Skip to main content

Home/ OpenDocument/ Group items tagged marbux

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Gary Edwards

Slamming the door shut on MS OOXML - 0 views

  • So your goal is a networked world where metadata is routinely trashed by apps developed by those who are too dumb or otherwise disabled to preserve metadata and only the big boys get to do interoperability, right? So if I send you a document for your editing, I can't count on getting it back with xml:id attributes intact. No thanks, Patrick. That sounds way too much like how things have worked ever since office productivity software first came on the market. In your world, interoperability belongs only to those who can map features 1:1 with the most featureful apps. And that is precisely why OpenDocument never should have been approved as a standard. Your kind of interoperability makes ODF a de facto Sun Microsystems standard wearing the clothing of a de jure standard. Why not just standardize the whole world on Microsoft apps and be done with it? Are two monopolies maintained by an interoperability barrier between them better than one? Fortunately, we don't have to debate the issue because the Directives resolve the issue. You lose under the rules of the game.
  •  
    Marbux on metadata and the language of universal interoperability: Few people are aware of the raging debate that has pushed ODF to the edge. The OASIS ODF TC is split between those who support Universal Interoperability, and those who insist on continuing with limited ODF interoperability.

    ODF (OpenDocument), formally known as Open Office XML, began it's standards life in the fall of 2002 when Sun submitted the OpenOffice file format to OASIS for consideration as a office suite XML fiel format standard. The work on ODF did not start off as a clean slate in that there were near 600 pages of application specific specification from day one of the standards work. The forces of universal interop have sought for years to separate ODF from the application specific features and implementation model of OpenOffice that began with those early specification volumes, and continues through the undue influence Sun continues to have over the ODF specification work.

    Many mistakenly believed that submission of ODF to ISO and subsequent approval as an international standard would provide an effective separation, putting ODF on the track of a truly universal file format.

    Marbux is one of those Universal Interop soldiers who has dug in his heels, cried to the heavens that enough is enough, and demanded the necessary changes to ODF interoperability language.

    This post he recently submitted to the OASIS ODF Metadata SC is a devastating rebuttal to the arguments of those who support the status quo of limited interoperability.

    In prior posts, marbux argues that ISO directives demand without compromise universal interoperability. This demand is also shared by the World Trade Organization directives regarding international trade laws and agreements. Here he brings those arguments together with the technical issues for achieving universal interop.

    It's a devastating argument.

Gary Edwards

Microsoft Will Support ODF! But Only If ISO Doesn't 'Restrict Choice Among Formats' - 0 views

  • By Marbux posted Jun 19, 2007 - 3:16 PM 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.
  •  
    Incredible comment by Marbux!  With one swipe he takes out both Ecma 376 and ODF. 

    Microsoft has written a letter claiming that they will support ODF in MSOffice, but only if ISO approves Ecma 376 as a second office suite XML file format standard.  ODF was approved by ISO nearly a year ago.

    Criticizing Ecma 376 is easy.  It was designed to meet the needs of  a proprietary application, MSOffice, and, to meet the needs of the emerging MS Vista Stack of applications that spans desktop to server to device to web platforms.  It's filled with MS platform dependencies that make it impossibly non interoperable with anything not fully compliant with Microsoft owned API's.

    Criticizing ODF however is another matter entirely.  Marbux points to the extremely poor ODF interoperability record.  If MOOXML (not Ecma 376 - since that is a read only file format) is tied to vendor-application specific MSOffice, then ODF is similarly tied to the many vendor versions of OpenOffice/StarOffice.

    The "many vendor" aspect of OpenOffice is somewhat of a scam.  The interoperability that ODF shares across Novell Office, StarOffice, IBM WorkPlace, Red Office, and NeoOffice is entirely based on the fact that these iterations of OpenOffice are based on a single code base controlled 100% by Sun.  Which is exactly the case with MSOffice.  With this important exception - MOOXML (not Ecma 376) is interoperable across the entire Vista Stack!

