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ODF Threat to Microsoft in US Governments Grows
Tookis writes "Another setback for Microsoft has cropped up in the space of document formats in government organizations. The state of California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement in the software used by state agencies. Similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota has added further to the pressure on Microsoft, which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007. The bill doesn't specify ODF by name, but instead requires the use of an open XML-based format."
Yeah, darn that government for wanting to be able to read the documents 20 years down the road.
The government is not forcing this on anyone. They have zero interest in forcing you or anyone else outside the government to use any given format. This is not Big Brother, this is a great case of the market economy at work! Microsoft's largest customer is saying that they they are in the market for a system that meets specific criteria. They don't care who provides it or where it comes from, just as long as it does what they need it to do. Now, the market decides who will provide them what they want.
I had been thinking that ODF was "obviously" a good thing until I read the rant by Opera's CTO about how shit both standards are (a memory dump between angle brackets), and how the correct way would be to go for XHTML with CSS formatting.
... but I'm concerned that standardising on ODF will come to bite us, the IT industry, in our collective butts sooner rather than later. We need something clear. Obvious. Simple. And from this some genuine innovation will come - remember that?
Like, seriously, why not? Have we not been here before, going "so we need to separate content from display" and was not the eventual solution actually rather good. It took ten years or so to get adopted, but nobody is denying that css has made the web a less obnoxious place. There are no technical reasons why it can't be extended to all aspects of "office" publishing/collaboration, and indeed a book has been published using XML+CSS.
I know that ODF is "here now", and it must be an improvement over Office's internal format
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
In computer language terms, nobody should use the word "open" (implying unencumbered) in a product name unless it really is. Otherwise, it's called false advertising and subject to all the fines and sanctions that come with it. Microsoft calling their compendium of proprietary digital glop "open" fits that description.
Most of the stuff on
Hooray for Government mandated mediocrity.
The only way applications can compete on merit is if they all use published standards to exchange information. No one can compete with secret formats and no public document should ever use one. Nothing but greed and fear of competition is keeping M$ from using ODF or inventing an equally well documented standard. Well, perhaps a little incompetence keeps them second rate.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is unwise to try to reframe the debate toward what proprietors value instead of what freedoms users need.
.doc formats (yes, plural, because there are more than one and they are not always upwardly-compatible) is bad. Many have analyzed OOXML and pointed out serious problems with it (Groklaw carries many pointers to these articles, from Linguists to more CS-oriented critique). We have a chance to liberate ourselves and preserve our documents for posterity by switching to open standards (one of which is ODF).
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on; letting some kind of popularity contest decide what format is "better" is also a bad idea because that boils down to spending more on advertising (which, of course, Microsoft would love to do because they can spend millions on ads that never discuss the shortcomings of their products). Microsoft's track record on their
We can't afford to push aside the importance to citizens here: people need the freedom to print, copy, and publish documents whenever they want (even if some government or corporation deems it inappropriate) without overcoming digital restrictions. Governments shouldn't be allowed to spend taxpayer money on documents that deny users these freedoms.
Digital Citizen
> I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these
> XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the
> job we want here?
As I understand it, the big advantage of using XML in ODF (don't know about OOXML) is that you can extract the actual content of your document as XML, change it, resave it and it all renders properly (this assumes that your styles etc. are set up correctly).
For example, in theory I should be able to create an empty document that just contains all my style info, insert *all* the content with appropriate pointers to the styles I want to use, save it, and then someone else can come along, open my document and read my content in their program of choice. If my raw content is XML (as is increasingly the case these days), I can fairly easily automate converting it to ODF format (just as I've been able to easily convert it to HTML, PDF and a bunch of other formats for a while now). ODF then becomes a simple "container" that anyone anywhere can use without needing any proprietary tools to do so.
I can then save my content as strict XML, then render it in whatever format the user requires. If they've got Acrobat, I'll give them a PDF file; if they've got OpenOffice or AbiWord, I'll give them an ODF doc; if they've got a Web browser, I'll give them HTML. *This* is the big plus of open document formats in general; the actual format of the document essentially becomes unimportant, since anyone who wants to look at it can do so in their tool of choice. If one tool is crappy, or becomes unavailable, or doesn't support e.g. Swahili, no problem - just find a different tool.
In terms of whether XML is the optimal format for this type of data in the first place, it's probably a good fit for almost all cases, as distinct from being a really great fit for only a few cases. Depending on how you define "better", it's not hard to come up with a better format for a book than:
<title>My document</title>
<subtitle>Written by me</subtitle>
<chapter>First chapter</chapter>
<chaptertext>The quick brown fox...</chaptertext>
However, XML is here now, works well enough, is insufficiently bad to try to replace it with something else (assuming that "something else" is actually better than XML), and a lot of tools and libraries (both free and commercial) exist that make working with it pretty straightforward.
It's a very long way from introducing a bill to seeing it out of committee, surviving kill-based amendments, brought to the floor for a vote, passed, passed again in the other chamber, signed into law, and actually implemented. There is nothing at all here to get excited about yet, if ever.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Linux/OSS zealots aren't getting it... MS won't care if everybody uses the ODF standard, because at the end of the day, just like with Windows, people will continue buying their software in large numbers because it simply works better than the OSS/Free alternatives out there. People have been saying the same thing about Linux for more than a decade, and Linux hasn't taken more than a negligible chunk of the small to medium server from MS (most was cannibalized from other *nix variants), and virtually none of the desktop market. A free screwdriver is useless if you need a hammer to do the job.
People *may*, if this thing actually has any legs to it, end up continuing to use Office and saving docs as "ODF", which won't impact MS if the OSS/Free office alternatives remain distant runners-up in terms of quality, performance, and bells-and-whistles.
I don't respond to AC's.
I just want to say to the /. community that before you all start raving about the downfall of M$ with this think about all the other industries out there. A few state government industries aren't even a drop in the bucket for the number of licenses M$ has out there. Now all the Fortune 500 companies going to "open" standards would be a watershed prophetic moment, this is pissing in a volcano.
Remember in order for there to be developers someone somewhere has to make money selling software.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Microsoft's "Office Open XML" name reminds me of a lot of country names. Whenever one hears a country called "The People's Democratic Republic of [Somewhere]", one instantly knows it is communist. Likewise, anything "open" from Microsoft is invariably closed. Microsoft does develop open formats (like RTF) but they are never advertised as such.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
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But surely if OOXML is as open as the wikipedia page (and everything I've heard) makes it sound,
Have you heard that Microsoft hired it's own wikipedia contributer to (try to) control the spin on the OOXML and ODF pages?
And I guess you haven't heard about the parts of the OOXML "spec" that say something ot the effect of: "Word95Spacing - This tag means that document spacing should conform to that produced by Word95. That's too complicated to go into here, see Word95 for details."
This is a spec? This is open?
-- Alastair
What you're failing to take into account is that Microsoft have a paid shill editing Wikipedia for them.
OOXML is not open, see the list of objections. Also ask yourself: if Microsoft wanted to use an open file format, why didn't they use ODF? They had plenty of time to implement it within Office 2007 and were asked to be part of ODF's development. Firstly the ignored it, now that it's gaining traction they're trying to destroy it with a competing 'standard'.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
The term "threat" suggests that something Microsoft legitimately owns or does is at risk. But this is no "threat", it's merely fair competition and should have happened a decade ago.
Microsoft can easily implement ODF. Microsoft will probably lose some marketshare, but they will do that anyway, and Office will probably still remain the dominant office suite either way.
So, let's go easy on language like "threat".
And with an open document format, all those people can use whatever programs and formats they like, and export to the mandated format as needed.
Shocking! Do you normally dictate the delivery format to your client? If a publisher wants their images in Adobe Illustrator format, do you feel oppressed due tot he fact that they are not interested in some random format you found on the web? If a website you build is required to be compatible with IE or Firefox, do you rail at the injustice of not being able to use the latest code hack that only works in some obscure browser from 5 years ago?
The government, like any other organization, has the right to dictate the details of their work exactly as far as they can enforce them. No one is forcing anyone to work with or for the government. If using the document format of their choice is morally repugnant to you, feel free to take your services elseware.
There is nothing at all here to get excited about yet, if ever.
On the one hand we have a company which names it's format as "Office Open XML" but documents the specification in over 6000 pages, using words like Windows 95 compatibility etc. in that spec... and yet has the guts to call it Open.
And on the other, we have a bunch of companies who have realised it's no use talking to the 800lb gorilla.. and basically decided to implement a workable, truly open, truly interoperable format... that may or may not be superior to the MS OOXML.
Now, Opera's CTO might think (and I largely agree with him) that BOTH specs are way off the mark, while simple HTML + CSS can do the trick....
But I find it truly amazing that for more than 10 years, people in the US have been shelling out billions of dollars buying crippleware.... money that is now used to enslave them to sub-standard, bug-ridden, inefficient, unreliable software and formats...
And yet, a comment on Slashdot that says nothing might happen yet for Microsoft or the marketplace gets modded +5 Insightful!
Looks like Lincoln was wrong... in America, you can apparently fool all the people all the time.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Yep. The important thing is to create *COMPETITION*.
