

OOXML Won't Get Fast-Track ISO Standardization 165
realdodgeman writes "The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) recently held an internal poll to determine the position that the United States should take on Microsoft's request for Office Open XML (OOXML) approval. With eight votes in favor, seven against, and one abstention, the group was one vote short of the nine votes required for approving OOXLM ISO standardization. This will mean a huge slowdown to the standardization to the OOXML format. 'Given the controversial nature, relative complexity, and significant importance of the standard, the results of INCIT's vote is unsurprising. An INCITS technical committee also voted against fast-track OOXML approval last month prior to the executive board's vote. Further deliberation is clearly needed as well as further refinement of the format. It seems as though many of the organizations participating in the approval process are generally supportive of the standard itself, but are unwilling to voice unconditional support until their concerns are resolved. OOXML may be down, but it's certainly not out.'"
OOXML (Score:5, Insightful)
Also why doesnt Open Office.org sue Microsoft for trademark infringement or something for their obviously deceptively labeled standard that is being proposed?
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Just like they do with standards not written by them.
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No, you've got that backwards: they already have implemented it, because instead of actually designing a standard, all they did was document MS Office's current functionality. By the same token, everybody else will only be able to partially implement it, because to do so fully would be equivalent to making a perfect, bug-for-bug reimplementation of MS Office.
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Secondly I seem to recall that the reason the open office suite is called OpenOffice.org (or OO.o), and not just OpenOffice, is because someone else (MS?) already owned the OpenOffice name / trademark...
Re:OOXML (Score:4, Insightful)
To launch openoffice apps, on linux at least, one uses oowrite, oocalc, and so on. So OOXML name is a clear admission of hypocrisy: not a surprise to me anyway.
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Hypocrisy? Huh?
OOXML is exactly what we've wanted from Microsoft for years. A document spec that can be read without spending hours attempting to reverse-engineer how Word stores files internally. They even made it a ZIP file of XML... exactly like OpenOffice.Org's original file format.
If anything, naming
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OOXML is exactly what we've wanted from Microsoft for years. A document spec that can be read without spending hours attempting to reverse-engineer how Word stores files internally
Their new strategy obviously is to make it as hard to implement for OSS-projects as it can get. The specs are several thousand pages long!
It's a step in the right direction, but that doesn't make it a good standard. From an idealistic point of view it would be much better to reject it in favor of a clean and functional design.
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Best way to keep formats free is the ODF plugin for office.
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Re:OOXML (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OOXML (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:OOXML (Score:4, Informative)
It's there because Microsoft does not want anyone to be able to do a full implementation. It's there because "OO"XML is not open standard.
Re:OOXML (Score:4, Informative)
That's not what the PCWorld article says at all.
iWork '08 is claimed to be able to open but not write OOXML. In practice, it doesn't appear to do even that well. http://www.bioneural.net/2007/08/11/iwork-08-and-s upport-for-open-xml/ [bioneural.net]
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Re:OOXML vote F8::A7::N1 is this political ...? (Score:2)
Can M$ lobbyist, nepotism, payola
I agree, M$-Tactics and Biz-Model, has always been based on maintaining no industry (or any type of) standard that may allow innovative competitor products to diminish M$ customer hostage base. The M$ Biz-Model should be considered monopolistic (to include software patents) tactics that are highly disruptive to software i
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Does iWork support OpenDocument? If not, and it does support MS's proprietary XML, then I will both refuse to buy it myself and bad-mouth it to others on principle!
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So I suppose if OpenOffice.org were to create a standard called 'Microsoft Office XML' that they were trying to pass off as a standard it would not end in a lawsuit?
Re:OOXML (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OOXML (Score:5, Informative)
It's not.
It's Office Open Extensible Markup Language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML [wikipedia.org]
No lawsuit.
And besides, Open Office precedes OOXML by a few years. If anything, OpenOffice.org *might* have a complaint about Microsoft misappropriating and reversing their name.
--
BMO
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But you see how even people around here get confused by the name, getting Office and Open reversed? It is similar and, I am sure, intentionally so to cause exactly such confusion.
To make things less complicated, I seriously propose everyone refer to it simply as "Microsoft's proprietary new Office 2007 format". Less confusion, and vastly more accurate.
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If any, the opposite can also be argued. Open Office is a very generic name and they own the trademarks only for the word openoffice.org AFAIK. A lawsuit, it is not, very.
