Stephen McGibbon, Microsoft writes:
Another of my colleagues, this time Andrea Valboni in Italy, has just written about an interesting project kicking off there to extend the Apache POI Java libraries to include OpenXML.
Isn't it funny that all these Microsoft partners start new projects to bring support of OOXML to various open source projects. Sure, people who took a look at the respective code of these myriads of projects were not very much impressed. But at least you get the press headlines. XY adds Open XML support to Emacs, etc. etc. Useful to invoke the impression that your company does not control your upcoming ISO standard and to get your partners to participate for you in the national standard committees and vote YES! You know, it doesn't look too good if you pay for participation in the standard bodies or offer marketing benefits. Why not let them do a software project? After all the EU-Commission watches the ISO process and they do not like committee stuffing.
Arnaud Le Hors (IBM) posted a contribution on his blog titled:"Let’s be clear: The Apache Software Foundation does NOT support OOXML."
Supporting OOXML. cannot be merely declared on the sole basis that a software can read OOXML files, or store OOXML files. If that were the case, then any XML parser could be said to support OOXML and the Apache Software Foundation could be said to support OOXML because its XML parser, Xerces, can read OOXML files (one would actually have to unzip them first but it’s not like Microsoft would stop at that kind of detail). But it takes much more than that to really support OOXML.
But Stephan McGibbon (Microsoft) was pretty clear about his announcement this time:
It's worth pointing out that this announcement doesn't represent an endorsement of Open XML by the ASF. (His blog also mentions he's a lawyer)
Now you understand why lawyers make life better. They care about the facts.
The wonderful aspect about free software is that anyone can write and contribute and fork whatever he or she wants. Another announcement that took me with great surprise is the criteria for the planned Wine 1.0, the Windows compatibility layer for other platforms and Microsoft has no stake here in the wine glas: Photoshop Cs2 and Microsoft Powerpoint, Word and Excel Viewer 2003 compatibility. Let's see if we get an announcement from another Microsoft partner next to make Wine MS Office Viewer 2008 compatible in order to "bring OpenXML to Linux". Just again.