Creating Excel files on Linux

[Roman Suzi]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Alex Martelli wrote:

>Roman Suzi wrote:
>        ...
>> mercilessly.) So, if MIcrosoft monopoly will last, my non-conformistic
>> views will make me non-conformic with the whole society, because I will
>
>...unless said monopoly switches to using open formats for its documents,
>and, as it happens, this is indeed going on (you can write .RTF, which is
>an open and documented format equivalent to .DOC from Word's viewpoint,
>with many systems; Office XP uses XML as its native format, I think, and
>the future Office .NET surely will; etc, etc).

Microsoft takes open standards and make some little "improvements"
to them. I do not know, what is wrong, but I was unable
to communicate RTF from StarOffice to Office 2002 (==XP?)
due to loss of some letters.

>> not be able to interface with state using free systems. For example, if I
>> had a firm, I *MUST* pay for at least MSDOS under which works the program
>> to prepare tax-reports! While such programs are probably just several
>> screens of Python code + database of classificators, etc.
>
>The recently-released version 1.0.2 of DOSEMU, with FreeDos on top, can
>probably let you run that program on a good Linux i386 machine.

Yes, I know. But the program could be open source - there is
nothing proprietary in it, only special format it uses must
stricly conform to what tax office uses.

>> The only hope is to convince gov's to use free software as happens in the
>> West.
>
>I'm not too sure about "the West" -- there's a lot of non-free software in
>governmental use around here (and now that, as a part of the recent
>government, we had the guy who headed Microsoft Italia until joining said
>government, my personal hopes that this will change have gone down:-).
>
>Rather, it seems to me that China is pursuing a strong policy of free-sw
>use (in their case the point being definitely the free-as-in-beer part),
>and France may be heading in the same direction (in _their_ case, the
>desire of resisting American cultural hegemony is probably uppermost).

Interesting.

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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