RSSOpen Format Duel Enters New Round After Mass. Decision
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published July 3, 2007, 5:43 PM
Following BetaNews' story yesterday on the State of Massachusetts' decision to propose formally accepting Microsoft's Office Open XML as a "suitable" format, advocates on two of the three sides of this issue wrote us to say they were concerned our story's contents might tend to favor a different side.
First, a Microsoft spokesperson cautioned us about a statement we cited from Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove. "I was reading your story on the Massachusetts policy and was noticing something in Andy Updegrove's quote at the end of your piece which is actually inaccurate," the spokesperson wrote, "which I'm guessing he may not realize, but thought you'd want to know.
"If I was reading his quote correctly, Andy seemed to be saying that Open XML has only a single implementation - Office. When in fact there are more than a dozen implementations from folks other than Microsoft, so people can be using Open XML whether they're running Windows, Linux, Mac or Palm platforms."
The Microsoft spokesperson then pointed us to a list of Open XML implementers presented last May by Office team program manager Brian Jones on his team's blog. Corel WordPerfect and Novell's rendition of OpenOffice appear there, though not every item on the list is an application or application suite.
Later, Mark Blafkin, a spokesperson for the Association for Competitive Technology, wrote to say his firm took issue with the way we set up the quote from ACT President Jonathan Zuck. For the record, our initial sentence of the update to that story did begin, "In perhaps the clearest indication to date that enough is never enough..."
"As you can tell from our statements, we have always had a problem with approach of the Massachusetts Policy," Blafkin wrote to BetaNews, "not its goals of long-term access of documents, interoperability, etc. And, as we told reporters and officials alike, simply adding Microsoft's formats to the policy wouldn't solve the problem. It might alleviate a short term political problem for them, but it wouldn't solve the fundamental efficacy problem of a technology mandate policy. The updated policy is better because it is no longer a strict technology mandate, but it is still has some inherited problems from the previous version, most notably the requirement for open standards versus open formats."
Blafkin cited Adobe's PDF as an example of an open format that was not an open standard - in effect, a specification that did not require ratification by a standards body in order to be freely utilized by developers without owing royalties. The Commonwealth's problem, he went on, is that it has only been able thus far to endorse PDF as its choice for archiving documents, not for any of the other purposes which it has found in the commercial sector.
"The value of PDF to the Commonwealth's policy to enhance interoperability and long-term document access, led Massachusetts create a special carve-out for PDF because it has become a de facto standard," Blafkin wrote us. "The fact that they had to create the carve-out demonstrates the problem we see in the policy."
Finally, Blafkin argued that if Massachusetts had to choose an audio/video encoding standard for itself, based on its current criteria, it would have to exclude Ogg Vorbis from consideration since it has yet to be accepted as a standard by the IETF after four years of debate. The state would also have to exclude the Free Lossless Audio Codec, he added, not because it utilizes a free and open-source format but because it's not an open standard.
Blafkin's point boils down to questioning why a format has to be a standard in order to be accepted. He did not provide any further examples with regard to possible open applications formats that would be excluded from Massachusetts' consideration by virtue of their lack of ratification by a standards body.
How can they tell that the packages on the list actually implement the "Open XML" format, given the many parts added for compatibility with the various warts on old versions of MS Word, where the alleged standard for it throws up its hands and says it's impossible to define the semantics?
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|Sun has finally released the ODF plugin 1.0 for MSOffice ver 2000, XP and 2003. We can now read and write documents in ODF format within MSOffice - Word, Excel and PP.
There is no need for OOXML and Office2007 anymore.
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|I've long given up on MS Office formats.
These days it's OpenOffice and PDF. IT provides all I need as well as my clients.
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|Rather than advertise or endorse a product that happens to be in the subject of the article, try reading the article first. Also proofread your posts--I doubt PDF and OpenOffice actually provide your clients--perhaps you meant it provides all your needs as well as the needs of your clients?
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|From Brian Jones blog:
"OpenOffice - Thanks to Novell, you can read and write the OpenXML formats with OpenOffice."
I've downloaded the Novell translator - though when installing it I get a bunch of "media-type not supported" errors.
