What IBM VP Bob Sutor does not want you to read

Asellus sez: "I will not say OOXML is easy to implement, but saying ODF is easier to implement just by looking at the ISO specification is a fallacy."



I shouldn't respond to trolls, but I will this time. Asellus is simply wrong. Large hunks of Ecma 376 are simply undocumented. And what's more, absolutely no vendor has a featureful 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.



I've spend a few hundred hours comparing the Ecma 376 specification (the version of OOXML being considered at ISO) to the information about the undocumented APIs used by MS Office 2007 that recently sprung loose in litigation. See http://www.groklaw.net/p...Rpt_Andrew_Schulman.pdf



Each of those APIs *should* have corresponding metadata in the formats, but are not in the Ecma 376 specification.

Subject: Suggested ODF1.2 items

• From: "Florian Reuter" <freuter@novell.com>


• To: <office@lists.oasis-open.org>


• Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:03:24 +0100

Suggested enhancement for OpenDocument V1.2

#
re: Specifying the document settings @ Thursday, January 11, 2007 5:11 AM

Brian, the fact that you are encouraging people not to use those compatibility flags does not matter at all here. There obviously will be documents with those flags turned on, right? Otherwise you wouldn't have put this in the standard. So it's just a corner case, but still: This means ONLY your office suite will be able to display those documents correctly, even if a competing program implemented the whole specification. Why? Because you didn't specify how those flags affect the display of the document (a hell of a specification you have there...). I still haven't seen any answer to this valid criticism. It's a competitive advantage for Microsoft since the standard is incomplete and your company is the only one that has the missing parts.

- Stephan

Stephan Jaensch

The second abusive practice the Commission found Microsoft guilty of is the
deliberate obstruction of interoperability, generally achieved through
arbitrary and willful modification of Open Standards. This makes it
impossible for competitors to write interoperable software. This is to
the detriment of customers, who find themselves locked into the
products of one vendor, the antithesis of competition.

It might look much worse in the light of public statements that
Microsoft will
not even commit to standards that it has proposed itself, such as
the recent Microsoft
OfficeOpenXML (OOXML) format it wants approved by ISO.

The less people talk about the interoperability side of the case, the
better for Microsoft. Otherwise people might connect MS-OOXML to the
fact that Microsoft initiated the standardisation effort in the
workgroup server area to open the market and later started
obstruction of interoperability on its own standard to drive the
innovator out of the market.