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The European Commission has taken note of Microsoft's announcement on 21st May concerning supporting ODF in Office. The Commission would welcome any step that Microsoft took towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in. In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office (see MEMO/08/19), the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF (OpenDocument format) in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.

Frankly, from Microsoft's perspective, the danger may have been overstated. Though the free open source crowd talks a good fight, the truth is that they keep missing the real target. Instead of investing in new features that nobody will use, the team behind OpenOffice should take a page from the SoftMaker playbook and focus on interoperability first. Until OpenOffice works out its import/export filter issues, it'll never be taken seriously as a Microsoft alternative. More troubling (for Microsoft) is the challenge from the SoftMaker camp. These folks have gotten the file-format compatibility issue licked, and this gives them the freedom to focus on building out their product's already respectable feature set. I wouldn't be surprised if SoftMaker got gobbled up by a major enterprise player in the near, thus creating a viable third way for IT shops seeking to kick the Redmond habit.

"ECMA 376" is a set of file formats subject to ECMA and now to ISO. "Office 2007" is a set of file formats which extend "ECMA 376" file formats. Office 2007 file formats are undocumented per se. ECMA 376 are. ECMA 376 file formats are documented but only at a syntactic level. To realize the true meaning of every single attribute is to realize that the documentation is more like 600,000 pages, not 6,000. Of particular difficulty is to keep some kind of control over the virtually infinite combinations of such attributes. Quick analysis of the underlying schemas reveals that simple concepts such as text formatting is expressed in no less than 6 different and incompatible ways. This leads to thinking that the file formats were only designed to comply with existing legacy formats that themselves are the result of 15 years of inside/outside library aggregation (some of the libraries were bought from non-Microsoft vendors). In fact, the truth is, ask any reverse engineer third-party who worked with legacy formats, they'll tell you Microsoft essentially added angle brackets around the binary serialization in legacy formats. This makes for a very cool XML-based file format, not an international standard.

Fortunately for Microsoft, the DaVinci plugin is coming, which will enable Microsoft office applications to comply with ISO 26300. We all understand the financial issues that prompted the push to make OOXML a standard (see Tim's comment above and http://lnxwalt.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/whose-finances-are-on-the-line/ for more on this) and ensure continued vendor lock-in. However, OOXML is not the answer.

ODF can handle everything and anything Microsoft Office can throw at it. Including the legacy billions of binary documents, years of MSOffice bound business processes, and even tricky low level reaching add-ons represented by assistive technologies.

"We feel that the best standards are open standards," technology industry commentator Colin Jackson, a member of the Technical Advisory committee convened by StandardsNZ to consider OOXML, said at the event. "In that respect Microsoft is to be applauded, as previously this was a secret binary format." Microsoft's opponents suggest, among a host of other concerns, that making Open XML an ISO standard would lock the world's document future to Microsoft. They argue that a standard should only be necessary when there is a "market requirement" for it. IBM spokesperson Paul Robinson thus describes OOXML as a "redundant replacement for other standards". Quoting from the ISO guide, Robinson said that a standard "is a document by a recognised body established by consensus which is aimed at achieving an optimum degree of order and aimed at the promotion of optimum community benefits". It can be argued that rather than provide community benefit, supporting multiple standards actually comes at an economic cost to the user community. "We do not believe OOXML meets these objectives of an international standard," Robinson said.

This fight is a distraction. Recognize both formats as legacy defacto standards and move on. This is actually a very common precursor in a standards process. CDF provides an opportunity to do the job right. People should not be translating OOXML into ODF, there simply isn't the value there. It is much more likely that OOXML will be a live format in twenty years time than ODF. We have a common standards based document language today - HTML. OK so I have a bias here but there is much more HTML than anything else. HTML is just a document format and it is somewhat presentation oriented but modern XHTML is changing those problems.

The problem for "you" is that Microsoft is the one who has 400 million or so installs of the dominant de facto office suite in the planet. "You" can either try to get them to play nice with you by applying pressure intelligently, or you can organize an exciting jihad to stick it to them. In a make-believe world where companies choose technology based on, well, technical merits and openness, the second approach will usually work. In the real world though, the former option would have been a better idea. But when you have well-paid shills like Rob Weir (courtesy of IBM) and his co-religionists who rarely take a break from hating Microsoft (except for lame attempts at making fun [robweir.com] of Microsoft) it's difficult to get away from the join-us-or-die approach. It just feels so right, I guess. I'm going OT here but seriously, Weir is just the cat's meow. Every single time Microsoft has challenged his hyperbolic rants and outright lies he's essentially ignored them or just penned some more. He thinks the OpenDocument Foundation is an irrelevant fly-by-night fanboy club (which I guess is possible), but he has no problem quoting obscure African groups [robweir.com] and his groupie bloggers to prop up his "Microsoft is evil and Office sucks and remember, IBM had nothing to do with this post" arguments. If the man spent 1/10th as much time writing some code or documentation as he does bitching about the Office toolbar buttons, ODF would have conquered the world by now. With people like that at the helm it's not difficult to see why a document format controlled by a single company and an elite group of testy technorati has gotten to where it is now. Not that I think OOXML is a particularly good idea, but at least there's someone out there with the balls to point out that the emperor is buck naked. I guess they better get ready for the DoS attacks, hate mail and death threats.