    The Vista Stack is comprised of Exchange/SharePoint, MS Live, MS Dynamics, MS SQL Server, MS Internet Server, MS Grove, MS Collaboration Server, and MS Active Directory.   Behind these applications sits a an important foundation of shared assets: MOOXML, Smart Documents, XAML and .NET 3.0.  All of which can be worked into third party, Stack dependent applications through the Visual Studio .NET IDE.

    Here are some thoughts i wou
Gary Edwards

OOXML and ODF: The next step | [odf-discuss] Marbux Responds! - 0 views

  • The issue we were discussing -- and what I believe the ODEF conference was very much concerned with -- was whether ODF plus vendor-specific extensions will be classified as conformant ODF. The market requirement is for "Exchange Formats" and document-level interoperability. I could repose my question as whether ODF v. 1.2 will "clearly and unambiguously specify interoperability requirements essential to achieve the interoperability," as required by JTC 1 Directives. As you noted in an earlier post in this thread, you can't do interoperability if you use vendor extensions. > I see a standard as providing a shared vocabulary for buyers and sellers > to express their requirements. You are in error. This is a matter controlled by law rather than by personal opinion. Standards are all about the substitutability of goods, weights, and measures. A standard specifies all characteristics of a product, weight, or measure in mandatory terms so there is uniformity. Standards are the antithesis of product differentiation. Their very purpose is to eliminate product differentiation.
  •  
    Excellent legal argument by the legendary marbux concerning OOXML and ODF itneroperability. Covers ISO Interop Requirements and the demands of International Trade Agreements. Key to this thread is ODF v 1.2 and what must be done to bring ODF into legal compliance with International demands.
  •  
    Outstanding analysis and research by the legendary marbux
Gary Edwards

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

  •  
    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

Behind Putting the OpenDocument Foundation to Bed (without its supper) : Updegroove | L... - 0 views

  • CDF is one of the very many useful projects that W3C has been laboring on, but not one that you would have been likely to have heard much about. Until recently, that is, when Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser and Marbux, the management (and perhaps sole remaining members) of the OpenDocument Foundation decided that CDF was the answer to all of the problems that ODF was designed to address. This announcement gave rise to a flurry of press attention that Sam Hiser has collected here. As others (such as Rob Weir) have already documented, these articles gave the OpenDocument Foundation’s position far more attention than it deserved. The most astonishing piece was written by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. Early on in her article she stated that, “the ODF camp might unravel before Microsoft’s rival Office Open XML (OOXML) comes up for final international standardization vote early next year.” All because Gary, Sam and Marbux have decided that ODF does not meet their needs. Astonishing indeed, given that there is no available evidence to support such a prediction.
  •  
    Uh?  The ODF failure in Massachusetts doesn't count as evidence that ODF was not designed to be compatible with existing MS documents or interoperable with existing MSOffice applications?

    And it's not just the da Vinci plug-in that failed to implement ODF in Massachusetts!  Nine months later Sun delivered their ODF plug-in for MSOffice to Massachusetts.  The next day, Massachusetts threw in the towel, officially recognizing MS-OOXML (and the MS-OOXML Compatibility Pack plug-in) as a standard format for the future.

    Worse, the Massachusetts recognition of MS-OOXML came just weeks before the September 2nd ISO vote on MS-OOXML.  Why not wait a few more weeks?  After all, Massachusetts had conducted a year long pilot study to implement ODF using ODF desktop office sutie alternatives to MSOffice.  Not only did the rip out and replace approach fail, but they were also unable to integrate OpenOffice ODF desktops into existing MSOffice bound workgroups.

    The year long pilot study was followed by another year long effort trying to implement ODF using the plug-in approach.  That too failed with Sun's ODF plug-in the final candidate to prove the difficulty of implementing ODF in situations where MSOffice workgroups dominate.

