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Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate dept.

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."

5 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Numbers game by Random+BedHead+Ed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Playing the numbers game, if a country as large as China were to adopt ODF (via harmonizing with it), it's game over, and ODF wins. That wouldn't spell the end for Microsoft's XML standard, but it would be a major setback, globally speaking. I wish him luck.

    1. Re:Numbers game by cduffy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Numbers game by cduffy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Since when was MS Office an alternative to ODF?

      Office is an application suite. ODF is a document format. They're apples and oranges. With appropriate plugins, Office will interoperate with ODF documents -- just as any number of other applications will.

      Claiming that OOXML is better than ODF because MS Office is better than OpenOffice is disingenuous; there's no reason MS Office and ODF can't be used together, and quite a bit of money and development time is being poured into making that an effective solution (thanks in no small part to .ma.us).

  2. Re:I can't wait by ror · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Microsoft lose their hold on the document format then there would be little to tie people to office, and through that, windows. Every time I try and 'sell' openoffice to my family they scoff and say "but it's NOT office" despite the fact they're using office 97 that can barely handle office 2000 documents.

    There is a perception that people NEED office to function, getting ODF widely accepted would be a huge blow to Microsoft.

  3. Nobody in China will use either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I live in China. All I see is Office 2000 or 2003 with windows 2000 or Windows XP, and it's all free for them so nobody is going to change. Except perhaps they'll change to Windows Vista and Office 2007 in 2010 when enough schools buy new computers with it installed already.. and no, don't think for a minute they are legal copies.