"Open Source" doesn't create competition, open file formats do - by allowing companies to pick and choose which software they use to work with their documents.
The sooner people figure this out, the better.
No sig today...
It's a threat to Microsoft because if Microsoft can't control the data format, then they can't lock users into their suite of Office products - and then they can't stop their customers from using other vendor's office suites.
So, there I am reading through the posts trying to get a feel for how others think, and I come across yours. It's marked as insightful, so maybe I should read it. Now, as an aside, when I set up my browser, I get it to display standard text at about the right size for me to read, clever huh? Why are your words so much smaller than everybody else's? No, I can't be bothered to squint or change my settings just so I can hear what you have to say. Please don't mess with the tags unless it actually helps to get your message across! /rant> ;D
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
Although I agree that open file formats create competition, I would also say that Open Source does create competition in the sense that if a company (or state) uses an Open Source program it can put several contractors in competition for the maintenance/development of the program.
To be fair, communism is an economic system. The term "democratic republic" refers to a governmental system. It is quite possible to have both.
In recent history, conquering powers often used the promise of communist economic reform to gain support for their dictatorship. Once they have power, they implement systems that are neither communist nor democratic.
The US government brainwashed the populace so well during the cold war that most Americans don't even know the difference between an economic and governmental system. It is possible to democratically elect leaders in a republican government that implement communist economic policies. Countries that have a single natural resource (such as oil) would probably be better of with such a system than with an entirely capitalist system.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If Microsoft had adopted ODF, they either would have had to remove features from their products [...] I love how Slashdot makes it sound like a big Microsoft conspiracy when, in reality, the reason they don't use ODF is practicality.
This argument doesn't wash AT ALL. Firstly, OO.o manages to be pretty full-featured using ODF as its native format and nobody has produced a list of MS Office features that could not be represented in an ODF-structured document. Being that MS is supposedly a participant in the OASIS organisation that oversees ODF the LEAST it could do is provide the standards authors a set of requirements to accommodate its products' functionality.
Second, what is stopping MS from implementing and supporting bundled ODF import/export in its office suite even if only a subset of features are supported? They don't need to make it the NATIVE format after all. To say otherwise is crap--MS already allows opening and saving RTF in Word and simple comma-delimited text files in Excel and Access and handles the down-conversion relatively gracefully (and warns the user of potential loss of information).
You're right--it isn't a big MS conspiracy, however it isn't a simple practicality issue either. To be sure, OOXML is a brain-dead specification thrown together with no thought at all by what appears to be the dimmest bulbs MS has to offer. It isn't unreasonable to conclude that MS ran its core-dump-binary formats through some thrown-together disassembly tool, then put angle brackets in the structs and called it an XML format. If they stopped at using this work-free activity then you might argue practicality. However MS then proceeded to DOCUMENT this nasty monster and submit the thousands of pages of junk to standards bodies for ratification. That had to be a HUGE amount of work!
It seems to me that simply embracing ODF as an alternate file format by way of bolting on inport/export filters would've been easier than the route they took from a technical practicality standpoint. This is purely a shrewd business decision. Windows and Office are MS' ONLY dependable revenue generators and MS knows that the only way to keep these products in a market-leading position is to put barriers in place to limit interoperability. Microsoft nearly missed the boat when it let HTML and related standards get established, however they succeeded in quashing that threat by bundling a browser with its OS to shut down serious competition, then putting in non-portable extensions like ActiveX and nonstandard implementations like its javascript-like VBScript and broken and/or confusing CSS behaviour to limit interoperability. This has been a tough battle for MS and they haven't even one the war yet (they tried to declare victory by discontinuing IE at version 6 but had to succumb to pressure and produce another major release).
It seems to me that MS is trying to head-off the competition before it gets established when it comes to ODF. Sure, MS could have embraced-and-extended ODF to some degree, however that would only limit competition not kill it (witness the persistence of competing web browsers) and MS couldn't "own" the format--it would have to put as much effort into implementing ODF as its competitors have to (and one competitor already has done so and uses it as a native format). OOXML lets MS have an advantage in that the format is tailored for its own products, being that it appears that it's merely a thin cellophane wrapper around the internal binary structures within MS Office applications.
Furthermore, success of OOXML would be of greater benefit to MS Office than the success of ODF would be to OO.o because it is an order of magnitude more difficult for third-parties to implement OOXML. ODF is freely available, easier to read and much shorter and the source code to implement it is pretty easy to obtain giventhe most mature implementation is Free software. OOXML is a HUGE spec and difficult to read or interpret (with countless references to un-described behaviou