Slashdot Mirror
Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents
Tontoman writes "ZDNet is running a story that sheds new light on the decision by Massachusetts to switch to
open formats for the commonwealth's official documents. This issue has previously been discussed on Slashdot, first The Massachusetts Office Party and then
Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision . From the
article: 'Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told CRN on Friday that
Massachusetts had concerns about the openness of Microsoft XML schemas
as well as with potential patent issues that could arise in the
future.' The article also quotes a Microsoft executive
on further reason that Microsoft's upcoming Office 12 will not support
OpenDocument."
Err, try looking at what OpenDocument actually supports first (as opposed to what Microsoft claimed it supports).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
"OpenDocument is designed to reuse existing open XML standards whenever they are available, and it creates new tags only where no existing standard can provide the needed functionality. So, OpenDocument uses DublinCore for metadata, MathML for formulae, SVG for vector graphics, SMIL for multimedia, etc."
Note the bit about multimedia, Microsoft?
The tag will be represented as something like this:
<draw:object-ole xlink:href="./Object 1" xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>
The OLE object's content would be in that "Object 1". This is obviously not XML, doesn't have to be. When OO starts, it instantiates the CLSID specified in the Object 1 file and streams its data into it via IStream or IStorage. Thus any OLE object is supported by the spec and by OO.
The object-ole tag is documented on page 300 of the OpenDocument 1.0 spec. Other mechanisms for embedding objects are also documented.
So it is supported by the Open Document spec.
pre-2.0 builds of oo.org use opendocument (ods, ods etc) as a default format and these are able to contain all mentioned media.
also, od was based on oo.org file format, several oo.org participants were on oasis committee - i somehow doubt they would have developed a format that would be seriously limited.
as mentioned in this thread and here :
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/faq.p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
od uses existing technologies to support multimedia.
btw, in wikipedia entry i noticed this :
that's a pretty impressive list - and it is growing
Rich
an interesting and required read for everybody interested in open formats :m l
:)
http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000743.ht
gary edwards, member of oasis opendocuemnt tc, comments on ms xml, od and related stuff. you really should read the whole comment, but i'll cite a couple of excerpts that imho are relevant to your comment
"Since MS XML looks to be a clone of OpenDoc XML, i think it's disingenuous to imply that Microsoft put so much time and effort into creating a duplicate XML file format to meet their "legacy" needs. This is a knockoff clear and simple. The work was done by OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems, and the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee."
"The first 18 months of work at the OASIS OpenDoc TC (...), was focused near entirely on legacy systems. Especially legacy systems
wedded to Microsoft binary file formats.
The OpenDoc TC was very fortunate to have a wealth of expertise in reverse engineering the legacy maze of incompatible MS binary file formats. Experts from Corel Office, StarOffice, Boeing, Stellent, ArborText, and SpeedLegal among others had long made their living reverse engineering MS file formats. Phil Boutros, the legendary binary cracking wizard representing Stellent, near single handedly represented what would have otherwise been thought to be the full cooperation of Microsoft in solving these legacy issues."
"At any time Microsoft was and is able to jump into the TC discussion's about their legacy file formats and the transformation issues that were eventually resolved in the OpenDoc XML specification. They did after all have an official membership on the OpenDoc TC."
Rich
FUD= Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
As a professional Office Automation Analyst, I can vouch for MS Office products not being 100% backward compatible, but whats worse, they are not 100% forward compatible either.
Case in point: I have several 1000's word 200o doc's with tables and indexes. Nothing spectacular. Yet, Office 2003 majorly screws with tabel alignment, and indexes are corrupt, and need to be set again.
Do I need to continue on MS Visio and MS Project? Same stuff. Most works, but often it also does not.
I have people saving thing with Project 2000 in Project 97 format, otherwise resources would dissapear and be un-editable in Project 2003.
MS is doing one, and only one thing: They are holding all our doc's hostage, and most of there profit is due to it, so they will stick to it no matter what.
I think a major problem with MS Office is its lack of archive value. If you have thousands (or millions) of documents and someone misfiles something, you cannot simply search the contents of the documents for a known string. Ferinstance, "egrep 'John Doe' *.doc" doesn't work so well, but it works on Corel WordPerfect files, and adding gzip into a pipe works on OOo docs. In a law office for example, it is very useful to be able to find precedents on obscure subjects that are only handled once or twice in several years and searching a collection of MS documents just doesn't work. This has convinced many lawyers to rather stick with Corel and not move to MS Office.
Oh well, what the hell...
It is already supported. OpenDocument files are merely ZIP archives. One of the files in the archive is a manifest. Another is the main file in XML, which includes links to the other files in the archive. These may be any kind of file: stylesheets, sounds, Flash animations, graphics, movies, more XML, more OpenDocument files -- all preserved in their original formats. And not translated to some horrible proprietary format which needs a payware viewer/editor; they are all editable with standard tools.
Go and have a butcher's at some OpenOffice documents.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Guess what? I'm getting slightly bored of people making verifiably false claims, and even more bored of clueless moderators modding them up for it.
If I may quote directly from the horse's mouth:So do pray enlighten me: exactly how is OpenDocument not the OpenOffice.org format?
Oh, the other guy who replied to you suggested that there's another format (called OpenDoc not OpenDocument), which may well be what you have in mind. In that case, you are completely off-topic, because the format Massachusetts are thinking of using is OpenDocument. Which is to say, the format which is used by new versions of OpenOffice.org.
There's one problem with your theory: you've got it backwards. OpenOffice is the program that can open
If a company wants to convert their Word documents to OpenDocument format, then the easiest way to do it is actually to use OpenOffice!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In other words: Nobody with more than a few .doc documents can switch from Ms Office to OpenOffice. Result: $$$ for MS
.doc files reliably.
.doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.
Now imagine MS Word could save reliably in OO's format. And it can obviously open
A company could now run a batch job that opens
Batch Converting MS Word Documents in OpenOffice.org
1. Open File / AutoPilot / Document Convertor
2. Select Microsoft Office
3. Choose any combination of
[X] Word
[X] Excel
[X] PowerPoint formats.
4. Click Next
5. Enter the proper locations for where to read files in and where to dump them out...
6. Click Convert!
Watch (and wait) as hundreds of MS Office Documents are quickly and easily converted to OO formats.
You will lose some formating and I think all macro information, but those can be cleaned up later.
Result: MS looses customers.
When you have 90+% of the market that can't really be avoided.
While I'll agree that OO is not a feature-by-feature drop-in replacement for MS Office, for most MS Office users, it's just fine. Since I've been using OO, I'm not having to deal with as many security issues, stability issues, or licensing issues. What have I had to sacrifice? VB Macro compatibility? I never used it anyway. I know a lot of people who are in the same situation.
There's no such thing as a universally perfect tool, but while there will certainly be scenarios where MS Office is the right tool for the job, most 'productivity' tasks can be handled just fine with OO.
Also, if you think that Firefox on Linux is easy to install/use, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say the OO is so difficult. The installation procedure for both programs has been identical for years now, and in most cases is included in a default Linux workstation install. All of the OO components are in my KDE menu, and I certainly did no extra steps to get them there.
Also, I certainly agree that the software is very large. Additional distribution channels are necessary for users on dial-up. I make CDs for friends, family, and co-workers. Those of us with the resources can help those without. There will still be people without access, but if we help eachother, we can shrink that number.
Aloha,
Chris