Comment 57 for bug 979320

Hello Thorsten,

I am a big believer in free software and in standardization of document formats.

First, if a commercial project introduces a bug, there is no way to have a discussion with the developers. With free software I can and that is, most of the time, refreshing.

Second, we as a company need to keep our documentation available for at least 10 years after delivering the last product. That would mean for us at least for a period of 15 years after creating a document. That's why we choose ODF and PDF.

Obviously the choice for ODF raises a lot of eyebrows internally and externally for us too, as skiani also mentions.

The funny thing with standards is that it is not the writing of a standard that makes it a standard, but the adoption of it. So while former versions of OO and LO incorrectly implement it in some respects, that implementation has become the 'defacto standard' pure by market share - at least for now.

I honestly can't say if this bug will hold up large scale adoption of > 3.5 (17 users subscribing to this bug only). And when everybody transitions, there will be no difficulties in exchanging documents between companies. In that respect exchanging doc's with MS Office users is a bigger issue.

Creating a having config switch as you suggest would probably only have the effect of prolonging the transition phase as new doc's with the broken format would be created with each day passing, which is not would I would want either.

It would probably have been better to add a fix to the 3.4.6 release, especially as that was as I understand for a similar reason, file compatibility of encrypted documents, but I guess that is now too late.

Having a Save As OpenOffice/LibreOffice 3.3/3.4 option would work for me, but I guess building that, getting it tested and distributed would take so much time that it would be too late to help anyone?

Otherwise I would ask you 'yes, pretty please, could you do this for us, ordinary but involved free software users'.

Thanks for the attention, I will shut up now, see how the world adopts 3.5.x and then follow.

Bye.