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Coming onto ODF and OOXML, we can start with the fact that there was one clear standard, ODF, that everybody had agreed on. Instead of joining an open process and ensuring that it's own needs were included, Microsoft "broke away from the standards process". Having done that, first Microsoft "broke the standards organisations " by ensuring that committes which had previously mainly consisted of technical experts were overloaded with Microsoft's commercial cronies. Then Microsoft "broke the standards it was trying to have implemented " by ensuring that the standards were at the same time incomplete ("do this as MS Word 2000"), inconsistent and unimplementable. Next Microsoft "broke the interoperability you would expect the standard to deliver" for ODF when Microsoft implemented ODF. Just recently, Microsoft has completed the circle by delivering an OOXML implementation which "broke the rules of the standard" by not following it. Microsoft has promised to to deliver a standards conforming implementation in 2015. The only question is, will Microsoft "break with it's standard practices" or will it "break it's promise to follow the standard? Did you have another meaning of "break the standard" in mind?

ODF produced by Office fails to work properly in any suite other than Office AFAIK, including OOo (as well as e.g. AbiWord, KOffice, Google Docs, etc.).

I believe that you're referring to the spreadsheet formulas problem (be sure to follow the links to blog posts there as well). Two things to note here: this only applies to formulas in spreadsheets; there is no standard covering those in scope of ODF 1.1 (which is the final published ODF standard at this moment - 1.2 is still a draft); and it wasn't a problem just between MSOffice and OO.org, there were other implementations which had incompatible formula representations - it's just that OO.org pushed all of the latter to conform to itself (specifically, to ODF 1.2 draft which it uses for formulas even in ODF 1.1 documents), but MSOffice stayed where it was.

There are other issues, but this is the single biggest one. Here is a list of all criticism with respect to implementation of ODF in MSOffice today. In particular, it's worth noting that there are no complaints referring to text documents in particular, so those are fully interoperable. The other two features that MSOffice doesn't properly support are change tracking, and password protection. I don't know the reason for not supporting password protection. With respect to change tracking, the official explanation is that it is notimplemented because it's underspecified and non-interoperable between other existing ODF 1.1 implementations.

Yet it is supposedly more "compliant" than OOo, due to a variety of technicalities.

I haven't seen any claims that MSOffice is more conformant to the spec than OO.org. The official claim is that it is merely conformant. Do you have any references for broader claims?

OTOH, ODF produced by OOo works in almost all of the other major suites. So, yes, it is trivial to do that, but no, it doesn't accomplish anything.

I think you're substituting definitions here. An open format, by definition, is the one that has an open specification - not the one that can be opened in a particular Office suite. In case of MSOffice, it implements ODF standard to the letter except for two features, it clearly defines the features that it doesn't implement, and it provides an open spec for those parts where the standard is underspecified, and format is implementation-defined. What this all means is that you can always fully extract any information contained in an ODF document saved by MSOffice by using only open specifications as a reference - there's no format lock-in.

Any traction on solving or at least improving Microsoft's ODF implementation? The last time I checked, there were serious issues with the implementation.

By the way, how does Office 2007's "Save-As-PDF" feature compare to the real thing?

Why distribute a .DOC file? The .ODF, Open Document Format, is the international standard.

In my opinion: The .DOC format is proprietary and buggy, and very expensive due to forced upgrades and general proprietary quirkiness. The .DOC format is supplied by a company that makes more money if it spaces improvements over ten versions, rather than making all improvements in one version. The .DOC format is supplied by a company that makes more money if the .DOC format is implemented in an abusive manner. Why open yourself to abuse?

The best way to send documents that will not be changed is as .PDF files. That's a simple menu choice in Open Office. Or, use PDF Creator from any application.

Microsoft's ODF Support Falls Short It's just another proprietary format, from a company that makes money by locking people into proprietary formats.

"Out of the box OpenOffice.org version 3 opens Microsoft Office 2007 documents, but often odf-converter-integrator converts with better quality." I haven't tested that myself.

