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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

Jason Brooks - Bumps on the Road to Document Exchange Nirvana - Flock - 0 views

  • The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format. Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced--but did not release publicly--about a year and a half ago. At the heart of the rift between the Foundation and the rest of the ODF backers--led by Sun and IBM--lies a dispute over the proper strategy for achieving round-trip document fidelity between Microsoft Office and ODF-consuming applications, such as Sun's OpenOffice.org or IBM's Lotus Symphony.
Gary Edwards

Home - Berkman Center for Internet & Society - 0 views

  • There were 5 successive Roundtables.  Each roundtable was led by 5 short presentations before the topic was opened to the floor for general discussion.  The first roundtable focused on "What is ODF, and why are open document standards important". There were many questions regarding how open standards affect competition and innovation, whether ODF is in fact the best standard, issues of archiving and interoperability with ODF as well as how ODF addresses/will address concerns of accessibility for disabled persons. The second Roundtable discussed how various software developers were responding to ODF and the third roundtable focused on whether governments or non-governmental and consumer organizations should systematically use procurement policy to promote ODF.  The following roundtable was a lively discussion on whether national or global "agreements" can play a role in promoting ODF and how.  During that roundtable as well as the last one on "Reflections and next steps", there were discussions of future work and strategies on ODF in a new international forum, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to be held in Athens, Greece, October 30 - November 3, 2006.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School held an Open Document Conference, October 23rd, 2006. Just a few weeks after the October 4th, 2006 resignation of Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez. This is the summary report of organizer Manon Ress. Sam Hiser represented the OpenDocument Foundation. The ZERO Interop problems that plague ODF implementation were not discussed. Strangely :) Another point not discussed is the fact that ODF is not an Internet file format. It's a desktop office suite only format. This constraint is written into the ODF charter. Interestingly, one of the problems of making ODF Web ready is that of highjacked W3C standards. Highjacking occurs when a specification or application takes existing W3C standards and changes the namespace reference to it's own. This is what ODF does. The reason for doing this is to constrain and limit the W3C standard to just those aspects implemented by the ODF reference application, OpenOffice. XForms, SVG, SMiL, XHTML, RDF/XML and RDFa are problematic examples of W3C namespaces that have been highjacked by ODF to meet the specific implementation constraints of OpenOffice. This impacts developers who rely on standard libraires to do conversions and processing. The libraries are built to the proper W3C namespace, and unfortunately assume that ODF complies. It doesn't, So developers have to investigate how OpenOffic eimplements XForms and SVG, and build special ODF libraries before they can use ODF on the Web. It can be done, i think. But it's a train wreck of a mess guaranteed to destroy the high level of web interoperability users and developers expect.
Gary Edwards

ODF Split: Good Riddance, Good Grief, or Game Over? Michael Desmond Redmond Developer ... - 0 views

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    Interesting comment from Simon Phipps: maybe we'll see ODF interoperability in versions 1.3 or 1.5? Note to Simon: It's been five years now since owrk on ODF began! Why not do something about the piss poor ODF interop now? Do we really need to wait another five years? ODF interop problems can be fixed with a simple vote to change the wording in Section 1.5, the Compatibility Clause, from should to must. Today compliance is optional, and it's killing ODF!!!! And this clown says we were out of our depth? He's out there peddling zero interoperability amongst ODF ready applications, with over 550 million users unable to convert their billions MSOffice documents to ODF, and we're the ones out of our depth? Although ODF began a noble and honorable effort to gift mankind with an open universally interoperable XML strucutred format also application, platform and vendor independent, things have changed. The big vendors have taken over, and turned this once noble effort into a shameless marketing war that's invaded international politics as it has corrupted international standards orgs. Game Over! ~ge~
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    Interesting comment from Simon Phipps: maybe we'll see ODF interoperability in versions 1.3 or 1.5? Note to Simon: It's been five years now since owrk on ODF began! Why not do something about the piss poor ODF interop now? Do we really need to wait another five years? ODF interop problems can be fixed with a simple vote to change the wording in Section 1.5, the Compatibility Clause, from should to must. Today compliance is optional, and it's killing ODF!!!! And this clown says we were out of our depth? He's out there peddling zero interoperability amongst ODF ready applications, with over 550 million users unable to convert their billions MSOffice documents to ODF, and we're the ones out of our depth? Although ODF began a noble and honorable effort to gift mankind with an open universally interoperable XML strucutred format also application, platform and vendor independent, things have changed. The big vendors have taken over, and turned this once noble effort into a shameless marketing war that's invaded international politics as it has corrupted international standards orgs. Game Over! ~ge~
Gary Edwards

Compound Document Format and OpenDocument Foundation (Updated 20071109) « Cyb... - 0 views

  • The first time I heard about OpenDocument Foundation people not happy with ODF is from Stephen McGibbon post about Gary Edwards disagreement with Sun. Then comes Rob Weir’s that OpenDocument Foundation had moved away from OpenDocumentFormat. With Rob Weir post I sense some crack in OpenDocument Foundation over ODF. While Weir’s post continues its tradition of building up evidence to support his argument, he is known to be a very passionate guy about ODF and is not shy about attacking opposition, any opposition to ODF. Hence, in this respect, I believe I have to exercise a certain amount of caution when Weir start attacking someone new. Today, I came across Jason Matusow’s happy rambling about how OpenDocument Foundation is unhappy about ODF and appears to be supporting a single document format. Matusow view it as an argument that the “one document format” theory does not work. More on this later. Hmmm… Did OpenDocument Foundation change direction away from ODF? and what is this Compound Document Format (CDF) thing that seems to be the new love of OpenDocument Foundation.
Gary Edwards

The Future is CDF | Metaphorical Web - Kurt Cagle - 0 views

  • As editing increasingly moves onto the web, its safe to say that the document of choice will be neither ODF nor OOXML, both of which gain their power on the basis of supporting legacy word processing systems. Instead, what seems to be emerging from the W3C is something that is not an office suite because it didn’t evolve from one, but that nonetheless is capable of most if not all of the same functions that office suite documents pose.
Paul Merrell

Where is there an end of it? | Real Conformance for ODF? - 0 views

  • There has been quite a lot of hubbub recently about ODF conformance, in particular about how conformance to the forthcoming ODF 1.2 specification should be defined.
  • The proposal caused much debate. In support of the new conformance clause, IBM's Rob Weir described foreign elements (formerly so welcome in ODF) as proprietary extensions that are “evil” and as a “nuclear death ray gun”. Questioning the proposal, KOffice's Thomas Zander wrote that he was “worried that we are trying to remove a core feature that I depend on in both KOffice and Qt”. Meanwhile Microsoft's Doug Mahugh made a counter-proposal suggesting that ODF might adopt the Markup Compatibility and Extensibility mechanisms from ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML). Things came to a head in a 9-2-2 split vote last week which saw the new conformance text adopted in the new ODF committee specification by will of the majority. Following this there was some traffic in the blogosphere with IBM's Rob Weir commenting and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh counter-commenting on the vote and the circumstances surrounding it.
Gary Edwards

An Interop Nightmare: The Northwest Progressive Institute Advocate Review of OpenOffice... - 0 views

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    Marbux at his best! Let's hope the OASIS ODF and OpenOffice.org groups get to work on real interop, and stop with the phony baloney. It can be done, bu tnothing is going to happen until people face up to the harsh reality that today there is zero interop between ODF compliant applications. This must change .... unless of course the world decides to move to the most interoperable but high performance format ever invented: HTML-CSS. And maybe from there the world can move onto the WebKit sugarplum document model, and truly set the future of the Open Web. One thing obviously missing for the Open Web is an office suite of high performance editors capable of natively producing high end WebKit documents (or basic HTML-CSS for that matter!!!!!!!) Good on marbux. Now, can you persuade OASIS and OpenOffice to change their application specific ways? Take on the desktop as well as the future of the Open Web?
Gary Edwards

Report: Companies Use Word Out of Habit, Not Necessity > Comments by ge - 0 views

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    I doubt that MSOffice ODF will make a difference. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice, and conversion from native binary to ODF will result in a serious loss of fidelity and business process markup. If the many ODF pilots are an indication, the real killer is that application specific processing logic will be lost on conversion even if it is Microsoft doing the conversion to ODF. This logic is expressed as scripts, macros, OLE, data binding, media binding, add-on specifics, and security settings. These components are vital to existing business processes. Besides, Microsoft will support ISO 26300, which is not compatible with the many aspects of ODF 1.2 currently implemented by most ODF applications. The most difficult barrier to entry is that of MSOffice bound business processes so vital to workgroups and day-to-day business systems. Maybe the report is right in saying that day-to-day business routines become habit, but not understanding the true nature of these barriers is certain to cloud our way forward. We need to dig deeper, as demonstrated by the many ODF pilot studies.
Gary Edwards

Document Interoperability Initiative: Appendix H - 0 views

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    Microsoft recently released their blueprint for implementing ISO 26300 (ODF 1.0 - dated May 1, 2005), and referenced this Web site. Appendix H is interesting in that it lists 13 of the 28 contributors sponsored by The OpenDocument Foundation. This contributor list contradicts the determined liars (er, editors) at Wikipedia who insist that The OpenDocument Foundation was two guys without a garage. The OpenDocument Foundation was founded in 2005 (shortly after OASIS approval of ODF 1.0) for the express purpose of balancing out the rapidly growing participation in the ODF technical committee of corporate contributors. IBM, Oracle, Novel, Intel and Adobe led a corporate wave joining the ODF TC following the May 2005 OASIS approval of ODF 1.0 and subsequent submission to ISO. The Foundation was set up to fund the participation of expert individuals representing both open source communities and groups interested in an Open Web future.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft OOXML viewers, translators, SDK to help interop with Firefox and OpenOffice? - 0 views

