Well, if that's IBM's plan they're going to need more than ODF, that's for sure - and that brings us to the announcement I've been wondering about:
IBM favors ODF as a file format because it is "truly open" and technically elegant, Heintzman said.
But IBM will support Open XML, which is the current document format in Office 2007, in its Lotus collaboration and portal products. IBM already supports older versions of Office.
I feel a Pamela Jones moment coming on .... there it is, as plain as day for the world to see, Doug Heintzman breaks through all IBM's doublespeak and hypocrisy and admits it.
I don't know about "Beyond Office" as a plan, I think the real game here is "Beyond ODF"
1More
IBM's Director of Strategy comes clean on OpenXML - IBM *WILL* support OpenXML in its L... - 0 views
1More
OASIS ODF: List Proposal Enhancement Vote Deadline on Wednesday | Gary Edwards - 0 views
-
Thanks to Paul for digging this up. Who would have guessed that years later, these same issues hang like a dark shroud on the future of ODF? Note also that June 1st of 2007 was the cut off date for ODF 1.2 proposals and recommendations. The OpenFormula and Metadata SC's were rushing to make the cutoff. The List Enhancement proposal itself was just one of many enhancements submitted by Florian Reuter in November of 2006, designed to greatly improve ODF compatibility with MSOffice "ODF". By November of 2006, thanks largely to the Massachusetts Pilot Study, there were a number of ODF plug-ins for MSOffice. All were capable of producing perfectly compliant ISO 26300 ODF, but falling far short of public expectations of high fidelity interop with OpenOffice ODF. Sound familiar? Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before Microsoft was pressed into providing MSOffice ODF support. There was no doubt that they would face the exact same interop challenges as the many independent plug-in efforts. Hence the stepped up efforts by many at the OASIS ODF to "fix" ISO 26300! At the time of the List Enhancement Proposal, we had increasing evidence from the many pilot studies that ODF was impossible to implement in business and workgroup environments where the MSOffice productivity environment was the defining platform. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice or the binary documents so critical to business processes bound to this environment. OpenXML was designed exactly to be compatible with these environments. Unless ODF fixed it's compatibility/interoperability problems there was no way for the independent plug-ins to provide a reasonable ODF implementation alternative to OpenXML. And even if Microsoft did produce an MSOffice ODF compliant with ISO 26300, these productivity environments would remain entirely locked. The world expected ODF to be compatible, interoperable, Web ready, and fully capable of cracking open the iron grip Mic
2More
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
- Cached
Reality Check: ODF vs. OpenXML - 0 views
weblog.infoworld.com/...odf_vs_openxml.html
microsoft mooxml oasis odf officeopenxml opendocument openxml sun
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Where do I stand? Well, at the risk of getting a lot of hate mail saying I am in Microsoft's pocket, if what Robertson and Paoli say about OpenXML and ODF is correct, then I think OpenXML is needed, at least until ODF becomes backward-compatible with older Office file formats and offers the capabilities large organizations require in their productivity solutions to run their business.
1More
The End of ODF & OpenXML - Hello ODEF! - 0 views
-
Short slide deck of Barbara Held's February 28th, 2007 EU IDABC presentation. She introduces ODEF, the "Open Document Exchange Format" which is designed to replace both ODF and OpenOfficeXML. ComputerWorld recently ran a story about the end of ODF, as they covered the failure of six "legislative" initiatives designed to mandate ODF as the official file format. While the political treachery surrounding these initiatives is a story in and of itself, the larger story, the one that has world wide reverberations, wasn't mentioned. The larger ODF story is that ODF vendors are losing the political battles because they are unable to provide government CIO's with real world solutions. Here are three quotes from the California discussion that really say it all: "Interoperability isn't just a feature. It's the basic requirement for getting your XML file format and applications considered"..... "The challenge is that of migrating our existing documents and business processes to XML. The question is which XML? OpenDocument or OpenXML?" ....... "Under those conditions, is it even possible to implement OpenDocument?" ....... Bill Welty, CIO California Air Resource Board wondering if there was a way to support California legislative proposal AB-1668. This is hardly the first time the compatibility-interoperability issue has challenged ODf. Massachusetts spent a full year on a pilot study testing the top tier of ODF solutions: OpenOffice, StarOffice, Novell Office and IBM's WorkPlace (prototype). The results were a disaster for ODF. So much so that the 300 page pilot study report and accompanying comments wiki have never seen the light of day. In response to the disastrous pilot study, Massachusetts issued their now infamous RFi; a "request for information" about whether it's possible or not to write an ODF plugin for MSOffice applications. The OpenDocument Foundation responded to the RFi with our da Vinci plugin. The quick descriptio
