Last time I wrote that the threats presented by Novell's OpenXML support plugin for OO.o don't outweigh the benefits of having such support. Even broken and partial support is still better than nothing because it enables companies to do a one-off conversion, with a manual pass if need be, to migrate away from MS Office. And it lets individuals, and companies which aren't ready yet for that migration, read evil OpenXML documents sent by other companies (or your government, in some cases).
Of course OpenXML support in OO.o can also encourage people
not to move away from MS Office, because if the metaphorical neighbours' kid who insists on using free software can read the documents your MS Word produces, he won't refuse to fix your computer. (A lucky few even have a government that wants to use open formats.) And it can also make people see OO.o as an inferior MS Office clone, because it can work with MS Office files but not as well as MS Office does itself, and it loses a bit of formatting data every time it opens them.
But by that measure we should also condemn projects like Samba and Wine. They too deliver inferior and late implementations of proprietary Microsoft technologies. I haven't heard any cries out of Groklaw that Samba betrays the free software community. (And don't talk to me about pure-Samba no-Windows networks. You could have all the same features on top of NFS or whatever if a tenth of Samba's development effort had gone that way instead. Samba's purpose is Windows compatibility, period.)
And what about the existing partial and inferior support for the MS Office .doc .xls etc. formats in OO.o and every other free office suite in existence? What about the FAT and NTFS filesystem support in Linux? I seem to remember PJ being proud of the community for such massive effort and dedication to often thankless projects of reverse engineering.
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