Keep away from proprietary poison!

[Francois-Rene Rideau <fare@tunes.org>]

> I'm getting WP9 because it seems to offer the best solution
> on both Windows and Linux platforms for GUI SGML.

Beware of WP, StarOffice, etc, since they use proprietary formats,
whereas it is essential that the LDP publish only open formats.
In as much as we can allow a variety of formats for our documents
(lout, lyx, texinfo, latex, html, txt, etc),
we CANNOT afford to use proprietary formats such as those used by WP9
and other proprietary software.
It is NOT a matter of price. WP, soffice, etc, are available free of charge.
It is a matter of decency.
We ought to "eat our own dogfood", or else we lose all our credibility
as a project to document a complete free software system.
Call that "NIH syndrome" if you wish; to me, it's about self-respect.
We _might_ accept documents produced by WP if and only if
they are conformant SGML, HTML or whatever open format.
We must NOT accept .wp9 .doc or any such kind of files.

Again, if SGML is a problem to some authors, we may recruit people
to convert contributed HTML/text/whatever into proper SGML.
After all, there are volunteers to translate the LDP
into a broad range of human languages.
Translating a poorer format into SGML isn't more difficult.
The LDP community can easily afford an additional translation effort.

Stop whining committee-like about what should be done.
Organize actual work.
The time wasted in pointless discussions would more productively spent
in translating stuff into SGML or writing better SGML tools.
Shut the fuck up. Just do it.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
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