Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF

christian.einfeldt writes "Sun's Chairman Scott McNealy has asked the world's most populous nation to merge its Uniform Office Format with the Open Document Format. Tech lawyer Andy Updegrove thinks that McNealy would not have flown to China and taken this chance of rejection if McNealy didn't think that there was a good likelihood of success."

Comments

Re:Numbers game

[cduffy]

Waitaminute here -- why do you switch from talking about ODF to talking about OpenOffice? Unlike OpenXML, ODF was written based not on a single application's requirements (although that was used as a starting point), but by getting a bunch of interested parties (particularly, parties with an interest in long-term document archival and storage), and building to their requirements.

And ODF is absolutely the better standard. It leverages preexisting standards such as SVG and MathML instead of reinventing the wheel; it's structured to permit XSLT-style transformations; a complete implementation isn't required to have support for legacy bugs from MS Office. Version 1.2 of the standard will require that implementations preserve unknown attributes to allow support for lossless roundtripping to and from legacy formats; support for lossless roundtripping to and from Word is an early application for this, already available in prototype. The only serious deficiency I'm familiar with is that spreadsheet formulas are unspecified and left to the implementor -- and while that is unfortunate, it's not like there aren't de-facto standards to work from until it's resolved (also in OpenDocument 1.2).

I realize it's trendy to be jaded, and I have little love for many of Sun's actions -- but I'm pretty sure they're on the right side inasmuch as ODF is concerned.

Re:Numbers game

[CastrTroy]

How many times should this story repeat until slashdotters learn: all corporations are the same. Not soon after ODF takes over MS Office, we'll be running daily articles of the "but ... Sun promised to not be evil!" kind, just like we're doing with former favorites Google, Red Hat, Novell, Adobe etc. etc.

But Sun doesn't control the ODF Format. It doesn't matter if sun becomes evil because they don't control anything. That's where you seem to have it wrong. ODF is an OASIS standard agreed upon by many companies and no one company can just change it when they feel like it. I would like to know which specific deficiencies exist with ODF. Don't complain that it's slow, because that's an application problem, not a file format problem. Just because OO.o is slow, doesn't mean that all word processors that use ODF have to be slow. There are already few out there that are quite faster than OO.o. I think that it's always going to be slower than .Doc, but that's only because .Doc is a big memory dump, and is not made to be readable or understood by anything other than MS word.