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And I am sure it's no accident, thus, the complaint gets even more valid because MS is using it to create confusion and hurt OpenOffice.org ability to use its own brand.
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Re:OOXML (Score:5, Informative)
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No, it's short for "Microsoft Office XML". There is nothing "open" about it, except maybe for how transparent Microsoft has been at manipulating the ISO process.
Re:OOXML (Score:5, Funny)
blah blah bovine overlords blah blah
this is disgusting (Score:2, Insightful)
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Take a look at the board :
http://www.incits.org/ebmem.htm [incits.org]
Here's some reporting on the last vote
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/ansi-deni
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Read the slashdot story a couple of days ago.
Re:this is disgusting (Score:4, Insightful)
It was then developed in the open over a period of 3 years. It reuses as many previous open standards as possible (MathML for math stuff, SVG for vector graphics, etc).
In what possible way can you claim that this is a proprietary proposal and not an open design process? It seems your love for MS has blinded you.
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And saying that the patent pledge is similar to MS's is a bit of an insult, given that MS's pledge is pretty awful, last time I looked. They protect only the first version of OOXML. The next revision would have no guarantee of being protected.
(They might have compromised
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Re:this is disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
"Document Markup" is an interesting way of describing of
And yet, Microsoft prance around with the "Open" prefix. And yet, their RAND patent license excludes free software.
The difference being that Microsoft's spec has things like "do it the way Office 97 does it", and the ODF spec doesn't.
The simple fact that there are other Office suites already reading and writing ODF files other than OOo/StarOffice (Abiword, KOffice for example) demonstrates that it is a viable and workable standard.
It's my impression (others have read more of the 6,000 pages of documents than I have) that the same could not be successfully achieved from the OOXML spec.
That's funny, exactly what Microsoft seems to be planning [eweek.com]. Their royalty free patent license may only be granted if you implement their standard EXACTLY (a herculean feat in itself). Want to enhance or modify your software, as the GPL explicitly sates you should be allowed to do? Sorry, you just agreed to get sued by Microsoft..
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http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/ipr.ph p [oasis-open.org]
Note the weasel words about version 1.0 and any version that sun actively participates in. Further, by naming the exact version of the ODF, and claiming that they must take active part in it's devleopment, that means any non-conforming implementation isn't covered by the pled
Personally (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Personally (Score:5, Interesting)
In reality (at least as I see it) Microsoft has pushed their XML format not to maintain market share, but rather to give them a foothold in web services. They see their productivity suite as a broad authoring tool for not just documents, but all kinds of data. The closed formats where a major roadblock for them, because their customers could not use the data produced by the suite to actually do anything useful with it in a web 2.0 sense. A open, standardized format gives Microsoft the ability to pursue this "software as a service" model in a much more meaningful way.
It's interesting, since there are several companies (most of which have been rolled up in one way or another now) that where doing exactly what Microsoft wants to be doing. They had reverse engineered the binary office file formats, and where using that knowledge to provide data processing for various companies wanting to use the suite as an authoring tool for their internal services. I think Microsoft looked at that (along with what Google and the like have been doing) and simply saw a really good opportunity to extend their near monopoly on productivity into an entirely new business. I really do believe it is nothing more evil than that.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why the unseemly haste, committee stacking, and other nefarious practices to get adopted as an ISO standard?
Why the attacks on ODF adoption? If Microsoft had any intention of being interoperable, they'd have supported ODF from the start..
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So they can convince governments, etc. that it really is a "standard", in order to defeat or at least put a monkey wrench into the adoption of ODF as a mandated standard that is currently being proposed by various government bodies.
Why the attacks on ODF adoption? If Microsoft had any intention of being interoperable, they'd have supported ODF from the start..
ODF can be (and is) easily sup
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You parrot the party line well. Maybe you should actually READ the specification yourself. If you did, you'd realize that you're spreading misinformation. Or maybe you know that.
The elements that you mention, that reference existing implementations, are deprecated, and actively discouraged in the documentation from third party i
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[ ... ]
The Translator may also be plugged into competing word processing programs that use ODF as the default format to open and save documents in Open XML.
Nah, MS is playing nice now.
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They still use Word format as the default but got free of the dreaded costly upgrade treadmill. The Mac office was particularly pleased with "Save To PDF".
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Any reason? All OS X native apps can print to PDF as it is anyway.
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I use troff myself.
