Re: Results for Debian's Position on the GFDL

[Walter Landry <walter@geodynamics.org>]

olive <olive.lin@versateladsl.be> wrote:
> W
> > A Word document is never Transparent.  From the GFDL:
> > 
> >   A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy,
> >   represented in a format whose specification is available to the
> >   general public ... 
> > 
> > The Word format specification is not available to the public.
> 
> Word documents can be read and written by a free software whose source 
> code is available (openoffice). So I think that now we can say that the 
> specification of the Word format is available to the public, even if it 
> is not published by M$. (there might be an exeption for some unusual 
> very complex word documents not fully understandable by openoffice, but 
> from my experience this is only a very tiny proportion of word documents 
> using some special feature like macros, etc.).

Your last sentence shows that the specification is not public.  That
is all that is required to keep it from being Transparent.  Having a
tool that partially implements the spec does not completely document
the spec.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu