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Gary Edwards

Government Open Source Conference to Feature Open Document Debate - Government Technology - GOSCON - 0 views

www.govtech.com/...150738

cdf goscon interoperability odf ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • The Executive Panel on Open Document Formats, moderated by Andy Stein, director of information technology at the city of Newport News, Va., will focus on how the user community can get involved in this issue, have influence over its outcome and knowledge for implementations. Panelists are expected to address the practical differences between competing standards OOXML, ODF and CDF to determine which one(s) truly provide a single file format that is open, universally interoperable and application- and platform-independent. About half of the session will be set aside for audience questions, providing an opportunity for GOSCON attendees to gain direct access to the debate.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The press coverage on GOSCON is outstanding.  Kudos to Debra Bryant and Andy Stein for stoking the fire here. 
Gary Edwards

EOOXML objections - Grokdoc - 0 views

www.grokdoc.net/...EOOXML_objections

ecma eooxml imported:del.icio.us iso jtc-1 microsft mooxml oasis odf

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Marbux has done some heroic work here, using the GrokDoc Wiki.  The Title is "EOOXML Objections", and it's primary purpose is to help ISO National Body Memebers evaluate the 0ver 6,000 pages of the Microsoft - ECMA Office Open XML Specification for MSOffice. 

    On January 5th, 2007, Microsoft officially submitted EOOXML to ISO under the fast track rules.  Before EOOXML can hit the fast track though, ISO provides members with a 30 day "Contradition Review Phase".   During this brief phase, ISO NB's (national standards body members) muct evaluate the proposal and post their allegations concerning contradictions and inconsistencies with other ISO products - like ODF.

    What Marbux is assembling here is a one stop shop for ISO NB's strugglign to understand the issues at stake.  It's incredible wha the has accomplished in such a short time.  But then, the clock is ticking.  February 5th is a hard and unmovable deadline. 

    The basic contradiction is thatt EOOXML is a subset of ISO existing product, ODF.  Both attempt to do the exact same thing:  provide an XML file format for desktop productivity environments such as MSOffice, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect Office.  What seriously differentiates the two is that ODF was designed expressly to be a universal file format, application and platform independent, able to transition across many different information domains connecting the legacy of desktop productivity to near everything else.  MOOXML on the other hand was designed for MSOffice and the legacy of billions of binary documents that only Micrsoft knows the secrets to converting to XML.  As such, MOOXML is designed to be application and platform bound, with these proprietary dependencies written right into the specification.

    One of the more important elements of the Marbux arguments is that the OpenDocument Foundation's daVinci Plugin and InfoSet Engine - API prove conclusively
Gary Edwards

Microsoft pushes Trade Secrets Bill - 1 views

thestack.com/...trade-secrets-act-2015-support

Trade-secret-legislation Microsoft Patents Microsoft-Patent-Consortium

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • A spokesman for the Microsoft On The Issues website has expressed the company’s support for new legislation that would reform the legal framework for companies wishing to protect their trade secrets in a cloud-centric world where such information is frequently forced to reside on networks. In the post Microsoft’s Assistant General Counsel of IP Policy & Strategy Jule Sigall rallies behind business and academic concerns supporting the proposed Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 (DTSA), which goes before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee today. Sigall, who is also Associate General Counsel for Copyright in Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs department, makes an ardent case for reform of the current legislation, as furnished by the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA). UTSA’s provisions are argued to be fractured, and rendered ineffective both by the inability of plaintiffs to pursue suits in federal courts (despite trade secret infractions being Federal by nature), and by the fact that not all states have adopted or instituted all the measures provided by the legislation. Additionally the limited provision for redress in international cases of trade secret theft are to be addressed.
  • Sigall presents the case of Microsoft’s Cortana AI as an example of why new legislation is necessary: ‘[Behind] Cortana sits a vast amount of technology developed or enhanced in-house by Microsoft – voice recognition; language translation; reactive and predictive algorithms that can synthesize context, location and data, and interface with the vast resources of the Bing search engine index; and a complex array of cloud servers to crunch and serve data in real time. This technology represents tens of thousands of hours of research, trial and error, and continued improvement as Cortana is adapted for new devices and new scenarios’
  • Sigall argues that better protection procedures for trade secrets, the only form of IP which currently lacks comprehensive cover in law, is essential for start-ups whose ideas, business plans and even customer lists may constitute the only marketable value of a company that is just in the stage of consolidating. ‘A trade secret is unique among forms of intellectual property in how it is legally protected. While it is a federal crime to steal a trade secret, a business that has its trade secrets stolen must rely on state law to pursue a civil remedy. Owners of copyrights, patents, and trademarks can go to federal court to protect their property and seek damages when their property has been infringed, but trade secret owners do not have access to such a federal remedy.’
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 contains [PDF] significant material from its doomed predecessor of 12 months ago, and one of its boldest initiatives is the extension of ex parte seizures, instituted in UTSA in a more limited form (particularly in the 1985 amendment to the Uniform Law Commission’s 1979 initial legislation). An ex parte seizure provides a kind of restraining order or injunction on disputed information, or even the dissemination of knowledge about whether the information is disputed, and places it under federal protection on the plaintiff’s behalf.
  • Microsoft had a hard time adjusting to the open source revolution, particularly in regard to the PC/Mac Office product which at one time represented the most successful and ubiquitous software in the world, and the many legal and semantic wrangles over the closed-source nature of Office formats such as Word led ultimately to a hybridised open source .docx format which is still argued to not be the OpenXML that was promised.
  • According to Sigall the state-by-state system currently in place was ‘simply not built with the digital world in mind’, and calls for ‘A uniform, national standard for protection’ which does not stop at state lines or even national borders.
  • In practical terms this seems likely to extend the circumstances under which information about leaks, hacks or thefts of information can be made the subject of gag orders for legal reasons, since it brings trade secrets into the same legal framework as other forms of intellectual property which enjoy more comprehensive coverage and recourse in law. The bill would also extend the purview of the 1996 Economic Espionage Act to take in a more rigorously conceived concept of ‘trade secrets’.
  • Even with the issues clear, the risk of disproportionate or over-reaching response in the event of the new bill passing successfully through congress in 2016 (it is unlikely to pass this year) is clear enough that the lack of network discussion about it is quite surprising. Essentially DTSA represents the same kind of proposed ‘judicial fast track’ – though in favour of corporations instead of governments – that has outraged so many commenters in the wake of the November 13th Paris attacks.
  • Silence in court Amongst its more quotidian clauses, the Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015 effectively offers corporate plaintiffs increased opportunity to federalise disputed private material in cases involving trade secrets, with all the penalties for infraction associated with that change of status – and far greater scope for sub judice orders likely to contain and conceal future breaches of information.
  • Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law has just published a paper outlining the risks of extending ex parte seizures in the manner that DTSA 2015 proposes. Goldman writes that ‘the Seizure Provision does not solve many, if any, problems. In light of the remedies already available to trade secret owners in ex parte temporary restraining orders (TROs), the Seizure Provision purports to apply to only a narrow set of additional circumstances. In exchange for that modest benefit, the Seizure Provision creates the risk of anti-competitive seizures and seizures that cause substantial collateral damage to innocent third parties. To discourage such abuses, the Act imposes procedural safeguards and creates a cause of action for wrongful seizures. Unfortunately, those safeguards are miscalibrated to achieve the desired protections against abusive seizures.’
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Dec 15
     
    Lots of possible Constitutional issues lurking. The Constitution creates only two types of intellectual property, patents and copyrights. "(P)roperty interests . . . are not created by the Constitution. Rather, they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law." Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co., 467 US 986 (1984), https://goo.gl/ZljO1H (trade secrets case). The traditional source of rights in trade secrets have been state law. Thus there is a state's rights issue lurking in this legislation, a question whether the federal government is invading the States' police power, an "our federalism" question.
Gary Edwards

Office generations 1.0 - 4.0| Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/...office_generati.php

carr office office20 web

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07 - Cached
  • The key is to extend both functionality and interoperability without taking away any of the capabilities that users currently rely on or expect. Reducing interoperability or functionality is a non-starter, for the end user as well as the IT departments that want to avoid annoying the end user. You screw with PowerPoint at your own risk.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
       
      Exactly! This is also the reason why ODF failed in Massachusetts! Reducing the interoperability or functionality of of any workgroup related business process is unacceptable. Which is why IBM's rip out and replace MSOffice approach as the means of transitioning to ODF is doomed. The Office 2.0 (er 3.0) crowd is at a similar disadvantage. They offer web based productivity services that leverage the incredible value of web collaboration. The problem is that these collaboration services are not interoperable with MSOffice. This disconnection greatly reduces and totally neutralizes the collaboration value promise. Microsoft of course will be able to deliver that same web based collaborative comp[uting value in an integrated package. They and they alone are able to integrate web collaboration services into existing MSOffice workgroups. In many ways this should be an anti trust issue. If governments allow Microsoft to control the interop channels into MSOffice, then Microsoft web collaboration systems will be the only choice for 550 million MSOffice workgroup users. The interop layer is today an impossible barrier for Office 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS and SOA competitors. This is the reasoning behind our da Vinci CDF+ plug-in for MSOffice. Rather than continue banging the wall of IBM's transition to ODF through government legislated rip out and replace mandates, we think the way forward is to exploit the MSOffice plug-in architecture, using it to neutralize and re purpose existing MSOffice workgroups. The key is getting MSOffice documents into a web ready format that is useful to non Microsoft web platform (cloud) alternatives. This requires a non disruptive transition. The workgroups will not tolerate any loss of interop or functionality. We believe this can be done using CDF+ (XHTML 2.0 + CSS). Think of it as cutting off the transition of existing workgroup business p
  • Microsoft sees this coming, and one of its biggest challenges in the years ahead will be figuring out how to replace the revenues and profits that get sucked out of the Office market.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
       
      Bingo!
  • The real problem that I see is the reduced functionality and integration. I don’t think there can be a Revolution until someone builds an entire suite of Revolutionary office products on the web. Office has had almost (or more than, don't quote me) 15 years of experience to build a tight cohesive relationship between it's products.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
       
      Rather than replace MSOffice, why not move the desktop bound business processes to the web? Re write them to take advantage of web collaboration, universal connectivity, and universal interop.
      Once the business processes are up in the cloud, you can actually start introducing desktop alternatives to MSOffice. The trick is to write these alternative business processes to something other than .NET 3.0, MS-OOXML, and the Exchange/SharePoint Hub.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • left standing in a few years will be limited to those who succeeded in getting their products adopted and imbedded into the customers 'workflow' (for lack of a better term) and who make money from it. A silo'ed PPA is not embedded in a company's workflow (this describes 95% of the Office 2.0 companies) thus their failure is predetermined. A Free PPA is not making money thus their failure is predetermined as well. For those companies who adapt to a traditional service and support model and make it through the flurry.....would they really qualify as Office 4.0?
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
       
      Spot on! Excellent comments that go right to the heart of the matter. The Office 2.0 crowd is creating a new market category that Microsoft will easily be able to seize and exploit when the time is right. Like when it becomes profitable :)
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
     
    In this 2006 article Nick Carr lays out the history of office productivity applications, arguing the Office 2.0 is really Office 3.0 - the generation where desktop productivity office suites mesh with the Web. This article is linked to The Office question, December 18, 2007
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
     
    In this 2006 article Nick Carr lays out the history of office productivity applications, arguing the Office 2.0 is really Office 3.0 - the generation where desktop productivity office suites mesh with the Web. This article is linked to The Office question, December 18, 2007
Gary Edwards

Can a file be ODF and Open XML at the same time? (and HTML? and a Java servlet? and a PDF archive?) - O'Reilly XML Blog - 0 views

www.oreillynet.com/..._file_be_odf_and_open_xml.html

jellife odf ooxml pdf

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • The recent bomb in the ODF world from Gary Edward’s claims that Sun successfully blocked the addition of features to ODF that would be needed for full interchange with Office are explosive not only because they demonstrate how ODF was (properly, in my view) developed to cope with the particular features of the participants, not really as a universal format, but also because the prop up Microsoft’s position that Open XML is required because it exposes particular features that ISO ODF is not capable of exposing. Both because ODF is still in progress and because sometimes the features are simply incompatible in the details.
  • Actually, ODF is about to get a new manifest along with the new metadata stuff. Because we base that on RDF, the manifest will also be RDF-based. It gives us the extensibility we want to provide (extension developers, for example, can add extra metadata they may need), without having to worry about breaking compatibility. The primary addition we've made is a mechanism to bind a stable URI to in-document content node ids and files. This is conceptually not all that different than what I see in OPC; it's just that the unique IDs are in fact URIs. Among other things, in the RDF context that allows further statements to be bound to those URIs. Bruce D'Arcus | July 29, 2007 01:02 PM
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's OOXML: The No vote | Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com.au/...d;1414093266;fp;4194304;fpid;1

cdf ecma iso odf ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Jan 08 - Cached
  • The Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of New South Wales recently hosted a symposium to discuss issues surrounding the proposed Microsoft OOXML document format standard. In attendance at a technical session were representatives from Microsoft, IBM, Google, the Open Source Industry Australia, Standards Australia, the National Archives of Australia, and the International Organisation for Standardisation.
Gary Edwards

International Digital Publishing Forum (formerly Open eBook Forum) - Flock - 0 views

www.idpf.org

universal-format

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is the trade and standards association for the digital publishing industry.
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