Blame Sun for this. Sounds like a populist position, or maybe troll flamebait. I'll be generous and assume the former, despite the fact your post seems like a digest from an anti-ODF briefing paper. Disclosure: My job [sun.com] includes the task of receiving complaints about Sun and trying to get Sun to fix whatever causes the problem. If you have proof of any of your accusations, let me know. I may have some of my facts wrong below as I'm working from memory; I'd welcome correction. With a few small additions, ODF could have supported Office formats as well, but Sun would not allow this. That is indeed the constant assertion that the three guys who comprise the Foundation make. However, I have personally asked members of the ODF working group at OASIS and they tell me its not so. The Foundation guys wanted to add structures to ODF to preserve untranslateable tags in translated documents so they could be regenerated on the reverse translation. Sounds OK at first glance, but in practice it results in very brittle software solutions that work well in demos but not in real life. The proposal was thus rejected by the whole working group (not just the Sun employees). Rejected, that is, in conversation. A complete solution was never proposed for voting. To say Sun would not allow it ignores the actual dynamic of the working group (see below). Their policy is that ODF will support what is needed for StarOffice, and nothing more. Naturally every member of a standards group in the traditional standards process is looking out for the code base where they implement a standard, and will have serious questions of any feature that they regard as unimplementable. The features actually put to a vote by the guys from the Foundation would have resulted in very brittle implementations, highly dependent on the version of MS Office with which they were coupled. It may have been possible to come up with a solution that reduced this problem, but the discussion was not sustained. The assertion you make is not true in the general case.They control the ODF technical committee Untrue. The ODF TC [oasis-open.org] can have no more than three members from any one organisation and is not under the control of any organisation. The Foundation guys actually flaunted that rule at one point and sent many, many more representatives - OASIS had to step in to fix it. That intervention is one of the issues they have with OASIS, in fact. Sun happens to employ the people who act as Chair and Secretary to the TC but the voting remains democratic.and their patent license allows them to stop the ODF TC if the ODF TC goes in a direction Sun does not like. I've heard that interpretation of the patent non-assert covenant [oasis-open.org] that Sun has made regarding ODF, but it's untrue. Sun covenants not to enforce any patents against ODF implementations based on any spec it participates in. To the extent that versions of the spec after Sun's departure are based on version in which Sun was involved, that covenant remains in effect even in the unlikely event of Sun leaving the TC. Sun can't stop the TC from continuing its work. Are you relaying this all as hearsay, or do you actually have data to back up your accusations? If you have, I'd like to see it (genuinely).

by OASIS attorney Andy Updegrove claimed that W3C Compound Document Formats: [i] are non-editable formats; [ii] are not designed for conversions to other formats; and [iii] are therefore unsuitable as office formats. Updegrove could not have been more wrong.

Shorn to essentials, Updegrove in effect argues for the existence of some sort of immaculately conceived data, that data cannot be generated by software editing tools if a homo sapiens operating a keyboard is somehow involved.

Conversions — Updegrove hedged somewhat on this issue, attributing a statement to Lilly that the "CDF working group was not chartered to achieve conversion between formats." But one might as well argue that because claw hammers were designed to drive and pull nails they can not be used to hit anything else.

The question we should be asking is why State CIO's and IT divisions are not backing the legislative proposals? It's not the lobbying that is killing ODF. It's the lack of support from those who would have been left with the challenge of implementing ODF solutions. The silence of the CIO's is deafening. There are three quotes i've seen batted about that pretty much say it all:

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.

ISO/IEC 26300:2006 XHTML version 1st Information technology -- Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 XHTML version

The following standards are made freely available for standardization purposes. They are protected by copyright and therefore and unless otherwise specified, no part of these publications may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, scanning, reproduction in whole or in part to another Internet site, without permission in writing from ISO. Requests should be addressed to the ISO Central Secretariat.

ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008 Electronic inserts 1st Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference JTC1/SC34 ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008 Electronic inserts 1st Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 2: Open Packaging Conventions JTC1/SC34 ISO/IEC 29500-3:2008 1st Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 3: Markup Compatibility and Extensibility JTC1/SC34 ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008 Electronic inserts 1st Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 4: Transitional Migration Features JTC1/SC34

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.

Greve told the BBC that genuine adoption of ODF would give consumers more choice. "People will no longer need to use Microsoft Office in order to interoperate. People could switch to GNU/Linux and choose OpenOffice or other applications that support ODF, like Lotus Symphony or Google Docs."

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.

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

The reasons for the move to CDF was improved compatibility with Microsoft’s OOXML format the foundation claimed at the time. Cris Lilley from W3C contradicted. CDF is not an office format, and thus not an alternative to the Open Document Format. This turn-down is likely the reason for the abrupt ditching of the foundation.

The decision to go with CDF has left some industry commentators scratching their heads, with arstechnica.com’s Ryan Paul noting that the decision is curious as CDF doesn't support “the full range of functionality required for office compatibility”. Paul does add, however, that the formats broad use of formats such as XHTML and SVG does give it a compelling edge.

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.

the fact is that Redmond could own this new space if it wanted to. All it would need to do is push interoperability and integration between lightweight Web versions of Office applications and its desktop fatware. Advanced features would be absent from the lightweight versions, but the company could ensure any Office doc would load on the Web -- whatever new desktop service packs and upgrades might appear -- and online document management could be integrated with Windows for offline access.

Microsoft has created its own proprietary document format, Office Open XML (OOXML), as a rival to the community-developed OpenDocument Format (ODF). OOXML is used in Microsoft's latest applications suite, Office 2007. Despite some efforts by the two camps, ODF and OOXML are, for the most part, not interoperable, meaning documents that are created in one format cannot be successfully read by applications based on the other format. According to Novell's vice president of developer platforms, Miguel de Icaza, the situation won't change in the foreseeable future. Want to know more? For all the latest news, analysis and opinion on open source, click here "There's no end in sight to the ongoing disputes between the two camps," said de Icaza, speaking at XML 2007, a Microsoft-sponsored event, on Tuesday. "In 2006, there was lots of FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] about the problems behind OOXML and it went downhill from there," Icaza said. "Neither group is willing to make the big changes required for real compatibility," de Icaza added.