    California and the EU-IDABC were closely watching the events in Massachusetts, as was most every CIO in government and private enterprise.  Reasoning that if Massachusetts was unable to implement ODF, California CIO's totally refused IBM and Sun's effort to get a pilot study underway.

    Across the pond, in the aftermath of Massachusetts CIO Louis Guiterrez resignation on October 4th, 2006, the EU-IDABC set about developing their own file format, ODEF.  The Open Document Exchange Format splashed into the public discussion on February 28th, 2007 at the "Open Document Exchange Workshop" held in Berlin, Germany.

    Meanwhile, the Sun ODF plug-in is fl
  •  
    Marbux sets the record straight. These are the facts: Putting Andy Updegrove to Bed (without his supper) ..... http://www.universal-interop-council.org/node/4
  •  
    Response from the OpenDocument Foundation setting the record straight. See "copmments" with this bookmark
Gary Edwards

Calling all black helicopters! This is a red alert. The OpenDocument Foundation suspe... - 0 views

  • Be aware that Gary Edwards and Marbux (of the organisation formerly known as “The OpenDocument Foundation” [1, 2]) have begun submitting links to their new site. They use Digg where they post elaborate comments about a decoy, a distraction. They comment on each other’s submissions, which are barely receiving any attention at all. The OpenDocument Foundation’s Web site has meanwhile become a link farm (inactive) with many inbound links. This is not very ordinary. “At times, however, new people are introduced to intervene and create tensions, misunderstandings, and civil wars.”
  •  
    Yo Marbux! Fire up the Black Hawk! They want us. They need us. Without the big bad bogey man, lurkign in the shadows, secretly conspiring against them, who will they blame their failures on?
Gary Edwards

OOXML: The next step - Interop at the International Standards legal level | Marbux - We... - 0 views

  • Both ODF and OOXML are only one WTO Dispute Resolution Process complaint away from losing their international standard, national technical regulation, and government procurement specification status. They do not meet the minimum requirements of international law. Both are unnecessary obstacles to international trade; neither specify a uniform and substitutable product. That does not sound like a sound business plan to me. So I return to my question posed in an earlier post: Will ODF v. 1.2 under your leadership attempt to "clearly and unambiguously specify that conformance requirements essential to achieve the interoperability" and will the standards-based interoperability between *different* IT systems be "demonstrable," as required by JTC 1 Directives? That is not a complicated question and it requires no deep dive into international law to answer. International law requires what the quoted JTC 1 Directives require in this regard, but for purposes of the point under discussion we need go no further than the Directives' plain language. One either adheres to the rules or one forfeits the moral high ground to complain when others ignore the rules. Where does Rob Weir stand on complying with the rules?
  •  
    Marbux at his best! Here he responds to Rob Weir's ODF v 1.2 arguments with a legal dissertation on International Standards, ISO, the WTO, and the key issue of interoperability and what it must mean. Excellent!
Gary Edwards

Re: [office-metadata] Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal - 0 views

    • Gary Edwards
       
      Preserving metadata! Preserving application specific information. Preserving "unknown" information inside of a document
  • Unless we add conformance requirements for the preservation of metadata and processing instructions, the less featureful apps will never  be able to round-trip documents with the more featureful apps. Our language should require that. Personally, I believe that the software-as-an-end-point client-side office suites are dinosaurs at the end of their era. They are being finished off by a thousand cuts as users spend less and less time using them and more and more time using other apps, such as web apps. ODF either develops methods for interoperability among all apps or it will die along with the office suites. E.g., Microsoft knows this and is busily migrating its Office development budget across the Sharepoint/Exchange server hubs to the network. Meanwhile, this TC fiddles with preserving the 1995 software-as-an-endpoint vision.
  •  
    Marbux is clearly at the top of his game here as he hammers the interoperability issue.
Gary Edwards

Re: [office-metadata] Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal - 0 views

  • - A metadata aware ODF implementation *shall* not remove the xml:id attributes defined in sections [?] or change its values unless the removal or modification is the result of an edit operation caused be the user, or a similar action taken by some automatic processing of the document.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      The road to universal interoperability! Document exchange demands that applications preserve information that other applications need.
  •  
    Surprising post from Sun's Michael Brauer supporting the mandatory "shall - must" preservation of the metadata XML:id. Preservation of metadata information is critical to the high fidelity "round trip" interoperable exchange of ODF documents.

    Marbux is currently locked into a raging interoperability battle with the ODF Metadata Sub Committee where it's been proposed that preservation of metadata be optional!

    The entire thread is located here:
    ODF-Metadata-Proposal-22August2007

    This is one worth watching. The fight to limit ODF interoperability continues. Marbux is a distinguished Universal Interoperability expert with a blazing background in International Trade Agreements and anti trust based on interoperability violations.
Gary Edwards

What IBM VP Bob Sutor does not want you to read | Universal Interoperability Council - 0 views

  • What IBM VP Bob Sutor does not want you to read Submitted by marbux on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 23:36. This site is now live, although there's a ton of customization and configuration work to be done. But we might as well kick off by reprinting a comment I unsuccessfully attempted to post on IBM vice president Bob Sutor's blog today. I'm flattered that my post was the apparent triggering event for Sutor's announcement later in the day that he will now only allow comments from people who use their "real names."
    • Gary Edwards
       
      A must read post from the legendary marbux!
Gary Edwards

Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary' - marbux - ge comments | ZDNet UK - 0 views

  • Interoperability and the binary ODF conversion di... garyedwards Sorry, the comment was cut short. Here'... garyedwards
  • ODF and OOXML are standards in... Marbux
Gary Edwards

Can IBM save OpenOffice.org from itself? - 0 views

  • OpenOffice.org's biggest foe may be Microsoft Office, but critics say the open-source organization has, from its inception, also been one of its application suite's own worst enemies -- a victim of a development culture that differs radically from the open-source norm. Observers now wonder if IBM's entry into OpenOffice.org can make the necessary changes.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      good article from Eric Lai of ComputerWorld. Written on the eve of the infamous Barcelona OpenOffice.org developers conference, Eric argues that OOo isn't a real open source community. Instead, OOo is a owned and operated by Sun.
      One of the more important control points Sun insists on is that of commit rights and project managers. Only Sun employees have these rights and can hold these important positions..
      The more important point is made by Marbux (below: ODF is an application specific format designed exactly for OpenOffice. While other applications might partially implement ODF, interoperability and successful ODF document exchange require the OOo code base!
      From Marbux: This is the only article I've found to date where IBM (Heintzman) flat out says IBM wants changes in OOo licensing, more in line with the Eclipse and Apache licenses. See pg. 2. Significant because it feeds the meme that IBM's own ODF-based development goal is proprietary closed source built on the OOo code base, e.g., Symphony, et cet.
      And that has huge signficance once you realize that ODF is not the real standard; the OOo code base is the real ODF standard. Look around the world and you see that ODF adoption decisions by governments are all in reality decisions to go with StarOffice, OOo, or OOo clones. I haven't, for example, seen a single instance where a government decided to ride with KOffice. Why would they, with the interop issues between KOffice and OOo? The fact that OOo's code base is the real ODF standard will figure strongly in the comments. Couple it with Sun's iron-fisted control of the OOo code base, and you have vendor lock-in with a Microsoft partner.
      But with 70 developers committed in China, where developers salaries are inexpensive, IBM will soon be in a position to threaten to fork the OOo code base using proprietary extensions. Is that their real tactic to force changes in licensing and gov
Gary Edwards

BetaNews | Microsoft Will Support ODF If It Doesn't 'Restrict Choice Among Formats' - 0 views

