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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
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."
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.
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As a linux user that sounds fine to me. I actually think MSOffice is a well-made suite, for what it is (I'm also a LaTeX person,) but if my professors and peers send me a .odp instead of a .ppt to work on, it makes my life that much easier. Preparing final presentations for classes, I've had to spend a lot of time on Windows so that I'd be able to collaborate on Powerpoint Presentations. The import features on OO.o work fine for a final product (except some minor things with equations and font sizes being off), but are unusable for trading documents back and forth modifying them each time.
The idea of open standards is compatibility and being able to make choices, not market-share and trying to force your software ideology on someone else, unless of course you're trying to hold on to a monopoly sustained by a closed standard.
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
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".
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...
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.