Free Software Linux

"I'm giving a talk at the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research in Cologne on Monday 3 August, 1.30-3pm. Here's the abstract: Emacs in Scientific Research ..."

A little while back I gave Peter Murray-Rust a hard time for daring to suggest that OOXML might be acceptable for archiving purposes. Here's his response to that lambasting: My point is that - at present - we have few alternatives. Authors use Word or LaTeX. We can try to change them - and Peter Sefton (and we) are trying to do this with the ICE system. But realistically we aren’t going to change them any time soon. My point was that if the authors deposit Word we can do something with it which we cannot do anything with PDF. It may be horrible, but it’s less horrible than PDF. And it exists.

"According to this, the ISO are now calling a "standard" the Microsoft Office format (which is cynically called "Office Open XML"). [...] What is interesting is that TeX, LaTeX, OGG/Vorbis, OGG/Theora, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml, are not standardized by any organization. read more

"According to this, the ISO are now calling a "standard" the Microsoft Office format (which is cynically called "Office Open XML"). [...] What is interesting is that TeX, LaTeX, OGG/Vorbis, OGG/Theora, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml, are not standardized by any organization. read more

"According to this, the ISO are now calling a "standard" the Microsoft Office format (which is cynically called "Office Open XML"). [...] What is interesting is that TeX, LaTeX, OGG/Vorbis, OGG/Theora, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml, are not standardized by any organization. read more

"According to this, the ISO are now calling a "standard" the Microsoft Office format (which is cynically called "Office Open XML"). [...] What is interesting is that TeX, LaTeX, OGG/Vorbis, OGG/Theora, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml, are not standardized by any organization. read more

This is an editorial about file conversions. It starts with a story about Free Software Magazine and our struggle with article formats, and continues explaining why the world needs to get rid of Office Open XML, which could create more problems than the Microsoft monopoly itself.