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Not normally. Safari supports persisting some links over to PDF (if you were to PDF-ify apple.com, the "bottom four" blobs don't get links, but everything else does; I suspect this is a bug). Printing a TextEdit document with a link in it doesn't retain the link or the link style. And bookmarks/TOC generation isn't being done in any case.
Serious PDF generation will require adjustment, but
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Not all PDFs are created equal. For example, say you have a textual document that you want to be turned into a PDF. There are three distinct possibilities: a PDF containing the (ASCII, UTF, whatever) text characters and metadata describing where they are to be placed on the page, a big list of the lines and arcs that make up the decomposed font characters, or even a rasterization. Obviously, these results vary considerably in terms of both the amount of (machine-readable) semantic meaning retained, file siz
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If it's just an office style document, OOo's PDF creation library works fine for me.
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"Where" is an indication of the location of something. (Where do you want to eat dinner tonight?)
"Were" is the past, imperfect, plural tense of "be" or "are". (We were going to eat here, but decided against it.)
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The obvious choice for the former is MS Works. Add a version for Linux and Mac, and give it away. If MS is serious about the standard, they should be willing to put some money into it. After all, unless MS is just becoming a games company, they need to invest in the common business si
That was too close! (Score:5, Interesting)
The real questions now are:
(a) how to ensure that the various standards organizations around the world really sit up and pay attention so that the obvious technical deficiencies and the crippling lack of open-ness in the proposal -- which were pointed out over and over again by individuals and companies opposed to the fast-tracking -- will be truly taken into account?
(b) how to keep Microsoft from succeeding with their tactic of stacking attendance at national standards organizations meetings to carry the day for them?
They almost succeeded the last time. If something doesn't change, they won't fail next time.
The more time.... (Score:2)
Par for the course (Score:3, Informative)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO#The_name [wikipedia.org]
Monkey Bussiness (Score:2)
INCITS is USA only, not the world (Score:5, Informative)
My canonical reference for these things is Andy Updegrove's blog (http://consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/ [consortiuminfo.org]).
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Department of Homeland Security? (Score:2)
Do they have some special expertise in the area or what?
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I guess DOHS is just there to serve as a counter to the intelligent decisions made by NIST and the DoD.
Keep It Simple Stupid? (Score:2)
I don't mind it being a standard if.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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First: Microsoft doesn't implement other people's standards for their bread and butter. They have the luxury of controlling the largest hoard of software engineers, product planners, marketers, testers, and customers in the desktop application market. Their motivation is to make money. Using their competition's file format as their primary fo
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the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are obviously microsoft's competitors in your eyes.
secondly: microsoft word isn't "flawlessly compatible with prior versions". try opening an early word document with some unusual formatting in office 2007.
thirdly: if microsoft would fully document the format, i wouldn't complain as muc
It's amazing people can still believe this stuff. (Score:2)
I'll quote here from "Microsoft Windows 2000 TCP/IP Implementation details" [microsoft.com] because it's an important and convenient example:
This is only one example out of a great many. Microsoft implements (embraces), extends, and to the extent possible extinguishes other people's standards for their bread
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Re:Except that MSOXML is only format w/o structure (Score:2)
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Not much to choose from, (though if it were only "Nukes ML", sigh), but the first has a bit of an edge.
Problem Solved (Score:2)
If Rupert Murdoch can buy The Wall Street Journal, why can't Microsoft buy ISO?
PS. Bill, US$680K plus options a year and I'm yours! I've even got a plan to bring that pesky Slashdot into line.
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Misleading article headline, it's far from over (Score:5, Informative)
It's very important to understand that the OOXML fight is not over. Microsoft are doing a fantastic job of explaining to committees why this format deserves to be an international standard, and of ensuring no-one gets onto the committees who can raise this dreamy proposition.
We are looking at a lot of votes between now and end-August, across the world, and it's still not too late to submit comments to - for example - the Australian Standards Authority, which will almost certainly vote YES to OOXML.
On NoOOXML.org [noooxml.org] the FFII is coordinating the fight. If you've not signed the petition, please do so.
Say what? (Score:2)
Of the 15 that voted, it got 53% of the vote, only needed one more (which could have been achieved as there was one abstention) to be given ISO standardisation - and this is "unsurprising"?
