The Massachusetts IT Division published many of the comments it received from the public – many from outside the state, some from outside the US – after its publication of the draft 4.0 specification last month. Letters supporting the state’s decision tended to float to the top of the list, though later items turned out to be overwhelmingly and vehemently opposed to the consideration of Microsoft in conjunction with anything claiming to be “open.”In his comment, Lee Braiden referred to Massachusetts’ former CIO, Peter Quinn, who resigned two years ago amid controversy that erupted after he took a stand on behalf of the state on behalf of ODF and against OOXML. Quinn was the subject of an official review, as a result of accusations made in a Boston Globe article, though he was later cleared of all charges. Braiden wrote in part:
In short, Microsoft cannot be trusted to create and maintain a standard. They have shown themselves time and time again to represent the antithesis of standardization. Any standard - particularly a business document standard - must be managed by an independent body.It was undoubtedly Peter Quinn's clarity on this issue - that checks and balances of the standard itself were needed to ensure a proper solution - that threatened Microsoft's (greatly undeserved) monopoly over document storage. Threatened as it should, I might add, as Microsoft's approach does not serve the public, as a public body's document storage should. Microsoft play hardball when an issue could lose them millions of dollars, and that is precisely why his job was jeopardized. Make no mistake about that.
Chris Clark, a member of a UK-based marketing agency, cited a blog post by Microsoft Office engineer Brian Jones, which addressed a number of alleged Excel 2007 bugs brought up by IBM performance architect Rob Weir – an outspoken critic of OOXML. Clark wrote in part:
Our second major concern seemingly confirmed by Microsoft is the scrambling of mathematical formula[e]...This will affect international shopping cart rules files if conversion between spreadsheets that cross OOXML conversion produce error numbers. This is hard enough to get right today, but the thought that mixes, volumes, and units might all get errored would create nightmare professional liabilities for my business, and administration risks to your State.
One e-mail was received that, either intentionally or through an omission of formatting codes (ironically) resulted in a single eight-page paragraph, often omitting punctuation and occasionally including spurious references to unrelated issues. Here’s a sample:
So if Macros are not included in Ecma 376, will developers who develop it independently get sued?― â€oeI will have to get back to you ...― To sumarize the licensing problems, the answers to the above questions for your future EOOXML compliant software can be provisionally given as: 1. Microsoft can stop any attempt to distribute your application 2. You need permission from Microsoft for every application of EOOXML on a computer [edit] (In-)Compatibility with other standards MS wants its own XML format to be an ISO standard. However, MS' format does not conform to many other ISO or W3C standards. You might even think MS doesn't like the W3C ;-): See eg, Wikipedia, OpenDocument Fellowship, Open Malaysia: MSOOXML's disregard for existing standards and, of course, Bob Sutor's blog. See also this GL discussion: Again from the newspick: a description of why ODF and OOXML don't interoperate. Office Open XML unquestionably duplicates or at least significantly overlaps with the ODF specification; moreover, unlike Office Open XML, OpenDocument incorporates still other standards such as XPath, XLinks, SVG, XForms, and MathML. Office Open XML reinvents the wheel at every turn rather than relying on existing open standards. The failure to implement XPath in Office Open XML is particularly problematic; it makes full fidelity in automated XSL transformations to and from other XML formats next to impossible.
This particular submission actually did not set the record for paragraph length; the ITD also published four copies of an identical letter, perhaps sent from the same e-mail server, also in opposition to OOXML, which was – with only slight exceptions – a single 12-page paragraph.
Donald Kulinski called to memory (albeit to a slightly defective unit of memory) the words of Henry David Thoreau in praising the State’s draft:
[I] recently received information about the microsoft system programs of xml format being used by the state gov't of mass. and the idea does increase the understanding of technology and the innovation of such products and programs to be given to the people of the u.s. to be used,, like the thoughts of waldon pond,,free thought cannot be denied and of the meaning and intent of the word ,,domain,,when used to benefit the ,"people", as a common goal.
Software developer Steve Worley contributed the following:
I am a professional software author, and have extensive real world experience in dealing with data, parsing, and formats. However, I asked myself if I were assigned a job to make my application read and use an OOXML file...I couldn't do it. The format specification, even if it's consistent and complete, is just far too large, complex, and filled with a staggering number of arcane details and exceptions to be able to deal with. It's like the US tax code, even a trained attorney could not understand all of it. A simpler, cleaner, design is easier to read, easier to write, easier to understand, and has a longer lifetime. If a format begins its life as difficult, arcane, and awkward, it will become even more so as it ages.
Francesco Fiore, a resident of Massachusetts, wrote the following in support of the draft:
As an international open standard of Ecma International, Open XML meets all state requirements as an open standard and therefore should be approved for use by government agencies. Use of the format will help enable citizens and state agencies to access electronic files well into the future. There is significant support for Open XML from all over the world as shown by the support on www.openxmlcommunity.org. The keys that these people highlight are interoperability (which in my opinion is always the most important) and standardization...Technology policies should enable government agencies to choose from technologies and products that meet their needs. Accepting the Open XML standard will enable wider choice, which will spur competition and innovation, which should be the ultimate goal of all democratic, market-driven societies.
Finally, Massachusetts resident Ryan Norbauer questioned whether the inclusion of converters in certain applications (Office 2003 comes to mind) truly qualifies as support for a format, regardless of whether the ISO adopts it as a global standard:
I am writing to urge the State to reject the plan to accept OOXML as an acceptable document format for our state government. Merely being "open" or simply having data encapsulated in XML is not synonymous with conforming to international standards. International standards bodies were created to make sure that information can be exchanged freely without any one party or interest having a controlling stake in the format itself. To accept a "standard" defined arbitrarily by one company is to reject the very notion of standards itself.History has shown that the sale or release of "converters" is merely a dishonest way of placating organizations into accepting non-standard formats. They rarely work properly, but more importantly, the extra overhead means there are even less frequently actually used. If we are to commit to open standards, as we should, then not only is the addition of a corporate-defined standard unhelpful and a drain on productivity, I believe it actually does real harm to the open international standards themselves.
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