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Microsoft Standing Firm On OOXML ISO Vote
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 12, 2008 06:13 PM
from the tough-guy-huh dept.
from the tough-guy-huh dept.
christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has responded via the industry trade group ECMA to some of the thousands of criticisms of its submission of Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver takes a look at those responses to see if Microsoft has made significant changes in either the substance of OOXML or the manner in which the OOXML specification will be maintained going forward. Ossendryver concludes that Microsoft's position has not significantly changed, but only hardened in place in advance of the Ballot Resolution Meeting which is to occur from February 25 through 29 in Geneva. While no one can say for certain whether Microsoft will succeed in having OOXML win the nod from the international community, Ossendryer thinks that Microsoft's firm stance is likely to backfire."
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Legal Counsel Advises Against Accepting OOXML Pledge 139 comments
ozmanjusri writes "A legal analysis of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), which was purportedly written to give developers protection from patent risk, says the promise should not be trusted. According to the Software Freedom Law Center, 'While technically an irrevocable promise, in practice the OSP is good only for today.' This is on the back of a chaotic ISO meeting to resolve outstanding specification problems. The session was described by Tim Bray as 'Complete, utter, unadulterated bulls**t. This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen.' The advice would seem to throw more doubt on OOXML's suitability as an international document standard. Microsoft responded to these assertions stating that they've already taken steps to answer these concerns"
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How 'Firm' Would You Stand For 20 Billion A Year? (Score:5, Insightful)
The vendor lockin from Office makes up almost half the company's yearly revenue.
Microsoft would cease to exist as we know it if the office document lockin revenue went away to an open format.
Fight? LOL! This is the type of shit Microsoft execs live for.
Fake grassroots efforts.
Standards body subversion.
Paid for media shills.
Shame studies.
Mysterious compatibility problems with the competition.
All in a days work.
Microsoft's Latest Trick (Score:3, Interesting)
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Point taken; however ...
Yeah Apple is so open and this is the reason i can run OS X on my beige bo- OH WAIT I CANNOT !
Actually you can [wired.com]. There are a bunch of sites explaining how; that is much more useful than running XP on the new Intel Macs, which you can also do.
But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !
You have to convert them first [askbobrankin.com]; you can do that in Itunes.
Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !
It w
Re:Apple isn't proprieta- NO WAIT ! (Score:5, Insightful)
The iTunes DRM is roughly equivalant to a false positive for piracy in Windows Genuine Advantage. They've purchased the product, but now there are these digital hand-cuffs keeping them from using it. I doubt anyone saying that "false positives in WGA aren't too bad - there are work arounds. [link]" would get modded up too far, though.
Parent
This is really quite the stupid move (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the plan could just be to say "We would have got away with ISO approval, if it wasn't for that pesky IBM". It's a bit odd, but there we are. MS is losing the EU to open standards.
Here's for holding onto hope (Score:5, Interesting)
directly because of MSFT the ISO has done nothing but stumble around they can't get the majorities that they need in oder to pass standards. Everything is stagnate. Here's to hope that MSFT gamed the system so hard that it blows up in MSFT's face.
the file format is too important (Score:4, Insightful)
truly open file formats are the only resolution for ALL office documents used in business & government. for audio/video multimedia file formats too but office communications it is just simply too important to be left to a private corporation...
Have your say (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.noooxml.org/petition [noooxml.org]
Mental Image (Score:3, Informative)
Dear Microsoft, (Score:5, Insightful)
Sincerely,
ODF supporter.
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"Win the nod"? (Score:3)
I'm hoping that the non-bought votes that voted "yes" last time figure out what's going on and vote "no" this time. We'll see.
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However, ISO has the same idiotic notion as the UN that all countries are equal, so there are probably a hundred more bullshit dictatorships that Microsoft can pay off to join the vote. I just hope that the bullshit dictatorships Microsoft paid off before make such outrageous demands for a new payoff that Microsoft refuses to pay.
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"However, ISO has the same idiotic notion as the UN that all countries are equal"
Got any better ideas? Population? Oh yeah, letting China and India take 1/3 of the votes is a great idea. Democracy? Well, first, you have to define democracy.