1More
shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 08
- Cached
Word of recognition from an unexpected side: ODF editor Patrick Durusau supports OOXML... - 0 views
idippedut.dk/...n-from-an-unexpected-side.aspx
brm durusau iso oasis odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument openxml
![](/images/link.gif)
1More
Classes of Fidelity for Document Applications - Rick Jellife - 0 views
-
Rick Jellife weighs in on the OpenOffice ODF- MSOffice OpenXML interop embroglio. His take is to focus on Classes of Fidelity, providing us with a comparative table of fidelity categories. I wonder though if this über document processing approach is anywhere near consistent with the common sense meaning of interoperability to average end-users? IMHO, end-users interpret "interoperability" to mean that compliant applications can exchange documents without loss of information. "..... In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come back with a bang with the release of Office 2007 SP2, and I'd like to give another pointer to it for readers who missed it first time around.... "...... OASIS ODF TC has some kind of conformance and testing wing at work, but it is not at all clear that they will deliver anything in this kind of area. Without targetting these classes, ODF's breezy conformance requirements means that ODF conforment software can deliver vastly different kinds of fidelity, yet still accord to the letter of the law (and, indeed, to the spirit of the ODF spec, which allows so many holes) which will cause frustration all-around....." Ouch!
2More
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
- Cached
» OpenDocument or OpenXML: Do you care? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com - 0 views
blogs.zdnet.com/BTL
california davinci interop iso massachusetts oasis odef odf ooxml opendocument politics xml
![](/images/link.gif)
-
A week or so ago, I published a podcast at IT Conversation with Scott Mace interviewing Gary Edwards about OpenDocument. Edwards is the president of the OpenDocument Foundation. OpenDocument Foundation is a non-profit that works to promote the OpenDocument file format–an XML file format for office documents. There’s no question that businesses want an XML-based file format for office data. The question, naturally, is which XML-based file format. Microsoft has it’s own XML-based file format called OpenXML.
3More
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
- Cached
Odf - Converters & the ODF Zero Interop problem - 0 views
odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.html
microsoft mooxml oasis odf officeopenxml opendocument openxml sun
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The ODF-Converter translates OpenXML documents (.DOCX) to Open Document Format (.Open Document Format) (and conversely) for Open XML processing applications. You will find below the list of unsupported features which may be due to standard compatibility issues, or to the translator itself (see rendering issues as discussed in the blog)...
-
Explosive compatibility - interoperability study concerning ODF and MOOXL! This has Florian's signature written all over it, and it goes right to the heart of the matter.
David A. Wheeler submitted a comment to the OASIS ODF TC outlining his concerns with this publication. He suggests that a few minor changes to ODF could greatly improve compatibility - interop issues. He also figures out that OpenOffice - ODF has more features than MSOffice - MOOXML. Wha the doesn't ge is that it is these new and innovative features that continue to increase the difficulties of implementing ODF in real world business process workgroups!
David also ignores the fact that the TC jus tvoted down the Novell "LIt Enhancement Proposal" which was specifically designed to address the compatibility - interop issues outlined in this odf-converter blog! Given a choice, the ODF TC members chose the new and innovative features of the interop breaking Sun-KOffice "List Enhancement Proposal".
The List Enhancement Proposal discussion was so contentious and focused on personal destruction as to represent a total break down of the ODF concensus process. There is no way that either the Foundation or Novell will ever contribute another compatibility - interop enhancement proposal given the personal assault and determined oppostion of Sun to compatibility - interoperability initiatives.
The hard lesson the Foundation learned is that if you oppose Sun, you'll get booted out of OASIS!
The lesson Novell learned is that they are better off working through Ecma 376 to resolve these issues that the public demands be addressed.
Notice the last line in David's comment, "In any case, the MUCH, MUCH longer list of problems with Microsoft XML format isn't our problem."
During the contentious List Enhancement Proposal and the compatibility - interop related Metadata RDF/XML discussions, ODF members freque -
These are the same guys who just voted against the Novell List Enhancement Proposal that did exactly what the odf-converter blog claims needs to be done if the compatibility-interop problems are to be resolved!
