

–Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Platform Group Vice President

Smile, Alex. It might lull some chaps in the audience. Microsoft calls this strategy “schmoozing”.

I’d have thought you would hailed the inclusion of Microsoft in the ODF committees at the OASIS consortium, and declared yourself positively satisfied with this move.

Haven’t the contributions of MSFT employees there been both useful and constructive?

- Alex.