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ODF Alliance, Who, What, Where (and Why?)
Andy Updegrove writes "On Friday, the new ODF Alliance was launched with much fanfare to 'educate government' about the OpenDocument Format. A flurry of brief news articles appeared the same day, based on pre-launch interviews (as well as an Op/Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Sun's Scott McNealy), but they didn't include much information. So what's it all about, why was it formed, and will it be likely to succeed? Given that the 36 members include only one government unit (the ICT department for Vienna), the answer is clearly to establish a beachhead in the government market as a target of opportunity, and then to expand from there to meet the real goals of the members."
Speaking of witch, What exactly stops MS from incorporating a crippled version of OpenDocuments, thereby changing the standard (like they did to HTML)?
Sigs are bad for your health
Every member will have slightly different goals but one goal brings them all together. No one company (especially Microsoft) should be the gate keeper to people's own data.
For several of the members (like IBM for instance), their basic survival depends on an open file format. If Microsoft controls all the files then nobody else can compete.
Does it matter? Judging by their resistance in Mass., Microsoft thinks so.
There's another reason its not worth worrying too hard about.
;-)
OpenOffice.org will read them correctly. Wordperfect, if they ever get round to it, will read them correctly. Sun's StarOffice, IBM's workplace will read ODF correctly. Abiword, etc, etc . . .
Let's say that MS offers EITHER broken ODF support, or no ODF support at all. Anyone who is in an environment that uses ODF has no problems; they can simply open the ODF in OpenOffice.org, which is free, and save it as a DOC, which Office will open correctly.
And that's the kicker; once you're using OpenOffice.org as a conversion filter you'll have people stop using MS Office for simple edits.
And then you've got a foothold
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The problem is that the Office XML format allows for (among other things) embedding binary data. So critical parts of a document could still be wrapped up in a complicated, obfuscated way, requiring reverse-engineering and so forth (or possibly even being "off limits" entirely, depending on patents and so forth).
The ODF is entirely different, since the specification is clear that no such binary data is allowed. As often happens, the MS offering has the appearance of satisfying a need ("open and accessible!") while not actually delivering on the promise.
new Office XML specifications are freely available for anyone to download and Microsoft offers perpetual, royalty-free licenses to use them
Even if that's true, apparently the way it is worded, nothing prevents MS from releasing a derivative of their format with new licensing terms. So people will get locked into an upgrade path that at first has no costs, but eventually does. ODF on the other hand is committed to keeping the standard free.
OASIS is much more independant and impartial than MS will ever be, and I'm much more comfortable trusting them. The OpenDocument format is very clearly open and readable, meaning anyone in the future will be able to read/write the documents easily (and without paying royalties). The same cannot be said for the new Office XML. In that case, you're just trading one locked-down format for another. The question should be: "If we're going to the bother of switching to a new format, why not select the one that offers us the most accessibility and flexibility down the road?" And the answer is: "you should switch to ODF." I have no doubt that MS Word will read/write ODF witin a few years.
This will only validate that:
A) One should use OpenOffice.org as a conversion filter instead of relying upon Microsoft's support, and
B) Microsoft can't program worth shit.
If every company on the planet except MS has good ODF support, and people start installing OpenOffice.org as a conversion filter, expect really bad things to happen to Microsoft's Office marketshare.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
That's silly and just not the reality. Microsoft can program just fine, it's just that they choose not to program for compatibility with non-Microsoft standards.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
As with the true spirit of Open Source, Free as in speech here is the analogy you need to remember: There are 3 knobs an a televisions set to allow the user control: 1) if you do not like what you here turn down the volume. 2) if you do not like what you see change the channel. 3) if you like neither 1 or 3 turn the damned thing off and get some fresh air outside. So, if Slashdot irrates you that bad, and probably other sites too, turn your pc off and go read some real information about what is happening in the world so you can get a clue before returning and posting......... not *flaimbait* but just a simple minded Bushite. --- People are allowed to be stupid. It just seems there are a whole bunch abusing the privledge lately.
The article is not about open source but about open standards. The two are not the same. You could use primarily only open standards but use only closed source software. For example IBM's implementation of ODF in Workplace and Sun's Staroffice are both closed source.
MS has been using the tactic with some of its more dubious FUDmongers (particularily with regard to ODF support in Mass.) of trying to deliberately confuse open standards and open source. I am not saying you are necessarily a MS FUDmonger but probably just duped by them.
There will be a dozen or so MSOffice add-ons to deal with the ODF. Some free (as in beer) some free (as in ./configure make make install) and some that actually work for the nice lady in the accounting departament ....
Thinking that no ODF implementation in MSOffice is going to boost OpenOffice/Abiword/whatever's popularity is wishfull thinking at best.
For the same friggin' reason they put the brain dead Posix inteface in Windows NT - so they could claim to meet the requirements of Posix compatibiliy without intending any serious use of it. Remember the fuss with Kerberos??
What do you think this is? This is the market speaking. Notice that most of the consortium members are NOT vendors of office software. Libraries, archives, researchers and others who need to use documents produced by others want them to be in an open format. Nobody is trying to force anybody to use any particular format for their own use - the point here is that consumers of documents want to get them in a format that makes the documents useful to them. What we have here is simply advertising for the purpose of affecting the market, just like Microsoft does for its own purposes.
When I read comments like "we really love XHTML, but we can't offer full support so we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. And hey, look! We now support 50% of CSS2! Hurray for IE's great CSS support" I start doubting that they are that committed to bringing Trident on par with the other renderers. Seriously, they should just buy a sourcecode copy of Opera's renderer along with all rights and only include Trident for legacy support, using the Opera renderer as the new codebase. Or port Tasman (the rendering engine used by IE5/Mac), for which they obviously already hold the rights, to Windows.
My opinion is that trying to bring Trident up to snuff would be like taking DR-DOS and trying to turn it into a modrn operating system. Rebuilding or replacing the thing wholesale might just be the better option. And maybe they underestimated the time it takes to bring a product that was obsolete when it went gold five years ago up to date.
NOTE: I called MSHTML "Triton" in my earlier post. The correct name is "Trident".
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