References:

OpenDocument Format Alliance. OpenDocument Format Alliance on Wikipedia

OpenDocument software

OpenDocument

OpenDocument adoption

Why distribute a .DOC file? The .ODF, Open Document Format, is the international standard.

In my opinion: The .DOC format is proprietary and buggy, and very expensive due to forced upgrades and general proprietary quirkiness. The .DOC format is supplied by a company that makes more money if it spaces improvements over ten versions, rather than making all improvements in one version. The .DOC format is supplied by a company that makes more money if the .DOC format is implemented in an abusive manner. Why open yourself to abuse?

The best way to send documents that will not be changed is as .PDF files. That's a simple menu choice in Open Office. Or, use PDF Creator from any application.

Microsoft's ODF Support Falls Short It's just another proprietary format, from a company that makes money by locking people into proprietary formats.

"Out of the box OpenOffice.org version 3 opens Microsoft Office 2007 documents, but often odf-converter-integrator converts with better quality." I haven't tested that myself.

References:

OpenDocument Format Alliance. OpenDocument Format Alliance on Wikipedia

OpenDocument software

OpenDocument

OpenDocument adoption

As a Brit, this appointment won't affect me directly. But indirectly US Government policy has an important global effect. I'll be watching closely to see whether ODF becomes widely used as a document format by the US Federal Government.

The ODF Alliance have welcomed the appointment, as have Tim O'Reilly and a host of other people so I'm hopeful that it will turn out to be a good thing

The Open Document Format - ODF was supposed to replace PDF anyway. Why not hasten the process and make a PDF to ODF converter?

The ODF Alliance should be on that case to do a converter program to convert all document formats to ODF format.

Ummm, why would you automatically assume that the American delegates would vote against Google, IBM, Red Hat, Sun, and all the other American ODF Alliance members? This isn't "US vs. The World", it's "One US Company vs. The Rest".

Now, we know that M$ [1] stacked the deck here. In a hypothetical unbiased panel, though, voting for Microsoft isn't necessarily voting for the interests of America.

[1] When discussing the crap like they do like this, M$ is a perfectly reasonable abbreviation.

ISO isn't corrupt. If anything, it's the members. There are too many people who have a say who shouldn't. The problem I see here is that many nations don't want to force people into a document format anymore, and will take any new document format proposal thrown out. Especially one by a big name like MS, no matter how crappy and impossible to implement it may be. My proposed solution: Let Google decide. Google, albeit a large corporation itself, is generally kind and considerate toward the needs of the people (developer or not). Google's position on OOXML (PDF) is well thought out and logical, unlike ISO's likely decision.

Ms. Van Sickle, In response to "Part I - General Questions," under "I. Information Requested," pertaining to "Terminology - Access," in addition to the very reasonable points listed there, I define a format's "accessibility" to include openness -- namely, the format must be based on open standards, and be guaranteed to stay that way in the future. This means that those standards are completely documented and specified, and available to anyone, and will remain so. The Microsoft OOXML standard does not meet this criteria. In fact, Microsoft has failed to keep its public promises regarding control of the standard (please see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071206131310362 for more information on this from people involved in the ISO standardization process). Essentially, once the format is approved as an ISO standard, Microsoft wants to keep the standard under its own control; they will be able to accomplish this because, rather than turning the standard over to ISO, the standards body they plan to turn over maintenance of the OOXML standard to, ECMA, has an OOXML group chaired by not one, but two Microsoft employees (http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm). Once the standard is in the hands of ECMA, Microsoft will then be free to add or change features at their whim, leaving any who attempt to implement their standard unable to take advantage of the now *undocumented* features. Therefore, they will fail to be in full compliance with the standard. This will have the effect of locking businesses and government departments into the use of their software, just as if they were to continue to use MS' current, proprietary ".DOC" format. It will also have the effect that, in order for taxpayers to access documents whose creation they've paid for, they must also pay a private company an additional sum in order to access that information. That is plainly wrong. As a lifelong New York State resident, I am deeply opposed to this standard, for the simple reason that it encroaches on fundamental liberty. There is no justification for creating a de facto requirement that individuals or organizations will, now or in the future, purchase software from a *private company* in order to access public documents. Please consider following the good example of the Dutch government in adopting a completely open standard, such as the Open Document Format (see http://www.odfalliance.org/ for more information), and keep private companies from hi-jacking my public documents.

