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MS Awarded "Best Campaigner Against OOXML"

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pull-gun-aim-at-foot-pull-trigger dept.

HansF writes "Microsoft itself is the surprise winner of the FFII's Kayak Prize 2007, offered by the FFII in its call for rejection of Microsoft's OOXML standards proposal. The software monopolist is honored as 'Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization.' FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, 'We could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure. All together, countries made over ten thousands technical comments, a new world record for an ISO vote. Microsoft made a heroic — and costly — effort to discredit their own proposal, and we're sincerely grateful to them.'" If Microsoft doesn't send a representative to claim their 2500-Euro prize at the FFII General Assembly in November, FFII will give the money to Peruvian earthquake relief.

5 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Some have already sipped the Kool-Aid... by tech10171968 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've already started seeing .docx format attachments in my email at the office. Never mind the fact that my office is nearly 100% Linux/FOSS (except for the sole Windows machine running proprietary apps requiring outdated API's); I'd figured that since the vast majority of companies I've seen haven't (yet) started to migrate to Office 2007 then maybe sending .docx fils to everyone might not be such a smart move. For now we simply kick these emails back along with a friendly reminder that we don't do .docx or OOXML here, and will never accept anyhting in that format. Microsoft says the 'O' in 'OOXML' stands for "open". My ass...

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    1. Re:Some have already sipped the Kool-Aid... by Shados · · Score: 4, Informative

      thats an Office 2003 doc XML (not quite the same thing). You'd have had to unzip the docx first if it was actually one, and then would have a crap ton of files and stuff... which I beleive is similar-ish to the "competition".

    2. Re:Some have already sipped the Kool-Aid... by TemporalBeing · · Score: 4, Informative

      thats an Office 2003 doc XML (not quite the same thing). You'd have had to unzip the docx first if it was actually one, and then would have a crap ton of files and stuff... which I beleive is similar-ish to the "competition".
      Not necessarily. There is a plug-in for Office 2003 - provided by Microsoft to certain organizations[1] - that allows Office 2003 to produce OOXML natively through the normal methods - i.e. more natively supported than PDF and ODF.

      Also, I believe Office 2003 uses a normal ".xml" extension[2] for its version of OOXML, while OOXML from Office 2007 uses the normal Office extensions with an appended "x" or "m" (the "m" is if you have macros embedded) - e.g. ".docx" and ".docm".

      [1] Last I knew it was not available publically, however, a Google search turned it up (3rd result).
      [2] Search for "OFFICE" and you'll find a number of "OFFICE11" paths.
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    3. Re:Some have already sipped the Kool-Aid... by Shados · · Score: 4, Informative

      That plugin is for Office 2003 and XP to use OOXML natively, correct. It works quite well, it IS available publicly, and its quite commonly deployed (well, relative to the amount of environments using 2007, not in absolute terms).

      And the Office 2003 using XML is for a totally different format, which was also available in a previous version of office (though with less features), which is literally the Office 2003 format but in XML instead of binary, and is a totally different deal than the docx format from 2007, and existed years before Office 2007 came out. It is, for example, the format that is often used to generate Office documents through XSLT. It was used a "long" time ago, and I personally still use that format since it is simpler to generate document with for internal, short term purposes compared to docx, since it doesn't require the additional operation of putting the files together and zipping (which isn't a big deal, but its nice to be able to simply invoke an XSLT processor with no additional steps).

      The plugin above will use the virtually the same docx format, used the same way, as Office 2007.

  2. Re:FFII? by qcomp · · Score: 4, Informative

    Is this the Japanese numbering of Final Fantasy II, or the USA releases?
    actually, the abbreviation stands for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a not-for-profit organization that has campaigned (in Europe), among other things, against software patents, excessive "intellectual" "property" rights and for open standards.