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Gary Edwards

An Antic Disposition: Cracks in the Foundation - IBM takes over ODF - 0 views

  • You must admire their tenacity. Gary Edwards and the pseudonymous "Marbux". The mythology of Silicon Valley is filled with stories of two guys and a garage founding great enterprises. And here we have two guys, and through blogs, interviews, and constant attendance at conferences, they have become some of the most-heard voices on ODF. Maybe it is partly due to the power of the name? The "OpenDocument Foundation" sounds so official. Although it has no official role in the ODF standard, this name opens doors. The ODF Alliance , the ODF Fellowship, the OASIS ODF TC, ODF Adoption TC (and many other groups without "ODF" in their name) have done far more to promote and improve ODF, yet the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. seems to score the panel invites. Not bad for two guys without a garage.
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    An eMail went out today, October 24th, 2007, nominating IBM's Rob "Show me your garage!" Weir to be the new Co Chairman of OASIS ODF TC.  So it's looks like it's true; IBM is moving to take over ODF and OpenOffice.

    Not that that's bad.  In the long run this is perhaps the best thing that ever happened to ODF and OpenOffice.  There is no way IBM's Lotus Notes business plan for ODF-OOo could be any worse than Sun's plan has turned out to be. 

    ~ge~

Graham Perrin

ODF Alliance Weblog: Microsoft's ODF Support Falls Short - 0 views

  • “Unfortunately, serious shortcomings have been identified in Microsoft’s support for ODF. Putting potentially millions of ODF files into circulation that are non-interoperable and incompatible with the ODF support provided by other vendors is a recipe for fragmentation.”
    • Alex Brown
       
      I think Mr Marcich forgot to put inverted commas round his particular use of "ODF" to denote its special meaning ...
  • Microsoft’s ODF Support Falls Short
  • some of the so-called ‘plug-ins’ were revealed to provide better support for ODF than the recently released Microsoft Office 2007 SP2
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • plug-ins for Microsoft Office written by third parties were revealed to provide better support for ODF than the recently released Microsoft Office 2007 SP2
  • SourceForge “OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-in for Office
  • Sun Plug-In 3.0
  • fail when using the “built-in” support provided by Office 2007 SP2
Gary Edwards

The ODF Alliance puckers up and gets smacked with the great CSS question - Where is it?... - 0 views

  • Harmonisation It is interesting that the ODF Alliance quotes Tim Bray that the world doesn’t need another way to express basic typesetting features. If it is so important, why didn’t ODF just adopt W3C CSS or ISO DSSSL conventions? Why did they adopt the odd automatic styles mechanism which no other standard uses? Now I think the ODF formating conventions are fine, and automatic styles are a good idea. But there is more than one way to make an omlette, and a good solution space is good for users. My perspective is that harmonisation (which will take multiple forms: modularity, pluralism, base sets, extensions, mappings, round-trippability, feature-matching, convergence of component vocabularies, etc, not just the simplistic common use of a common syntax) will be best achieved by continued user pressure, both on MS and the ODF side, within a forum where neither side can stymie the legitimate needs of other.
Gary Edwards

South Africa, Netherlands and Korea striding toward ODF - 0 views

  • In Belgium, for instance, the government is using plug-ins to enable Microsoft Office to read and save files in ODF, Marcich said. The same plug-ins are being used in Massachusetts, which was the first governmental body to move to ODF. One prominent ODF backer, the unrelated Open Document Foundation, said in late October that it would stop backing ODF in favor of a more viable universal format called the Compound Document Format (CDF). Marcich said that "won't have any effect on the alliance or on ODF" adoption. Moreover, CDF, which is a World Wide Web Consortium format, differs greatly in features and goals than ODF. "We're talking about apples and oranges here," he said.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      This ComputerWorld article is referenced by the State of New York in their request for information
Gary Edwards

Computerworld - South Africa, Netherlands and Korea striding toward ODF - Eric Lai - 0 views

  • One prominent ODF backer, the unrelated Open Document Foundation, said in late October that it would stop backing ODF in favor of a more viable universal format called the Compound Document Format (CDF). Marcich said that "won't have any effect on the alliance or on ODF" adoption. Moreover, CDF, which is a World Wide Web Consortium format, differs greatly in features and goals than ODF. "We're talking about apples and oranges here," he said.
Gary Edwards

Open XML trumps ODF in document format fight, consulting firm says - 0 views

  • Marino Marcich, executive director of the OpenDocument Format Alliance, retorted via e-mail that many users are taking "a buyer-beware attitude" toward Open XML because that format "is not interoperable and will tie them to the upgrade path of a single vendor." For example, he noted that Becta, the U.K. government's educational technology agency, last week released a report of its own advising, among other things, that to ensure the widest compatibility of files between different applications, Office 2007 users shouldn't save documents in Open XML. Instead, Becta recommended the continued use of Microsoft's older and proprietary .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      It's true, OOXML is not interoperable. It was designed for MSOffice and MSOffice only. The problem is that there is no interoperable" alternative to OOXML!!!! ODF itself has serious interoperability problems fully demonstrated at the October 2007 ODF Interoeprability Workshop held in Barcelona Spain. If users want interoperbility with ODF, they must settle on a single ODF vendor. So how is that different from the interop problems imposed by OOXML?
Gary Edwards

Study: Open Document Format made gains in '07 | InfoWorld | News | 2008-01-04 | By Chri... - 0 views

  • "It's one thing to recognize ODF as a matter of policy in an enterprise architecture framework and another to mandate its use," he added. "Proprietary formats in the public sphere are going out of style and becoming unacceptable globally."
    • Gary Edwards
       
      That's right! Which is why announcing a preference for HTML, XHTML, PDF and ODF is meaningless. A mandate for ODF RATHER THAN OOXML is the only way ODF can succeed as an open standard.
Gary Edwards