This depends on whether you are talking about the ISO or the UN. But with respect to the UN I do think that it would make sense to create a parallel organization that only admits democracies and gives votes based on population. Maybe certain measures would require a gi
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For ISO, I would say that a formula that combines GDP with per-capita GDP would give a good measure of who the real industrial innovators and players are. China has a high GDP but a low per-capita GDP. It has massive internal corruption, but it is still a global player. Per-capita GDP provides a good measure of corruption, since corruptions syphons it off.
Horse running, cart rolling out of gate (Score:5, Insightful)
OOXML is not a standard. It cannot be used to shield any entity from MS's product changes. Also, OOXML extends into nebulous areas where other implementors or translators will be unable to replicate the viewers or editors like Office. Governments or corporations must take it or leave it.
PS
I recently received a DOCX from an MS rep and wrote back asking for a DOC format (we've not upgraded). They sent me a PDF. Moral: OOXML isn't a standard. There's no turning back - its a conversion world, not an interoperable one.
Re:Horse running, cart rolling out of gate (Score:5, Informative)
It's worse than that -- the MS-OOXML that Office saves documents in is not the same as the OOXML that MS spec'ed out to ECMA and got submitted to ISO. (This should be no surprise to anyone -- when has Microsoft ever produced software that matched the spec?) It's close, but different. Even if you could write software to the ECMA spec (doubtful since it is incomplete and ambiguous in places), it wouldn't interoperate well with MS Office.
Parent
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Wow. How utterly stupid. Thx for the info
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Office does no such thing. Office 2007 .docx files are not ECMA 376 OOXML. Do not conflate the two as Microsoft obviously intends you to do.
If we take this as given, then let us be absolutely clear here: the result i
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Not if they want to save face. This is a proud and stubborn family, you see. You cannot release Office, start saving a whole bunch of new files for it, then start changing for format too soon. Too much trouble, pklus people's backup have to still work. You have to slowly migrate the features in. Those features are polled and polled from feedback, security, and corporate wallets. Some never make it.
Really, your best best is to write an Office plugin/addon thingy that makes ODF the defau
ECMA an RIAA-like organization? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have discussed this. (Score:3, Insightful)
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But I'm curious. What makes you think that DOCX files bear more than a passing resemblence to what ECMA's proposing?
Re:We have discussed this. (Score:5, Insightful)
As more and more organizations, and in particular various government agencies around the world start mandating that all documents be saved in an open format, this is where Microsoft's viability in the long term comes into question. If OOXML fails at the ISO (as it appears that it has a good chance of doing) then Microsoft has got a real long-term problem. Adopting ODF means opening up Office to meaningful competition. It means OO.org, KOffice, Google Docs and who the hell knows what else is coming down the pike over the next decade are going to start to eat into Office's huge market share.
Now I think it's safe to say that in the medium term, Microsoft will continue with OOXML no matter what the ISO does, and it will, even if it adopts to some degree ODF try to mutilate by the "adopt, extend, extinguish" doctrine, and a good many government agencies, regardless of the mandate by politicians and senior bureaucrats, will roll over, but not all, and as long as a few major government agencies in North America and/or Europe refuse to recognize OOXML or whatever Microsoft comes up with next as an open format, the long-term viability of Office is in question.
We're not talking about next year, or even in the next five years, but I think over the next decade or so, if Microsoft can't fool ISO into accepting its worthless, unimplementable format, then it's going to have a real problem. The whole structure of company is built on the operating system and Office divisions keeping the money rolling in. Everything else doesn't matter, and probably loses money, existing solely in the interests of brand name placement.
The long-term solution I suspect Microsoft will move towards is some sort of rubber stamp standards commitee to compete with ISO, just like ECMA. The ultimate question is how long governments are going to let it get away with all of this. The EU seems to have a distinct hard-on against Microsoft at the moment, but the US doesn't currently give a damn one way or the other.
Parent
Czech Republic's expert disagrees wholeheartedly (Score:4, Informative)
Quoting from zmotula's post [slashdot.org]:
"...see the post [xmlguru.cz] by the guy who evaluated the OOXML specification for the Czech Normalization Institute. This means that Czech Republic is most probably going to vote for OOXML when the time comes."