  • None of this is to say that OpenDocument is perfect. Far from it. OpenDocument at present is crippled from an interoperability standpoint. I'm a member of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee and I think the resistance of the big vendors to fixing the interoperability warts is simply outrageous, particularly because they are fairly trivial changes. But the advancement of software users' interests are not advanced by painting OOXML as other than deeply flawed. It is vendor-specific and far from "open." The lesser of the two evils is clearly OpenDocument, which is at least open even if not yet interoperable. The sooner folks can start discussing practical methods of convergence, the better. See e.g., http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=27956 That set of slides summarizing a conference of some 20 European national governments' IT types says a lot more about the future of office document formats than Mr. Asellus has to offer.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Marbux hits a homerun! Right ON!
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Support for ODF - the Q&A - Google Docs & Spreadsheets - 0 views

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 07 - Cached
  • Hi Gary,I am a technology journalist with Asia's ONLY Linux-focused magazine, LINUX For You. I am working on a story revolving the recent development of Microsoft supporting ODF Format. I want to understand the equation of the whole development, would you please help me understand: Q1. What do you think drove Microsoft to support the ODF format?
  •  
    This is the full response to Swapnil's seven questions.  It's long.  But we hold back nothing!  Thanks again to Marbux.  He is a peach!
Gary Edwards

The Interoperability Wars :: ODF vs. ... - Google Docs & Spreadsheets - 0 views

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 07 - Cached
  •  
    This discussion is part of a much larger response to a series of questions from a LiNUX magazine in India.  The mighty Marbux helped answer the questions, so please don't mistake his eloquence for my customary thundering.
Gary Edwards

ODF Civil War: Bulll Run - Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal - OASIS ODF - 0 views

  • From our perspective it would be better to aim for doing the job in ODF 1.2, even if that requires delay. We will oppose ODF 1.2 at ISO unless the interoperability warts are cleaned up. What the market requires is no longer in doubt. See the slides linked above and further presentations linked from this page, < http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6474/5935>. Substantial progress toward those goals would seem to be mandatory to maintain Europe's preference for a harmonized set of file formats that uses ODF to provide the common functionality. Delaying commencement of such work enhances the likelihood that governments will tire of waiting for ODF to become interoperable with MS Office and simply go with MOOXML. We may not be able to force Microsoft to participate in the harmonization work, but we will be in a far better position if we have done everything we can in aid of that interoperability without Microsoft's assistance. As the situation stands, we have what is known in the U.S. as a "Mexican stand-off," where neither side has taken a solitary step toward what Europe has requested. We have decided to do that work via a fork of ODF; it is up to this TC whether it wishes to cooperate in that effort.
  •  
    This is the famous marbux response to Sun regarding Sun's attempt to partially implement ODF 1.2 XML-RDF metadata.  It's a treasure.

    There is one problem with marbux's statement though.  We had decided long ago not to fork ODF even if the five iX "interoperability enhancement" proposals were refused by the OASIS ODF TC.   This assurance was provided to Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez witht he the first ODF iX proposal submitted on July 12th, 2006.  Louis ended up signing off on three iX proposals before his resignation October 4th, 2006.

    The ODF iX enhancements were essential to saving ODF in Massachusetts.  Without them, there was no way our da Vinci plug-in could convert existing MSOffice documents and processes to ODF with the needed round trip fidelity.

    For nearly a year we tried to push through some semblance of the needed iX enhancements.  We also tried to push through a much needed Interoperability Framework, which will be critical to any ISO approval of ODF 1.2.

    Our critics are correct in that every iX effort was defeated, with Sun providing the primary opposition. 

    Still rather than fork ODF, we are simply going to move on. 

    On October 4th, 2006, all work on ODF da Vinci ended - not to be resumed unless and until we had the ODF iX enhancements we needed to crack the MSOffice bound workgroup-workflow business process barrier.

