An intriguing idea is whether we can have it both ways. Suppose you are in an ODF editor and you have a "Save for archiving..." option that would save your ODF document as normal, but also generate a PDF version of it and store it in the zip archive along with ODF's XML streams. Then digitally sign the archive along with a time stamp to make it tamper-proof. You would need to define some additional access conventions, but you could end up with a single document that could be loaded in an ODF editor (in read-only mode) to allow examination of the details of spreadsheet formulas, etc., as well as loaded in a PDF reader to show exactly how it was formated.
Page Comments
The Complete Feature list of the da Vinci plug-in for MSOffice that was proposed and signed off on by CIO Louis Gutierrez in early August of 2006 was well known by IBM's representatives who were working hand in hand with us at the time: Rob Weir, Don Harbison and Doug Heintzman.
Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to create a "benefactors Group" to overcome the challenge that Massachusetts ITD did not have a budget. IBM and Oracle selected Google, Sun, Novell, Intel, and Nokia as key benefactors. The group was provided with the complete feature set and roadmap for da Vinci development.
The da Vinci roadmap was the schedule announced by Louis Gutierrez in his mid year report, August 17th, 2006.
The da Vinci plug-in feature set, in order of priority, consisted of:
- ODF iX Approval at OASIS
- Plug-in for MS WORD
- Accessibility Interface for all ODF documents in MS Word
- PDF - ODF iX Digital Signature container
- Plug-in for MS Excel
- Interoperability Wizard for OpenOffice
- Plug-in for PowerPoint
- XForms Interface
The roadmap we provided Louis and the "benefactors" was sceduled out with deliverables, test periods, and cost per deliverable. The buy-in per "benefactor" was set at $350,000, and included full access to da Vinci and InfoSet source code plus a permanent seat on the Foundations Board of Directors. Louis apponeted Timothy Vaverchak as the Project Manager, and he was to handle all finacial concerns, deliverables, testing schedules and reporting back to the Board of Directors. Massachusetts, California and the EU-IDABC had permanent BofD seats, including exclusive control of the Chairmanship. da Vinci was to be fully open sourced under the GPL, although "benefactors" had full access and distribution rights.The least Rob could do is credit the Foundation with what was then a very creative and innovative solution. Instead, a year later he's trash talking us and posturing as if he thought of this approach!
~ge~
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