• GNOME (and Novell) do not support the standardisation of OOXML. They are both members of the ODF alliance, both use it as the default file format, and if it was even remotely realistic to have a decent office product without OOXML support (where the Windows desktop is unfortunately in such an insane over-dominance currently), then they would of course be all for it.
• The implementation of OOXML is all about interoperability. I don't see anyone (wrongly) trashing Samba as a project, and yet its existence and the effort to implement OOXML support is virtually identical in terms of free software.
• You like software freedom and hate the software patent system? Great, so do I. Free implementations of proprietary solutions, though, are a good thing; not a single one of my friends are going to be using Linux if they can't submit their assignments to their lecturers. We need interoperability, to ease the transition for people coming from the proprietary world.
• The KDE/Koffice developers issued a statement basically saying they didn't have the resources or the time to implement OOXML, and suddenly a lot of silly talk gets thrown at GNOME. If I volunteered to implement OOXML support in Koffice I doubt (i) that they would object, and for sure that (ii) any distribution would not include it.
• Even if you dislike Jeff Waugh, it's pretty tough to find a rational basis for criticising him based on the podcast or his approach to the problem other than (i) not getting the GNOME statement (again, which you really can't fault) out soon enough, or (ii) giving Roy the publicity he wants.
• The itwire article plays Roy as some sort of victim in the podcast talk. That is ridiculous. Unfortunately -- and to the detriment of the FLOSS community -- Roy is an incredibly prolific, poisonous person willing to do or say anything that might cook up some self-publicity, and with an irrational hatred of Novell. And in fact on the contrary, Roy skipped around every question that was directly asked to him; instead opting to just give background on Microsoft's "evil" nature and talking about how bad OOXML is (both of which we palpably know).
• Finally, even if you decide to ignore all the other above facts, please tell me why you're not also staging wide protests against OpenOffice.org or your distribution for including OOXML support, as well.

To elaborate, the format was actually put forth by OASIS (which, the entire British parliament should agree is the best band ever), but that's just a little piece of what they do.

The open document fellowship are the community supporters (i.e., the ODF volunteer organization), while the ODF Alliance are the industry supporters. What did the Open Document Foundation do? Muddy the waters.

They're the Ross Perot of open document foundations - making people think that if they listen to them, that they'll get the real skinny because of their seeming-official status. Good to see 'em go.

Actually, it's just three guys:
http://opendocumentfoundation.us/we.htm
Not much of a foundation.

The *real* ODF group is:
http://www.odfalliance.org/memberlist.php

I think that the only honest thing the "The OpenDocument Foundation" can do is rename
itself "The Compound Documents Format Foundation", since to do otherwise would be as
deceitful as Microsoft choosing to name OOXML "Office Open XML". But honestly, I doubt
they will. Their comparison chart between CDF and ODF betrays a few lies:
            http://opendocument.foundation.googlepages.com/GOSCON_Chart.pdf
In particular:
* CDF is not OOXML compatible, nor has any implementation shown this to be possible. ODF at least has a not-100% compatible conversion.
* ODF has a lot more big vendor support than CDF
* Neither are universal formats, but ODF is supported by more vendors and software projects at the moment.

Personally, I think that the reasons for "The OpenDocument Foundation" changing it's
support from ODF to CDF is self-interest. When ODF was first introduced, there was
money to be made for a small company to write MS Office/Corel Office/Mac Office plugins
and other conversion services. But then Sun and others started offering free converters
and conversion services. There's just too much competition too quickly

CDF, OTOH is not as well supported universally, so there's a lot more room for
a small company. And if the CDF growth rate is slow, the "The OpenDocument Foundation"
has the chance to become *the CDF conversion experts* and make a lot of money.
Also, since CDF (if you believe their claims) is more web oriented, it would be good
for transactional converters of many types that need to be used for each message.
With ODF, you convert your document once and don't have to worry about going back
(by purpose....ODF is best for documents that have to be read, as is 100 years
from now). The difference in profit between one-time business and licensed per
transaction business could huge, even if CDF has a smaller market.

Right, I'll comment. Not mod.
Parent has it correctly, they're scums.
For further, "official" information see: http://www.odfalliance.org/

Yet another slow day on /. ?

ODF has already been accepted as an ISO standard, and is already supported by all of the following groups:
http://www.odfalliance.org/members.php#viewall

Fascinating how a group all about "standards" can't put together a standards-compliant Web page:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.odfalliance.org/members.php
Failed validation, 815 Errors (150kB page)

gewg_

Nice try at misdirection, troll, but the squabbling is over. ODF has already been accepted as an ISO standard, and is already supported by all of the following groups:

http://www.odfalliance.org/members.php#viewall

Now perhaps you would care to answer the original question: why are two standards better than one ?

A small victory, but an important one. Maybe Massachusetts can now be persuaded to move to an actual open, easy-to-implement and reliable standard to preserve government records. It can join Russia and Norway in using ODF.

In developing standards, as in other engineering processes, it is a bad idea to reinvent the wheel. The OOXML standard document is 6546 pages long. The ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages. The reason for this is that ODF references other existing ISO standards for such things as date specifications, math formula markup and many other needs of an office document format standard. OOXML invents its own versions of these existing standards, which is unnecessary and complicates the final standard. If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison. Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.

That the roll out is going well is not a lie. Despite heavy interference from M$, it was right on schedule six months ago and the roll out was supposed to start only five months ago. Given the resignation of the CIO due to a smear and M$'s attempt to restructure their entire IT system, it's a miracle they are able to keep to their plans at all. It's the planning that takes time - roll outs happen in a week, even in the deadly inefficient world of Windoze.

Oh yeah, let's not forget the blind people FUD, which has limited deployment due to the state's "chosen accessibility technology". That's particularly irksome, considering the better stuff available in the free software world (Klaus Knopper's wife is legally blind), and bragging from M$ that ODF support would not be hard for them, but only if forced.

When contacting people, please remember what is crucial:

Be polite - this will make them much more likely to listen. If you are feeling angry, take a walk outside, have a nice snack then come back when you are calmed down.

Make personal contact - fax or phone where you can; reinforce emails by calling up to check that they got them. Write your own letter, based on somebody elses template if you need, but with your own information. If they promise to look into it, call back later to find out what they found out.

State clearly your relationship to them - resident of the state / local business / supporter / floating voter etc. Always find a reason why they should take notice of you. Identify yourself clearly and let them call you back later (better to give a business phone or mobile so that they don't call you at home during election campaign time though)

Give information - links to pages about problems - specific links to ODF sites or the Wikipedia article etc. to show alternatives. However, read through those pages yourself and pick out and explain specific points from them that you think are important.

Be efficient. Make your point early; don't drown them in extra information; Say only things which you think are important.

Be original. Give specific information about your position and how you will benefit from alternative solutions. Show that you care about it and why.