    In April of 2007, with our OASIS membership officially shredded by OASIS management, bleeding from the List Enhancement Proposal doonybrook, and totally defeated with our hope - the metadata XML-RDF work, we threw in the towel.

    Since then we've moved on to CDF, the W3C Compound Document format.  Incredibly, CDF is able to do what ODF can not.  With CDF we can solve the three primary problems confronting governments and MSOffice bound workgroups everywhere. 

    The challenge for these g
Gary Edwards

InfoWorld Tech Watch | InfoWorld | Messaging standard OK'd for Web services | June 21, ... - 0 views

  • OASIS considers WS-ReliableMessaging critical for SOA, in that it can handle a variety of SOA requirements. WS-ReliableMessaging can be extended to enable integration with capabilities such as security. SOAP binding for interoperability is included. WS-ReliableMessaging is part of a series of Web services specifications dubbed WS-* that have been championed by companies such as Microsoft.
  •  
    Check out the comments below this article.  There are links to Ian Foster of Globus and to the Marbux license disseration posted with the OpenDocument Foundation's NO VOTE at OASIS.
Gary Edwards

Harmonization and Interop: The dizzying dance of ODF, OOXML, and CDF - 0 views

  • With the ISO BRM fast approaching, the harmonization of ODF and OOXML is all the rage. The legendary marbux takes on this discussion arguing that ODF and OOXML both lack the interoperability framework needed to meet ISO directives describing interop requirements. He argues that interop between MSOffice and OpenOffice can be achieved using CDF.
  •  
    Will the real universal document format please stand up! Comments on the recent article posted by the Universal Interoperability Council: "Putting Andy Updegrove to bed without his supper". The UIC article is well worth your time. It is extremely well referenced and researched. The arguments put forth counter claims by IBM and OASIS that the W3C's CDF format can not be used to represent desktop productivity environment documents. Not surprisingly, IBM and OASIS argue that the OpenOffice specific ODF is the only alternative to Microsoft Office specific OOXML. The UIC argues that the full range of MSOffice legacy binary documents and emerging XML documents can fully be represented in CDF - something that not even the most ardent of ODF jihadists would claim as an ODF capabilitiy. The truth is that ODF was not designed for the conversion of MSOffice binary and xml documents.
Gary Edwards

ODF and OOXML are standards in name only - Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'... - 0 views

  • Both ODF and OOXML flunk that test badly. Their interoperable implementation neither has nor can be demonstrated. Both are designed for the waging of feature wars, not for interoperability. Both attempt to legitimize market-leading companies embracing and extending their own formats. They are standards in name only. What we are watching is a contest to decide which big vendor formats will be allowed to undeservedly claim the title of "international standard."
Gary Edwards

ConsortiumInfo.org - Putting the OpenDocument Foundation to Bed (without its supper) - ... - 0 views

  • Here's what Chris Lilley had to say, reconstructed from my notes (in other words, this is not a direct quote): So we were in a meeting when these articles about the Foundation and CDF started to appear, and we were really puzzled.  CDF isn't anything like ODF at all – it's an "interoperability agreement," mainly focused on two other specifications - XHTML and SVG.  You'd need to use another W3C specification, called Web Interactive Compound Document (WICD, pronounced "wicked"), for exporting, and even then you could only view, and not edit the output.  The one thing I'd really want your readers to know is that CDF (even together with WICD) was not created to be, and isn't suitable for use, as an office format.  Here are some other takeaways from my conversation with Chris: Although they would be welcome to become members, Neither Gary, Sam nor Marbux are members of W3C or the CDF working group The W3C has never been contacted by anyone from the Foundation about CDF.  After the articles began appearing, the W3C sent an inquiry to the Foundation, and received only a general reply in response The CDF working group was not chartered to achieve conversion between formats Although he hasn't spent a lot of time trying to unravel what Gary has written on the subject, he can't make any sense out of why the Foundation thinks that CDF makes sense as a substitute for ODF
1 - 20 of 25 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page