2More
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
- Cached
Keeping both sides honest - O\'Reilly XML Blog - 0 views
www.oreillynet.com/...keeping_both_sides_honest.html
massachusetts microsoft odf ooxml opendocument openxml
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The former State Government CIO of Massachusetts (a state in USA) Louis Gutierrez has a worthwhile interview in Computerworld this week. What I like about the article in particular is that he seems clear that the role of govenment is not just to passively accept standards, but to pragmatically assess the suitability and impact and processes of each one. ISO makes “voluntary standards” not laws. Gutierrez says the obvious: that there is a marked difference in the feature set between ODF and OpenXML (”straightforward simplicity” versus “feature-rich but very idiosyncratic diversty”): he does not trivialize the difference in coverage or scope between the two.
-
Finally, someone in Massachusetts is talking and it's the master, Louis Gutierrez. Wiki Ricki has some nice comments about the ComputerWorld interview with Louis. As have become his custom though, Rick once again carries the flag (or should i say water) for Microsoft. Rick's expertise in XML used to be the draw for his column. Now you have to parse through his comments, separating the nuggets of truth from the torren of bias. Paid bias. It's too bad. Rick was one of the best.
2More
BetaNews | Microsoft: Office Format War Over - 0 views
-
"Over the past few years, we've had two important file formats come into the market, OpenXML and ODF. Both were designed for different purposes, and both have been valuable additions to the market. Now we can also say that we have multiple implementations of both formats."
-
The war is over? When did Microsoft surrender? And when did they sign the official terms of surrender?
The terms of surrender are simple. Microsoft must agree to fully support and implement ODF as a native file format in all versions of MSOffice qualified for the current OOXML compatibility kit. Furthermore, MSOffice must offer end users the choice of selecting ODF as the default MSOffice file format.
Those are the terms of surrender, and i for one don't see how the Microsoft or Novell Translator plugin's qualify? These things are garbage!
What if an MSOffice user was to work on a document, save it to OOXML only to open it later to find a near totally useless and corrupted document with a conversion fidelity equal to that achieved by the hapless MCN Translator Plugins?
Right. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Until these idiotic MCN Translators can achieve a conversion fidelity between ODF and OOXML acceptable to MSOffice users - comparable to native documents use and expectations, they should be regarded for what they are: an experimentation proving conclusively that OOXML is not even close to being interoperable with ODF.
~ge~
4More
Is ODF designed to be not implementable without source code? - Wouter - 0 views
-
Exactly! It's not that ODF is under-specified. It's that ODF can't be fully specified until OpenOffice is completely documented and capable of supporting expected features. There is this famous quote from Sun's Svante Schubert that pretty much says it all; "Nothing goes into the ODF specification unless it's supported by OpenOffice". The statement was made at a meeting of the OASIS ODF Metadata SC while discussing the controversial use of "XML ID". IBM's Elias Torres, of RDFa fame, was passionately arguing that use of the XML ID should be left open to all developers. Sun had taken the position that XML ID should be limited to only a handful of elements supported by OpenOffice. The discussion acutally got far worse than the quote would indicate. Elias compromised his arguments suggesting that we should allow developers to have at it with XML ID for at least one year, and then revisit the issue. This suggestion lead to a discussion of how developers implementing elements with metadata would notify the metadata sub committee of their use case. A discussion list was proposed. The idea being that developers would send in their use cases and the oligarchs on the sub c would approve or disprove. Incredibly, this suggestions was shot down by Bruce d'Arcus (OpenDocument Foundation). Bruce thought that any developer needing metadata support for particular elements should have to join the OASIS ODF Metadata SC like everyone else before their needs would be considered. ( i.e. - like the other oligarchs). At the next weeks meeting, Rob Weir showed up with a list of 14 spreadsheet related elements that IBM needed XML ID support for. Sun representatives Svante Schubert and Michael Brauer immediately approved the use, agreeing that OpenOffice would support that implementation. This how things work at OASIS ODF. Ever wonder why SVG or XForms support in ODF is so limited? It's because the specification directly reflects the limits of the OpenOffice implement
-
Sorry. Diigo cut my comment off about half way through. I've complained to Wade and Maggie about this problem, especially how it impacts and cripples the "Group Auto-Blog Post" feature . Months have gone by. Yet still the issue remains.