What this says to me is that the people doing the voting do not understand the issues at hand. If they did, then there should have been no-where near that number of votes for this
And MSFT announces a new International Committee (Score:2)
Just watch, even if/when it becomes a standard (Score:2)
From reading about MS's OOXML they are long overdue for a reinvention of the wheel (and thinking about it, whats to stop them? I can se
ODF vs. OOXML (Score:2, Interesting)
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The Office Open XML format was initially made available under a free and perpetual license.[21] for "any of (OOXMLs) essential patent claims in Ecma 376". This patent coverage does not extend to non-essential items, or unrequired-items that are defined in OOXML.
As there was concern that free and open source software (FOSS) could not use the format under the proposed license,[22] Microsoft provided a covenant not to sue[23]. The covenant received a mixed reception, with some like Groklaw identifying problems[24] and others (such as Lawrence Rosen) endorsing it.[25]
Microsoft also added the Office Open XML format to their Microsoft Open Specification Promise in which Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification ("Covered Implementation"). The Office Open XML 1.0 - Ecma 376 and its predecessor Office 2003 XML format are among the covered specifications.[26]
The Office Open XML format therefore can be used under the Covenant not to Sue or the Open Specification Promise, providing only items required in OOXML are implemented.
So, we have a format where microsoft promises to not sue over patent use, only if other implementations only implement required items. So, any 'optional' parts of the spec are off-limits to com
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Sun OpenDocument Patent Statement, submitted by Sun Microsystems, Inc., September 29, 2005
Sun irrevocably covenants that, subject solely to the reciprocity requirement described below, it will not seek to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification, or of any subsequent version thereof("OpenDocument Implementation") in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation, as defined by the rules of OASIS, to grant (or commit to grant) patent licenses or make equivalent non-assertion covenants. Notwithstanding the commitment above, Sun's covenant shall not apply and Sun makes no assurance, covenant or commitment not to assert or enforce any or all of its patent rights against any individual, corporation or other entity that asserts, threatens or seeks at any time to enforce its own or another party's U.S. or foreign patents or patent rights against any OpenDocument Implementation.
This statement is not an assurance either (i) that any of Sun's issued patents cover an OpenDocument Implementation or are enforceable, or (ii) that an OpenDocument Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party.
No other rights except those expressly stated in this Patent Statement shall be deemed granted, waived, or received by implication, or estoppel, or otherwise.
Similarly, nothing in this statement is intended to relieve Sun of its obligations, if any, under the applicable rules of OASIS.
(source [coverpages.org])
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How, precisely, did you miss that? Especially after I stated it explicitly?
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IANAL, but it seems like the reasoning goes like this: While sun is developing ODF, they agree that any of their IP in the spec is, in perpetuity, under their covenant not to sue.
When sun stops developing ODF, the other clause is to just cover their ass. It
OOXML sucks because... (Score:2)
Its not hard to guess that Microsoft will just go on using their old closed proprietary formats, just as a BLOB encapsulated in a thin OOXML wrapper.
OOXML used this way would be a quick solution to give a fake legal veneer of openness rather than a real attempt at an actually open format.
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Re:obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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It's quite simple. The OpenOffice port for OS X sucks beyond belief (NeoOffice sucks within the realms of belief). The Microsoft Office port to OS X (aside from the delay getting it ported to Intel - leverage, anyone?) is very slick, integrates well with OS X, and I've heard a number of people complain over the years that the UI in the Windows version wasn't as good.
Apple makes money selling machines that will run MS Office, but doesn't make any money selling machines to run ODF-based word processors. N
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In the next version of Office MS has announced there will be a removal of the macro language VBA (add it to the list of things like Active X which hasn't been on the Mac since the olf IE days).
I have my doubts that MS is planning to make Ma
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I'd guess Apple voted in favor of OOXML in the hopes that it would prevent MS Office formats from being moving targets from release to release, and possibly to use as leverage (probably in Europe) to force MS to publish specifications for all of the currently undocumented specs in OOXML, which would
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Ehm... Microsoft owns Apple (literally).
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
So let me get this straight. Microsoft is caught putting Quicktime technology/code into Windows Media Player. Apple then decides to settle out of court with the following provisions: Microsoft will publicly purchase $150million of non-voting stock, Microsoft will publicly pledge to support the Mac platform for at least 5 years, and both companies will have full access to the other's patent portfolios.
Wait a minute, at the time which company owned which? Sure sounds like Apple owned
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Darl McBride's crack pipe. Now that Darl doesn't need it anymore he loaned it to them.
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