A response to Miguel de Icaza re: OOXML
Monday, March 19th, 2007A guy called Rob Weir responded to Miguel de Icaza’s blog about the standardisation of the Microsoft Office Open format.
What amused me was Miguel’s response to this, and then Rob’s follow up.
Miguel writes:
I actually *wrote* a spreadsheet and I actually *know* how the formula implementations came to be.
…snip…
Other than trumpeting ODF, have you actually contributed *ANY* code to OpenOffice, or you are just another armchair general?
Rob responds:
I prefer to let my words and logic stand for themselves. A resume is a poor substitute for a sound argument.
But if you think it makes a bit of difference, I joined IBM as part of their purchase of Lotus, and over the past 17 years I’ve coded on SmartSuite, Lotus Components, eSuite, K-Station, Portal and Workplace, among some of the more notable projects.
Along the way I’ve done a good deal of file format work, with SmartSuite formats, with the legacy binary Office formats, with ODF and with OOXML. I also was part of the team that made the Xalan XSLT engine and contributed that to Apache. So I have some basis for my opinions, based on practical experience as well as clear thinking. You are free to accept or reject either or both.