Frankly Speaking: Microsoft's Cynicism - Flock - 0 views

  • In July, Jones was asked on his blog whether Microsoft would actually commit to conform to an officially standardized OOXML. His response: “It’s hard for Microsoft to commit to what comes out of Ecma [the European standards group that has already OK’d OOXML] in the coming years, because we don’t know what direction they will take the formats. We’ll of course stay active and propose changes based on where we want to go with Office 14. At the end of the day, though, the other Ecma members could decide to take the spec in a completely different direction. ... Since it’s not guaranteed, it would be hard for us to make any sort of official statement.”
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Then why is Microsoft dragging us through this standardization nonsense? Is this nothing more than thinly veiled assault on open standards in general?
  • To at least some people at Microsoft, this isn’t about meeting the needs of customers who want a stable, solid, vendor-neutral format for storing and managing documents. It’s just another skirmish with the open-source crowd and rivals like IBM, and all that matters is winning.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      The battle between OOXML and ODF is very much about two groups of big vendor alliances. Interestingly, both groups seek to limit ODF interoperability, but for different reasons.

      See: The Plot To Limit ODF Interop
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    Good commentary from Frank Hayes of Computerworld concerning a very serious problem. Even if ISO somehow manages to approve MS-OOXML, Microsoft has reserved the right to implement whatever extension of Ecma-OOXML they feel like implementing. The whole purpose of this standardization exercise was to bring interoperability, document exchange and long term archive capability to digital information by separating the file formats from the traditions of application, platform and vendor dependence.

    If Microsoft is determined to produce a variation of OOXML that meets the needs of their proprietary application-platform stack, including proprietary bindings and dependencies, any illusions we might have about open standards and interoeprability will be shattered.  By 2008, Microsoft is expected to have over a billion MS-OOXML ready systems intertwined with their proprietary MS Stack of desktop, server, device and web applications. 

    How are we to interoperate/integrate non Microsoft applications and services into that MS Stack if the portable document/data/media transport is off limits?  If you thought the MS Desktop monopoly posed an impossible barrier, wait until the world gets a load of the MS Stack!

    Good article Frank.

    ~ge~

Graham Perrin

Front-page: Microsoft now attempts to sabotage ODF - 0 views

Gary Edwards

Greeks bearing gifts - 0 views

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    Hands down the best analysis of the Novell-Microsoft axis of evil alliance. Although i have to say that from what i know about IBM, Oracle, and Novell, one would have to conclude that "Microsoft took the bait". From the standpoint of the IBM-Oracle-Nove
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    Hands down the best analysis of the Novell-Microsoft axis of evil alliance. Although i have to say that from what i know about IBM, Oracle, and Novell, one would have to conclude that "Microsoft took the bait". From the standpoint of the IBM-Oracle-Nove
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    Hands down the best analysis of the Novell-Microsoft axis of evil alliance. Although i have to say that from what i know about IBM, Oracle, and Novell, one would have to conclude that "Microsoft took the bait". From the standpoint of the IBM-Oracle-Nove
Gary Edwards

Dave Winer Bashing ODF | Scripting News: 10/12/2005 - 0 views

  • A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft's (with a monopolistic dominant installed base). It's not surprising that the group is lead by the detritus of the last generation of tech companies. The thriving companies, Google, Yahoo and others have the good sense to sit this time and money-waster out.  
Gary Edwards

Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill? | Applications - InfoWorld - 0 views

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    This article compliments the previous publication, "The better Office Alternative - Softmaker Office". Good stuff! Excerpt: "It's the question that vexes free open source software advocates and commercial competitors around the globe: Why is Microsoft Office so difficult to dislodge from its perch atop the IT heap? Is it the exclusive bundling deals? The deep Software Assurance entrenchment? Steve Ballmer's backroom deal with the devil?" "The answer, of course, is none of the above (though some evidence of a Microsoft-Hell alliance exists). Rather, it's the Office ecosystem -- the vast library of third-party add-ons and vertical solutions built (with copious encouragement from Microsoft) on Office's extensive programmatic model -- that makes Microsoft's suite so hard to kill."
Gary Edwards

www.odfalliance.org/resources/ - Google Search - 0 views

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    Whoa! Jackpot
Gary Edwards

How A PAID IBM Lobbyist Orchestrates The Worldwide Search for a Standard Document Format - 0 views

  • Open Means Open For a document format to be considered "open," it should be fully implemented by many different vendors, interoperable, fully published, and available royalty free without intellectual property restrictions. Microsoft's OOXML continues to fail this test. For example, the comments from the British Standards Institute pointed out that "there was no other proven implementation of OOXML apart from Office 2007." Unless and until there is another proven implementation, any government beginning to use OOXML would be faced with only one option. This is contrary to the objective of government open standards policies. Open standards policies are proliferating as governments seek to create IT architectures that rely on open standards to allow multiple vendors to compete directly based on the features and performance of their products. What governments obviously need are open standards that enable technology solutions that are portable and that can be removed and replaced with that of another vendor with minimal effort and without major interruption.
Gary Edwards

The History of OpenDocument,: The battle between Massachusetts and Microsoft - 0 views

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    Excellent historical summary of the battle between Massachusetts adn Microsft over the OpenDocument XML file format. Grea ttime line, with many useful links. One thing missing is an explanation of why XML?
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    Excellent historical summary of the battle between Massachusetts adn Microsft over the OpenDocument XML file format. Grea ttime line, with many useful links. One thing missing is an explanation of why XML?
  •  
    Excellent historical summary of the battle between Massachusetts adn Microsft over the OpenDocument XML file format. Grea ttime line, with many useful links. One thing missing is an explanation of why XML?
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