5More
shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 14
- No Cached
We Can No Longer Unbundle Microsoft Office - 0 views
techcrunch.com/...cannot-unbundle-office-anymore
wordsdk Office-365 office-formats Office-Productivity
![](/images/link.gif)
-
In 2007, productivity reached the cloud when the EU forced Microsoft to open the file formats to OpenXML and add an x at the end of our familiar file extensions .pptx, .xlsx and .docx. Google Docs also quickly floated cloud versions of each Office document format. However, in the same year, Apple launched iPhone without a view to file storage on the device. Since then a lot of startup innovation came from Dropbox and Box unbundling file storage from the OS, but software that enables the creation and editing of files on touchscreen devices has been less of a concern.
-
2007 was also the year that Apple released the first iPhone. ISO standardised PDF with a unique very valuable attribute; "tags". Tagged PDF raced into the mobility breach enabling all kinds of data binding and digital signature advances critical to mobile document centric workflows. In 2008 we saw a global financial collapse that put more pressure than ever on productivity. To survive, companies had to do more with less. Less people, less resources and less money. Cloud computing and mobility rose to the occasion, but the timing of the cloud tsunami connects the incredible synchronicity of XML compound document formats (business documents), Tagged PDF, the iPhone, and the financial collapse of 2008. The rise of sync-share-store services like DropBox is a natural replacement of the local, workgroup bound, client/server hard drive problem. Most importantly though, the iPhone is the first device to integrate and combine communications with computation. The data had to move to the Cloud before it could become useful to mobile apps combining for the first time, communications, content and computation is hand held devices. Anyone who ever worked in the Microsoft client/server productivity ecosystem will tell you that the desktop PC was totally lacking in "communications"; let alone the kind of integrated communications that the iPhone offers. It is the integration of communications, content and collaborative computation that will make the productivity of Cloud Computing something extraordinary.
-
-
Three years ago, CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar started using OpenXML formats to bring Microsoft Office to iPad. Since then, the company opened its interface to file authoring tools from Office and Google Drive, and storage providers like Dropbox, Box and Hightail, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and will soon be hard at work adding Apple’s CloudDrive. CloudOn feels that if it focuses on providing the best compatibility and exportability across devices, then they can be the place where users can “preserve, render and manipulate” documents on mobile. Once CloudOn can maintain its goal of giving consumers a familiar look and feel and lossless publishing for all the most popular document creation and storage providers, they plan to optimize for touchscreens. CloudOn sees only single-digit-minute session times in files, so their next step is to enable gestures to edit charts and annotate text with your fingers to help make better use of that time.
-
Feature-bundled workflows to get things done on the device you’re looking at are necessities, not nice pairings like chocolate and peanut butter.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
Pellucid Analytics takes a different strategy to rebuilding PowerPoint. Instead of looking at PowerPoint as a design tool, Pellucid fixes the design and enables archive search for thousands of financial accounting slide templates that an analyst would need to fill a pitch book such as ROE, EBITDA and other fun acronyms. Since the formatting is already set, analysts can just enter company names and based on the data sources that the bank they work for has licensed, Pellucid can fill in any of that data automatically and keep it up to date. However, the concept of live data in presentations is a shock to most bankers, so Adrian Crockett of Pellucid admits that it’s one of the first things he has to explain to new users. Of course, Pellucid offers the ability to snapshot data for use in later presentations. But Adrian stressed that in addition to Pellucid’s approach to removing grunt work for analysts, it is giving senior bankers access to live data right in the presentation that would normally require VPN access, logins, app switching and all other sorts of headaches to be able to access, especially on tablets.
