[okfn-discuss] A question of history

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

> In the long run whatever one does it would seem sensible to move away
> from word since the format is obfuscated and therefore ends up tying the
> data to the tool -- definitely not what one wants here. The obvious
> thing would be go initially to OpenOffice: it can import .doc without
> problem, is very similar to Word in appearance for those used to Word,
> has PDF export built in and, most importantly, has a back end xml format
> that is well-documented and fairly easy to manipulate with standard
> tools (xsl etc).

Yes, I have been thinking about that for a while. Unfortunately, there
was a bug in openoffice that caused system and application crashes
with these documents; it has just been fully fixed in the development
version [1].  OpenOffice also appears not to implement section breaks,
which causes havoc with footnote numbering.  But I am sure we will get
there.

> 1. (social issue) Agree on an open license

Ok; is there a place we should start to inform ourselves about licenses?

> 2. (social/tech issue) Start releasing the work both source
> (word/openoffice/text ...) and compiled (pdf) -- this already seems to
> be in progress though one might want to have version numbers to identify
> newer and older stages of work

Yes; I believe the plan for now is to release source to those who
request it via email. I think this is to protect the intellectual
property of the contributors.  Obviously this is not ideal, and maybe
it will be possible to sort that out with some sort of partial delayed
partial release or a good license.

> Examples of use-cases (put ultra-simply) might be:
>    * allow the comparison of two versions of the same text
>    * allow collaborative /decentralized/ annotation of a given text

That seems very sensible.  But, at the moment the team thinking
technical thoughts about this, is me and my father, more or less (dad
- is that right?).  Maybe we should try and set up some funding or
other collaboration to make sure this makes some progress.

> Does seem more practical and more useful?

Yes - thanks a lot,

Matthew

[1] http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=49069