ODF infighting could help Microsoft's OOXML

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RE: ODF infighting could help Microsoft's OOXML

Mary-

As we've pointed out to our colleagues & friends in the ODF community, both OOXML and ODF v1.2 are having (going to have) difficulty at ISO.

ODF v1.2's problem is that it doesn't respect ISO's "JTC 1" directive mandating interoperability. Same OOXML.

So, the dream of a single universal document format (around which all applications have equal access) has, for the time-being, gone sideways.

We tried really hard working within the standards process (for years) and our interoperability proposals were rejected by Sun (who leads the ODF OASIS TC by governing the schedule of what proposals will be discussed and what and when voting will or won't occur). They read our whitepaper published in Spanish in Dec 2006 ...

"Interoperability: Will the Real Universal File Format Please Stand Up?"

... where we first clearly articulated our vision for ODF v1.2 and the necessary changes to the ODF specification to align it with ISO interop directives as well as the high-level of document fidelity required by the enterprise market (simply installing OpenOffice is not enough). Experts were able to grok that the OpenDocument Foundation's interop proposals were necessary also to make the Foundation's ODF Plug-in viable at the ODF format level. We knew it would take Sun's Hamburg engineers 2 to 3 years to catch the OpenOffice application up to our proposed changes in the ODF spec, but hey, that's life.

Sun blocked the changes we believe to avoid embarrassment if the ODF spec should be able to do things that the application could not handle; and they did it also to honor their $2 Billion hardware & server commitment to Microsoft (in the 2004 pact, meaning to prevent or delay perfect interop with MS documents) and, therefore, to keep the Foundation's plug-in from the playing field.

All this is merely historical arcana to many observers, and the open source chorus seems to think it's a good idea to avoid extending the life of Microsoft's legacy applications with an EXCELLENT-QUALITY (**INTERNAL**) plug-in ... only weak plug-ins (Microsoft's, Novell's, Sun's) are wanted.

What seems missing from the discussion is that the market is going to give the de facto standard back to Microsoft, regardless of events at ISO. That is, unless we provide a clean way for enterprises to access their Microsoft formatted documents and play with an open document format standard within BUSINESS PROCESSES.

While part of the world is swallowing the ODF story, those enterprises who are testing ODF implementations and hitting the brick wall of business processes (Mass ITD [with whom I am under NDA], Denmark, Belgium) are finding it impossible to implement across autonomous networks of decentralized government agencies (each with its own CIO) for practical reasons. People wonder why the ODF policies are drifting back to ODF + OOXML. Wonder no more.

It's true -- I was a vociferous supporter of ODF, and among the most passionate and committed people to identify the importance of OpenOffice's file format back in 2002.

But this year the vendors' tendency to use open standards and open source applications as a bargaining chip to extract (some would say 'extort') money from the deep-pockets Gorilla [that's your client, Microsoft] seems to have won out over good software that works for people.

CDF is better. It's governance is with the W3C: does anyone dare question the integrity of Sir Tim? And it is a format -- or I should say a framework for open formats -- which does something ODF can't do at all and OOXML can only do with Microsoft products -- it can go Mobile.

Posted by: swhiser   Posted on: 10/29/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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