1More
shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Mar 16
- No Cached
LibreOffice 4.3 boosts document compatibility | InfoWorld - 0 views
www.infoworld.com/...ts-document-compatibility.html
OOXML OpenXML Office-Interop Office-Compatibility Office 365 LibreOffice
![](/images/link.gif)
-
"Version 4.3 of LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite developed by the Document Foundation and derived from the OpenOffice.org project, was released today. Aside from the usual array of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more cross-compatible with Microsoft Office, version 4.3 has features that give files from legacy Macintosh productivity software a new lease on life. Take control! 30 essential OS X command-line tips Go beyond the graphical user interface and take full advantage of Mac OS X at the command line READ NOW Most of the improvements around file handling in 4.3 involve better support for various aspects of the Office Open XML (OOXML) format used by Microsoft for its productivity software. LibreOffice users have often complained of opening Word 2010 or Word 2013 documents and finding that the formatting had been mangled or features like annotations hadn't survive being resaved in LibreOffice. Version 4.3 preserves many more of the attributes used in OOXML documents, such as style attributes for text and images. Also new to this edition of LibreOffice is import support for document formats created by a slew of legacy Macintosh applications: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, Claris Resolve, GreatWorks, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and Wingz. Likewise, Microsoft Works spreadsheets and databases -- not just word processing documents -- can now also be imported into LibreOffice. Another change, which might not directly affect many users but hints at how the refactoring of LibreOffice's code is reaching many legacy issues, involves the lengths of paragraphs. Previously, paragraphs in a LibreOffice document couldn't exceed 65,000 characters due to a bug in the underlying OpenOffice.org code that had persisted for over a decade and remained unclosed. Other changes include comments that can now be "printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported," according to the Document Foundation; better behaviors for sp
2More
shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Mar 16
- No Cached
The Document Foundation, LibreOffice and OOXML - The Document Foundation Wiki - 1 views
wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_OOXML
OOXML OpenXML MOX ODF The-Document-Foundation Office 365 LibreOffice
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Why does LibreOffice offer to read, edit and save documents in OOXML? Just like OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice lets its users handle documents in the format used by Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. It is important to understand that these formats, also called OOXML are in fact somewhat different from the ISO standard bearing the same name; in fact it is unclear whether anyone is able to implement the ISO standard. To avoid confusion, we will refer to the Microsoft formats produced by Microsoft Office as Microsoft Open XML (MOX) hereafter. To enable data interchange, LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org before it, has traditionally engaged with the reality of a world filled with data in many, less than ideal formats. Our users are used to exchanging data bi-directionally between many proprietary formats, and their Free Software equivalents. Indeed there are few choices for a non-dominant player to deliberately shun inter-operating, and remain relevant.
-
Don't you feel as if you are betraying Free and Open Source Software, as well as Open Standards such as ODF? No. And if we felt that way, we would take immediate action to remove the full stack. What we are offering our users is convenience; if we didn't offer these features we would not be serving users and we would get daily messages requesting the support of the new Microsoft Office formats. Besides, the same reasoning applies to the old Microsoft Office formats we support; and while it was thought for a while it was possible to prevent people from using these formats or even buying Microsoft Office, it turned out that it was not possible. We do believe, however, that by offering a full-featured and innovative office suite that exists among a rich and diverse ODF ecosystem, ODF shall prevail in the end.
1More
Guest Post Online - 0 views
-
Article Writing & Guestpost You Can Join this Site for Your Article & guest post, Just Easy way to join this site & total free Article site. This site article post to totally free Way. Guest Post & Article Post live to Life time only for Current & this time new User. http://guestpostonline.com
3More
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
- Cached
ODF1.2 Interoperability Proposal - 0 views
www.oasis-open.org/...msg00048.html
california compatibility davinci interoperability iso massachusetts oasis odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument openxml plugin xml
![](/images/link.gif)
-
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
-
Part of the sad but enduring "History of Failed ODF Interoperability Attempts". This particular message is dated November 20th, 2006.
The OpenDocument Foundation was notified a week earlier that the "benefactor" ODF Community group Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to put together in Massachusetts had failed. This was the group Louis formed around the da Vinci plugin and our InfoSet APi.
Florian has been hired by Novell, and his first day on the job he finds out about the IBM - Novell deal with Microsoft. Now he has write the MOOXML plugin for OpenOffice using the MS-CleverAge Translator Project work. So he writes this message to the ODF TC [office] list.
The interoperability enhancements Florian suggests are based on the <interoperability eXtensions> submitted in August to the ODF Metadata SC for consideration.
The first element in this list tha tFlorian chose to tackle related to "Lists". He called it the "LIst Override Proposal". This became the now infamous "List Enhancement Proposal War" that resulted in Sun having OASIS boot out the Foundation.
Such is life in big vendor ODF'dom
~ge~
4More
shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
- Cached
Sun-Bosak "Yes" Vote on ISO approval of MS OOXML - 0 views
www.ibiblio.org/...2007Jul16-081558.eml
bosak ecma iso microsoft oasis odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument openxml
![](/images/link.gif)
-
We wish to make it completely clear that we support DIS 29500 becoming an ISO Standard and are in complete agreement with its stated purposes of enabling interoperability among different implementations and providing interoperable access to the legacy of Microsoft Office documents.
-
Sun announces support for ISO approval of MS OOXML as an international standard:
"We wish to make it completely clear that we support DIS 29500 becoming an ISO Standard and are in complete agreement with its stated purposes of enabling interoperability among different implementations and providing interoperable access to the legacy of Microsoft Office documents."
