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."

Comments

Re:It could be useful

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:That's not the proposed format

[DrXym]

OLE objects are supported in the urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:drawing:1.0 namespace. This can be seen by saving a document containing an OLE object and opening up the content.xml file.

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.

Re:It wasn't a problem before

[richlv]

an interesting and required read for everybody interested in open formats :
http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000743.htm l

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."

Re:ms

[KermitJunior]

FUD= Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt