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.
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
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!
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.