Read that post and you see that nearly every one of the Czech Republic's objections has been addressed (the only one not satisfactorily addressed was the Czech Republic's complaint that part of the spec has redundant info). Let me quote:
Re:well... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a scam, pure and simple.
Parent
Re:well... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a scam, pure and simple.
So what do we do?
That's right: whenever you receive a .docx, .xlsx and other .*x documents, send them back, asking that they be converted into a readable format.
Include a link for Sun's ODF plugin for MS Office, if need be.
Fight fire with fire.
Parent
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How about the other, about a million different, formats?
I would not consider "things to work" if there is several random file formats for word documents.
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I am saying you really should have "official" allowed document formats list. And "what people happen to find in mail" is not the way to do this.
Re:well... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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A standard is open for everyone to implement. ISO doesn't discriminate on who it provides copies to.
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IE, it being based around how they designed MS Word...
I make a point of nat being a grammar nazi, but there does come a time where the meaning you are trying to express is obscured by grammatical errors. IE in terms of Microsoft usually refers to Internet Explorer. IE in terms of ISO means Ireland's TLD. In future you might want to try using "i.e." which the most accepted abbreviation for the latin "id est," meaning "that is; in other words" and is the least confusing way to express your meaning.
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Picky picky picky. You got the meaning, didn't you?
Sure, the third time I read it trying to figure out what internet explorer had to do with it.
Not punctuating that is hardly the most atrocious of grammatical errors I've seen here.
There are entire books I've read that eschew punctuation and were still understandable. The problem isn't lack of punctuation. The problem is lack of punctuation and improper capitalization used in a context where it makes the phrase you're trying to express not the first thing people associate with your text, nor even the second thing. I generally don't care if people use incorrect grammar. This is a casual fo
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Yep, no kidding. A grammar Nazi is a person who strictly and dogmatically points out grammatical nuances that are fairly immaterial to the readability or understandability of the text presented. This is not such a case. In this case, the error was misleading and made it very difficult for both myself and others to even understand what the writer was trying to express.
Re:Whats the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Many reasons:
1. There is already an ISO standard for this same purpose.
2. There are exclusions in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, meaning Microsoft can sue over other parties writing implementations of some of the things that the OOXML standard references (ActiveX and VBA are examples).
3. OOXML is designed so that fully-compliant applications can only be written by Microsoft, and mostly-complaint applications can be written by other parties but only to run on a Windows platform. Therefore OOXML is not inter-operable with other applications and especially not with non-Windows platforms, and the whole purpose of making something a standard is to facilitate such inter-operation.
4. OOXML is technically very inferior to the existing standard, ISO 26300. For example, OOXML specifies three different implementations of "a table", instead of just one common to different Office applications. This means that you cannot write a "table handling class" as a library, but instead you have to duplicate equivalent functionality several times over.
5. OOXML includes deliberately mandating bugs (such as dates before 1900) just to pander to errors in Microsoft software.
6. OOXML is controlled by just one corporation
7. ISO 26300 already has many implementations by many vendors on multiple platform. OTOH even Office 2007 running on Windows Vista does not implement OOXML
8. ISO 26300 even works with Microsoft Office (up to Office 2003) using a free plugin written by Sun. Microsoft deliberately broke Office 2007 file filters so that this plugin (or any other plugin not written by Microsoft) would not work in Office 2007.
9. ISO 26300 has a compliance test suite. You can use this test suite to make sure a given application works properly with ISO 26300. No such thing exists with OOXML.
10. It makes no sense to have "choice in standards"
Parent
Re:OOXML, ODF, and FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Of course they are. There is, for example, only one ISO standard for paper sizes, ISO 216. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#The_international_standard:_ISO_216 [wikipedia.org]
This standard is used in all countries bar two. Becase there are two countries that use a competing non-ISO standard (they use an ANSI standard instead), it causes all sorts of un-necessary costs all around the world.
Actually, it is you who is misleading here, and your anti-ODF FUD is from brian Jones in 2005 (when OOXML also lacked any definition of formula syntax). ODF version 1.2, which is currently going through the approval process, has a far more detailed definition of formula syntax, known as OpenFormula, defined by an independent body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula [wikipedia.org] This is what will be formally agreed in the upcoming version of ODF, but it is backward compatible with the (admittedly vauge) syntax definition in earlier versions of ODF, and it is also what all of the ODF applications actually now use.