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    On Dec 3, Microsoft officially announced the availability of its Open XML Document Viewer, Open XML/ODF Translators Version 2.5 and the Apache POI Java SDKfor OpenXML.
Paul Merrell

Alliance Calls on Microsoft to Act on Its Commitment to Implement Support for ODF - 0 views

  • The ODF Alliance today greeted with scepticism Microsoft's announcement of its intention to include support for the OpenDocument Format in the first half of 2009.
Paul Merrell

Technology News: Applications: What's Holding OpenOffice Back? - 0 views

  • Most folks see data formats as an inside-baseball issue, because they work in all-Microsoft organizations where incompatibilities are rare. The only hangup, in that case, comes when Microsoft releases new software (Office 2007 being the latest example). Invariably, the data format's been upgraded as well.
  • The data format wars have been going on for years and have provoked a substantial backlash. The anti-Microsoft crowd has an alternate data format, OpenDocument, that anyone can freely incorporate into any program, just as everyone uses the same old free, non-proprietary HTML to build Web sites.
  • Is Open XML an open standard? The arguments are pretty technical but boil down to this: Microsoft says OpenDocument is not good and that anyone will be able to implement its far more enlightened Open Office XML. Opponents say Microsoft has built into Open XML all manner of snares, deadfalls and booby traps to defend its monopoly.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • And I'm auditioning the latest open source goodie, IBM Lotus Symphony, which looks like a sweet suite. More on that next time.
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    The myths that ODF is an open standard, that Lotus Symphony is open source, and that Microsoft is the only company that manipulates "open" standards for unlawful competitive advantage continue to propagate.
Jesper Lund Stocholm

OOXML is defective by design: Microsoft latest bullshit : native support of ODF in Offi... - 1 views

  • I wanted to post a quick reaction to the latest Microsoft bullshit announcement, in which they reportedly plan to "add native support for ODF 1.1". The way they put is very succinct, intentionally probably, and it opens the door for wild guesses.First of all, Microsoft is a huge Office licensing monopoly. It's so big it even surpasses Windows in sales. Any decline in Office licensing would be dramatic for Microsoft's future. With that alone, you know that any announcement from Microsoft that they are willing to interoperate with other people's software, namely applications, should be taken with a grain of salt.Here is how, with the release of Office 2007, Microsoft intends to keep their monopoly in Office licensing :
  • Likewise, since Office 2007 is not a native XML application (the internal representation is a bunch of binary structure, not XML DOM)
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
       
      Do any of you guys know if applications like OOo has a different internal object model? Is an ODF-document loaded into something equivilant to an XML DOM?
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    Stephane is right on target. This is a must read for anyone trying to understand ISO approval of OOXML, and the sudden change of mind at Microsoft to support ODF!
Paul Merrell

New OASIS Discussion List: oiic-formation-discuss - 0 views

  • The proposed discussion list name is "oiic-formation". (2) A preliminary statement of scope for the TC whose formation the list is intended to discuss. It is the intent of the ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC to provide a means for software implementors and service providers to create applications which adhere to the ODF specification and are able to interoperate. As such, the purpose of the IIC TC includes the following:
  • It is the intent of the ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC to provide a means for software implementors and service providers to create applications which adhere to the ODF specification and are able to interoperate. As such, the purpose of the IIC TC includes the following: 1. To publish test suites of ODF for applications of ODF to check their conformance with the Standard and to confirm their interoperability; 2. To provide feedback, where necessary, to the ODF TC on ways in which the standard could improve interoperability; 3. To produce a set of implementation guidelines; 4. To define interoperability with related standards by the creation of profiles or technical reports; 5. To coordinate, in conjunction with the ODF Adoption TC, OASIS InterOp demos related to ODF; The IIC TC may also liaise with other standard bodies whose work is leveraged in present or future ODF specifications. These include, but are not limited to, the W3C and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34.
  • 1. To publish test suites of ODF for applications of ODF to check their conformance with the Standard and to confirm their interoperability; 2. To provide feedback, where necessary, to the ODF TC on ways in which the standard could improve interoperability; 3. To produce a set of implementation guidelines; 4. To define interoperability with related standards by the creation of profiles or technical reports; 5. To coordinate, in conjunction with the ODF Adoption TC, OASIS InterOp demos related to ODF; The IIC TC may also liaise with other standard bodies whose work is leveraged in present or future ODF specifications. These include, but are not limited to, the W3C and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34.
Paul Merrell