Dear Mr Leno;

I am the owner of a small web hosting company. I am writing to support "California A.B. 1668 : Open Document Format, Open Source.". We would like to be able to automatically send out pre-filled billing forms from our billing system and expect all our customers to be able to complete them easily. Unfortuantely, the current de-facto standard for documents is Microsofts .doc format and that is too complex for us to be able to add it to the billing system. A new alteranative exists in the ISO standard Open Document Format. If that was widely adopted our problem would be solved. Unfortuantely, Microsoft is trying to block this adoption by having a fake new standard based on .doc. This isn't really a standard because it doesn't fully specifiy how the format works (please see http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections section 10.2 "Cloning the behaviour of proprietary applications") and is far to big for us to deal with, let alone be a reasonably reviewed ISO standard ( see http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections secton 11 "Ecma 376 cannot be adequately evaluated within the 30-day evaluation period")

We believe that if Microsofts standard is blocked and the Open Document Format is standardised for state use, in future we would be able to rely on it's availability everywhere and our buisiness would be able to work much better with its customers.

As you know well, we are strongly committed to supporting the good of our state and my wife and I have often run coffee mornings for the state assembly which you have attended yourself. We think that this bill would clearly improve life in our state and look forward to hearing that you are committed to supporting it.

Best Regards
Jason R Kovacs Jr.

Does anyon know if there's any such thing as a "corporate petition" that I could pesuade my company to join?

There was a petition, but it's largely over and the result of MS at least giving lip service to OpenDocument support has been achieved. It remains to be seen what really happens with the third party plug-ins for MS Office, which is what the support amounts to it may be unsupport. Though the MS sponsored plug-in is the only one that makes the news, the one that has actually entered testing is the OpenDocument Foundation's ODF Plugin for MS Office.

As far as petitions go, about the closest thing right now would be for your business to sign onto the OpenDocument Alliance.

i think we'll just have to agree to disagree. you say to use an open document structure so anyone can use it, yay! i say microsoft is in the position to dictate formats because they're the industry leader (regardless of how they got there), which includes even CSS renderings (and opinions are like buttholes). if microsoft had some sort of incentive to support an open format, then maybe they would. and you know what, if it wasn't microsoft then it'd just be some other private company running the show (be it apple, ibm, etc). microsoft is in the business to make money. don't fault them for doing that. as it is, human beings are pretty predictable which is why i say that if you were microsoft you'd never be where it is today with the attitude of universal formats. few businesses would be worth a damn if they just freely gave out everything that requires some form of keeping things away from the general populous (recipes from hostess, rdbms code from oracle, brass mixtures for cymbal makers, etc). free market--compete! or shut up and color with the rest of those that wish they had a piece of the pie. all of those on the list, from what i could tell, are linux/oss supporters, including google--and it appears that no one there benefits in the pocketbook from having an open format...with names like Open Enterprise Solutions or City of Bloomington i don't see how these folks want closed source anything. i did see IBM and Unisys on the list, but they know they're not in position to dictate anything in regards to document formats (and i sure as hell don't see IBM giving out the source code for their mainframe software--please correct me if i'm wrong). all those on the list stand to save money by having oss products to do their documents in, so as to not pay money to microsoft in terms of licensing fees for microsoft office. /rant

You're stuck in that position because of the file format and wouldn't be in that position if

1. Third party tools had access to the complete file format specification so the actually could generate an 'excel document {sic}' with charts. That's not gonna happen with existing formats and the licensing questions about MOOX / DOCX suggest future replacement formats out of Redmond may not help out so much with that.
   
   ... or ...
   
   
2. There was a universal format that included spreadsheets (aka 'excel documents') and charts, etc.

The solution's been visible for a long time. It's only lately that it's been within grasp.

Full list of members can be found here (and FAQ here)

I note that Apple is not a member - I suggest all slashdotters write to Apple to support ODF & join this alliance. After all, Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?

Full list of members can be found here (and FAQ here)

I note that Apple is not a member - I suggest all slashdotters write to Apple to support ODF & join this alliance. After all, Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?

If you RTFA, you'll see:
The ODF Alliance was first proposed by IBM...

If you look at the list of supporters, you'll see IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, etc. The open-document format does indeed have the backing of some big companies. The fact that MS doesn't want to support will slow adoption, but there is still a significant push for this format (as the very existence of this Alliance attests to).