OpenFormula is indeed technically superior to the formula syntax of OOXML, for the following reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula#OpenFormula_Attributes [wikipedia.org]
No, it is not. Before it was an ISO standard, it was an OASIS standard, and Microsoft were part of OASIS. Microsoft were invited to join the development process of ODF, which began in 2002, but Microsoft refused. Apart from the solitary exception of Microsoft, however, ODF otherwise has full industry consensus. In fact, after a long review period where comments from a broad array of interested parties were invited and incorporated, the ODF specification was put to a formal vote for OASIS approval, and it was passed unanimously. Yes, as an OASIS member, Microsoft approved ODF. Further, after that vote, ODF was submitted to ISO for approval as an International standard, via the long-winded PAS process (not fast-track), and after world-wide solicitation of comment and incorporation of recommendations, it was again approved unanimously. Yes, Microsoft approved it a second time ... then refused to implement it.
It wasn't wrong for the original release of Ofice 2007. Full plugins were borked in that release. I'm pleased to see that Microsoft fixed it (now that Office 2007 has a foothold) in SP1. As for Microsoft-sponsored ODF convertors ... they are convertors, not plugins. You cannot use Microsoft's convertors to open & save as ODF ... you must have an OOXML version of your document first, and then you can import & export it as ODF. Microsoft convertors do a terrible job compared to the Sun plugin, and of course you cannot set Office 2007 as the default for .odx file extensions because Office 2007 can't open them directly (without Sun's plugin).
... all the more reason to use ODF (ISO 26300) format and not OOXML.
Anyway, now that Sun's plugin works for Office 2007
Parent
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Sorry, but only by stubbornly ignoring all of the facts could you even try to pretend to "flip OOXML and ODF".
- Only ODF is an agreed, consensus standard, approved as an ISO standard via unanimous vote.
- Only ODF has multiple implementations by multiple vendors working on multiple platforms.
- Only OOXML has no implementations at all.
- Only ODF can be validated against a test suite.
- Only ODF
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Re:Whats the problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Can we get some *new* anti-ODF FUD too? (Score:4, Informative)
OOXML may be (or pretend to be), but what application products were you thinking of for ODF? Were you aware that KOffice (no relation at all to OpenOffice.org) also uses ODF as its native document format? The old StarOffice/OpenOffice.org formats (.sxw,
The "thin veneer" argument against ODF is just Microsoft FUD.
Parent
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I suggest you read http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] and see for yourself if OOXML can be considered broken from an objective POV.
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Perhaps not, but there are certainly gratuitous hacks like that in plenty of IETF specs. FTP has an enormous amount of crud devoted to ASCII/EBSDIC issues, to the point that the default mode for FTP MUST be character mode and image mode is an explicit switch. Its completely unnecessary and broken of course but it goes on all the time.
That is exactly the sort of thing I would WANT to see in a
Re:Can we get some *new* FUD, please? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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OOXML and ODF are both thin veneers on particular application products.
I call bullshit on this one. I actually did look at both specs. OOXML is indeed a quick and dirty XML-like version of Office formats and doesn't even pretend to try to make functionality generic enough to make it easy for any application to implement. Even for functionality that is designed to interoperate with other types of applications OOXML is written just for the most popular add-on. ODF, on the other hand, makes a reasonable attempt at implementing functionality in a generic way so that it can be ea
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Also came accross this
Disclosure: In January 2007, Rick became embroiled in a controversy after mentioning in his XML.COM blog an approach from Microsoft for a several-day contract job to correct some Wikipedia entries from a neutral point of view, as an experienced technical writer with credible first-hand knowledge of standards and procedures. This was incorrectly reported as being a secret plot to subvert Wikipedia. With the support of many editors on Wikipedia, with complete transparency, and with care to respect the Wikipedia rules, Rick has started participating on the Wikipedia entries.
The company that is the co-owner of Topologi has a long-standing training business and will be providing some presenters for some Microsoft sponsored-events in 2007 in Australasia. It is highly likely that Rick will be one of the presenters on standards matters at some of these.
link [oreillynet.com]
Seems he has lots of involvement with MS.