BetaNews | Microsoft's Matusow and Mahugh on Office's move to open format support - 0 views

  • DOUG MAHUGH, program manager for ISO 29500-based products, Microsoft: One thing to be very clear about here is this: When we say, "support for ODF in [Office] SP2," we intend to write very compliant ODF documents when you save a document. However, it's not a given that everything you can do in the Office UI is savable under ODF. As you're alluding to, there are things -- SmartArt, conditional formatting, things like that -- that we have in Office and that are popular features, where there is no way to save those in ODF, currently.The way we're approaching that, I can share a little bit with you: We're not throttling the UI, as you describe, where certain things are disabled. Rather, at the time you save, we're telling you, "Hey, you're saving in this other format; some information in this document may be lost." That sort of thing. And let me tell you why we made the decision to do it in that particular way: There are situations where some of that functionality may be very useful to the user, even though it can't be serialized out to the format that they're saving in.
    • Paul Merrell
       
      One might suppose that the new API discussed on the following page will similarly not allow developers to set a compatability mode in Office apps. Note that the existing APIs do allow that, so one might suspect that disabling the ability to set a compatibility mode is one of the reasons for the new API.
  • The engineering decisions that were made in the original creation of ODF represent the engineering pathway and the innovations that were happening in the OpenOffice space. The engineering decisions and development pathway for Open XML represents that which was happening in [Microsoft] Office, and the feature sets are not in parity. In fact, there's a superset of features within the Microsoft Office set, but there are certainly features that are exclusive to OpenOffice that do not get covered in Microsoft Office.
  • We really hope to see ODF move to JTC 1 / SC 34 maintenance
Paul Merrell

Is our idea of "Open Standards" good enough? Verifiable vendor-neutrality - O'Reilly XM... - 0 views

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    In light of the Microsoft announcement of ODF support, a prescient July, 2007 blog article by Rick Jelliffe deserves revisiting. Jelliffe surveyed the pressure points for various players that he saw in the File Format War and made a set of suggestions that bear a remarkable resemblance to subsequent events. The goal he recommended for eGovernment and open standards advocates was to push to get ODF and OOXML out of the hands of Ecma and OASIS and into the hands of ISO for harmonization work, arguing that it is the most vendor-neutral eligible forum for such work.
Paul Merrell

Rob Weir is caught in a deceit - 0 views

  • But at all relevant times you knew that you could not respond on the merits if Alex took the time to write the same analysis I did. I call foul. Foul 1: You accused Alex of ignorance and deceit. Foul 2: You had no informed basis for those insults.Foul 3: You knew you had no informed basis for your insults.Foul 4: You have put me to the work of repeating the conversation we already had. Shame on you, Rob Weir. The position you took was unprincipled. You are the one who has intentionally misled Alex's readers. You are caught. If you are a principled person, you will immediately retract your insults and apologize to Alex Brown for your deceit in as public a manner as you inflicted your deceit. If you do not do so, the undeniable record lies here of a man who is not man enough to take responsibility for his wrongs and apologize.
  • Ah, Marbux, what circus is complete without the clowns?
  • It seems you like to ignore requirements in order to defend Microsoft
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Do you get paid to spread FUD like this, or is it merely a dilettantish pursuit?
  • I am unable to even imagine that you would be ignorant of basic standards terminology. So why do you persist in intentionally misleading your readers?
Graham Perrin

Orcmid's Lair: Microsoft ODF Interoperability Workshop - 0 views

  • 2008-08
  • Microsoft's first built-in support
  • approach to adding Open Document Format support directly into Office 2007
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the balancing act that Office-ODF interoperability requires
  • absence of non-disclosure agreements
  • I saw no down side
  • all ODF TC members who desired to come had a place
  • interaction with the ODF community
  • priorities that apply in making trade-offs
  • five guiding principles that govern ODF support in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
  • balancing of different interests: standards groups, corporations, institutions, government agencies, regulatory bodies, and general users
  • an application being quite friendly with its own ODF but not with that of other significant implementations
  • Balancing of competing considerations is not trivial
  • current OpenOffice.org implementations fail to check whether a formula conforms to its own extension
  • the central feature of typical document processing software is the internal, in-memory representation of the software's document model
  • features may be lost on output
  • features may be lost on input
  • rely on features that succeed with the internal representation
  • degraded or lost entirely in the chosen external representation
  • losing some of them when saving
  • Florian Reuter argued an interesting gracefully-failing extension technique that, on reflection, I believe could avoid breaking changes against earlier ODF specifications of namespaces, their elements and their attributes too
    • Graham Perrin
       
      I'd like to learn more about this.
  • a serious, open conversation is beginning
  • discussions did not arrive at conclusions
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    I read this more than a year after the event but still, it's interesting.
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