Then what filter do you use to open .xlsx docs?
Still haven't gotten it to work.
Yeah, seamless, M$. OOXML == joke.
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|Same here. The MCAN converter garbles everything, including simple documents. I've worked for such liars before and when a company tries to sell bull snot as good code, it should be felony.
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|Oh wait, then bush would just pardon them!
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|Just like Clinton.... (issued 140 of them, actually).
Of course, You're speaking about the Libby Commutation...which is not a pardon.
You knew that, right?
I *love* how Hillary, one day, claims that *no* non-violent offenders should be sent to prison, and then, a whopping 5 days later can be heard condemning Bush for commuting Libby's prison sentence.
Pure comedy.
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|... and justice for all
/sarcasm
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|It's true that the short statement I issued that BetaNews quoted from spoke of a single implementation, but it also linked back to the full text at my blog, which reads as follows:
"This question has a number of dimensions. Superficially, the answer could be "yes," because even as Ecma 376, OOXML will have achieved rough parity with ODF, which had only been adopted as an OASIS standard at the time it was included in ETRM 3.6. It requires weighing more subjective details to differentiate further, such as whether Ecma is as "open" as OASIS, and whether it should matter whether a standard with (still) a single implementation (Office, although it has been announced that a few additional products, such as Novell's version of OpenOffice, will save to OOXML) should be granted the same status as another (ODF) with more than a dozen outright adopters today."
But perhaps it's more interesting to follow the link to Brian Jones' blog provided by Microsoft, which includes a list of products, most or all of which are converters or other products that have a "save to" feature. I see only the Gnumeric spreadsheet and the Novell version of OpenOffice that are actual applications. Gnumeric, if I recall correctly, was built to ODF, and I assume therefore has a "save to" function. Novell, of course, was created in compliance with ODF, so I assume that this is also a converter situation.
Finally, its instructive to note how Brian Jones himself refers to the list that Microsoft now points to: Brian refers to all of these products as follows: "Those are a few of the tools I've been keeping track of, but that's just the beginning."
Not competitive products - "tools."
In other words, not competitive applications that can offer end-user choice and price competition, but other products that live around the periphery of Office. While these do indeed improve the value of Office to Office customers, and may increase the attractiveness of Office to potential customers, they do not encourage competition - in short, they help to further entrench Microsoft, rather than the reverse.
You may wish to read my full blog entry, which elaborates on the meaning and impact of the above. You can find it here: http://www.consortiuminf...story=20070702101415578
Andy
Andy
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|sorry andrew, but that post probably fell on deaf ears, not many here want to go that in depth into things.
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|Problem is, PDF is not an open format... yet. And MS-OOXML has so many proprietary dependencies that it really will never work as a future file format.
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|http://www.adobe.com/dev.../pdfs/pdf_reference.pdf
open format - yes - fully documented and controlled by it's corporate owners.
open standard - not at this time - then a standards organization would control it.
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|Thanks for the correction, Scotch Moose.
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|Why is it a problem with PDF? Lots of things can read and write pdf. Can you say that about .doc?
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|Yes.
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|Just that .doc files look different in every reader. PDF's look the same on every platform.
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|+1. Even through the various iterations of Microsoft's own products you find that a .doc file looks different from one version to the next. :p
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|I think you should not compare DOC(X) format with PDF. They are useful for different means. Doc(x) format is suitable for word-processing, while PDF format is suitable for publishing.
If you wanna compare PDF with something, choose Microsoft "XPS". I know, XPS is not yet as mature as PDF, but it's provided for the same means as PDF.
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|PDF is not a suitable format for document collaboration. The 'writing' part of PDF is flaky at best, especially if multiple users use multiple clients. ODF is better than PDF in this regard. PDF is best at archiving and publishing at best.
And yeah, it is not an international standard yet. Adobe was sucker-punched by Microsoft when they are forced to make PDF an ISO standard, just by Microsoft's mere step of standardizing XPS. When PDF become ISO standard, Adobe will not be able to stop Microsoft from integrating PDF read/write support in Office and even Internet Explorer/Windows. The moment PDF become an ISO standard, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader is dead and buried.
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