Bosak tries to obscure this "YES" vote by pointing to their comments that Microsoft should finally reveal the MS binary secret blueprints with a mapping of the binary blueprints to OOXML. Ha Ha Ha! Now we know what Microsoft paid Sun $2 Billion for in 2004. -
Yagotta B. Kidding: The vote was "yes, with comments." That is not, per ISO rules, a "conditional" yes, it's a just-plain-yes. The comments are advisory and regardless of whether they're resolved there's no way to change the "yes" to a "no." Specifically, ISO voting procedure [1] states, "Conditional approval should be submitted as a disapproval vote." Yes, it's confusing. The way these things work, there's no way to vote "unconditional no." The options are "yes, as it currently stands" and "yes, if the following problems are addressed." That makes the enormous effort to get unconditional approval quite curious. [1] JTC1 Directives, 5th Edition, Version 3.0, Section 9.8
2More
Comments on 'On the Office format wars' - 0 views
-
A fatal flaw in your analysis By Marbux Posted Saturday 21st April 2007 08:15 GMT Your analysis contains a fatal flaw, Martin. That is your belief that adequate Microsoft XML <> OpenDocument translators will be available. In fact, all of the translators suck mightily and there is no prospect at all of them being perfected. The major problems are: (i) that Microsoft's XML formats seem deliberately designed to thwart their parsing with XPath, which is essential to XML transformations; (ii) that Microsoft's "XML" file formats include binary blobs, bitmasks, and multiple Windows and Microsoft dependendencies, all of which defy XML transformations; and (iii) OpenDocument assumes a richer page layout engine than Microsoft Word provides, so while DOCX can be completely mapped to ODT it is impossible to fully map in the other direction without declaring an MS Office interoperability subset of OpenDocument and ODF applications implementing a compatibility mode with reduced features. (That is more than somewhat ironic, given Microsoft's spin that it couldn't implement all of its features in OpenDocument. In fact, the exact opposite is true.) In fact, Steve Ballmer is on record as saying that the developers of the Novell-Microsoft-Clever Age plug-ins will not even attempt to achieve full fidelity file translations between the two formats. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2050848,00.asp?kc=EWEWEMNL103006EP17A Those translators achieve at best far less conversion fidelity than existing file conversion filters between OpenDocument and Microsoft binary file formats such as the OpenOffice.org conversion filters, which achieve only about 80 per cent fidelity. The file format cognescenti know this. See e.g., the paper by Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser included in this edition of the European Journal for the Informatics Professional. http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2006/6/up7-6Hiser.pdf (PDF). (Note that I contributed to that paper.) And as also detailed in that paper, what works well enough for some of us does not necessarily work well enough for all. Anything less than full fidelity data conversions is absolutely unacceptable in the context of wholly automated business processes and is in fact illegal in various contexts, including government records. So your thesis doesn't fly. In fact, I'd go so far as to bet that you have been suckered by the Microsoft spin doctors. Another indication is your depiction of the file format wars as being waged primarily between IBM and Microsoft, a recent theme of Microsoft's public relations machine. While it is seductive to believe that the controversy is just another chapter in the war between major competitors, the pro-ODF camp is far broader than IBM. For example, nearly 20 governments recently opposed fast track processing of Microsoft's draft standard at ISO. Do you believe they were all carrying water for IBM? Government bodies in more than 50 nations have chosen to adopt ODF. http://opendocumentfellowship.org/government/precedent And dozens of developers now support the OpenDocument standard in their applications. http://opendocumentfellowship.org/applications While IBM has had a noteworthy role in proliferating the OpenDocument formats, there is a movement without a recognizable leader in the industry. When it comes to vendor influence on things relevant to ODF, Sun Microsystem's far outshines IBM. But in fact, a core group of open standards and free and open source developers and advocates -- inside and outside government -- have played a far larger role. This is a customer-driven phenomenon, not a vendor-driven effort as you portray. So I will respectfully suggest that you reexamine your position on these issues. Reasonable minds can differ, but not on the grounds you advocate.
-
Here we go again. A couple of boot lickin lackies at The Register make some moronic statements about the OpenDocument XML file format, and the portable document cognisceti experts come out of the wood work to set the record straight. I think it's a scam to get boost hits.
Once again Marbux hands out a major bitch splappin to Microsoft shills who have no idea what's coming. What a great job Marbox does, and does with a kind consideration that certainly isn't warranted given the idiocy of the main article. Where does the man's patience come from? I gave up long ago.
~ge~