Course Change for OpenDocument Developers Seen as Emerging Rift

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

October 30, 2007, 12:17 PM

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The remaining case for the ODf format

In a comment to BetaNews last June (prior to this op-ed's publication), Martin tried to frame the problem ahead of them as balancing the competing interests of a greater evil and a lesser evil. First, he made the case that Massachusetts was in error in assuming the ECMA 376 standard they were accepting as equally valid as ODf, was really the same format as OOXML. "Large hunks of Ecma 376 are simply undocumented," Martin told us. "And what's more, absolutely no vendor has a feature-ful app that writes to that format. Not even Microsoft. There's a myth that Ecma 376 is the same as the Office Open XML used by Microsoft. It is not."

The only benefit of having standards compete with each other on a level playing field with no help from the audience, if you will, is to enable better error messages telling the user what complies and what doesn't, Martin continued.

"None of this is to say that OpenDocument is perfect. Far from it," he added. "OpenDocument at present is crippled from an interoperability standpoint...I think the resistance of the big vendors to fixing the interoperability warts is simply outrageous, particularly because they are fairly trivial changes. But the advancement of software users' interests are not advanced by painting OOXML as other than deeply flawed. It is vendor-specific and far from 'open.' The lesser of the two evils is clearly OpenDocument, which is at least open even if not yet interoperable."

In the abundance of comments like these, IBM's most vocal ODf format advocate, Rob Weir, has recently taken the opportunity to paint Martin and Edwards into a corner.

"However, in recent months the OpenDocument Foundation has found itself more and more isolated, outside of the mainstream debate," wrote Weir earlier this month, adopting a tone not unlike a Democratic presidential candidate trying to distance himself from the field. "How far they have fallen can be seen in the fact that Microsoft has gone from ridiculing their conspiracy theories to using them to support their arguments. At the same time the Foundation's membership has dwindled to the point where a small number remain, while former members have disassociated themselves from the Foundation as it turned increasingly to strident rhetoric. Whereas in the early days, the Foundation had a large membership that participated fully in the OASIS TC's, now their 'contributions' are mainly that of heckling and haranguing the other members."

IBM is one vendor - among Sun and Novell - who have heavy investments in ODf's future viability.

Such comments from both sides of the internal ODf debate prompted this response from Microsoft corporate standards director Jason Matusow: "There are many document formats out there. Innovation will continue to push technology forward (especially in the applications) and thus the need for evolution and flexibility with document formats will continue to move forward at a rapid pace as well. Now, with the push towards standardization of these formats the argument is one of consolidation. Yet this does not jive with the actual situation in the marketplace. The OpenDocument Foundation could not be making this point any clearer for me. They had hoped one technology was going to get to a certain result, but that result did not materialize. So, they are now hoping the next one will do it for them."

Perhaps the unpleasantness of the impending debate is compelling the new da Vinci project advocates to jump to the end, perhaps prematurely. In a response to a recent blog post, Gary Edwards described CDF as, "Finally we have a single file format that everyone can agree on." If everyone could perhaps agree on anything, it is that this statement remains a very elusive dream.