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GNOME Foundation Helping OOXML?
christian.einfeldt writes "According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard' is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in 'resolving' the thousands of criticisms leveled against Microsoft's proposed standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver urges the GNOME Foundation to halt its apparent support for OOXML as a standard and to put its efforts behind enhancing adoption of the genuinely open standard, ODF, which was approved by the world standards bodies as ISO/IEC standard 26300 on 2 May 2006."
Miguel's stated that, as a standard, OOXML is alright, but also shuddered at dealing with the way Microsoft abused binary segments in the format. The reason Novell et the GNOME foundation are so involved is for simple compatibility reasons. What better way to lure Windows users away than to provide support for the formats their existing documents are probably already in?
As you can see for your self, GNOME is participating directly in the Standards process: http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.htm
G'day,
:-)
The background is really simple: While Jody Goldberg (Gnumeric maintainer extraordinaire) was at Novell, he had been doing rocking work on the ECMA committee to make sure OOXML didn't just slip through, under-specified and uninvestigated. Jody put them through the wringer!
So, when Jody left Novell, the GNOME Foundation supported his participation on the ECMA working group, so he could continue to "keep the bastards honest".
The GNOME Foundation does not support ISO standardisation of OOXML. But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else. Should we let Microsoft shove OOXML through ECMA without challenge? Hell no. That's why we have one of our best hackers in there, holding their feet to the fire.
Thanks,
- Jeff Waugh, GNOME Foundation Board
(Given how often it comes up, I suppose it's also important to note that Miguel does not speak for the GNOME Foundation or the GNOME project in general.)
And for the last two decades, people were pushing AT&T stuff, some of it patented.
AT&T donated the key patent for UNIX (the setuid patent) into the public domain. The UNIX APIs were designed to be independent of the underlying hardware and implementation, and they never made any attempt to enforce any potential copyrights on the UNIX programmer's manuals. The only product I know of that felt it necessary to avoid using the precise APIs described in the manual, ever, was Idris... presumably because it was by a former Bell Labs employee. There are, so far as I can tell, only two significant operating systems started after the publication of the 1976 Bell System Technical Journal that were not based primarily on the UNIX "software tools" environment: Mac OS, and Windows... and both of those were instead based on the Xerox environment. I'm not counting MS-DOS, because it was an 8086 port of CP/M by Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Systems, and starting with MS-DOS 2.x it was increasingly adopting UNIX APIs.
By 1987 (two decades ago) the UNIX environment had been re-implemented dozens of times, both standalone and hosted on top of other operating systems. By 1997 (one decade ago) there was no operating system in the world that wasn't either UNIX-based, transitioning to UNIX, or shipping with a functional hosted UNIX environment... other than Windows.
And by that time AT&T had sold all their rights in UNIX to Novell, who had publicly disclaimed any intellectual property in the APIs.
If there was any remaining danger in these APIs, the results of the Caldera (the new SCO) suit have completely defanged it.
So far, there is no indication that there is any more risk to Mono from Microsoft than there was to Linux from AT&T.
On the one hand we have a set of APIs that were already in the public domain both because of explicit donation and due to being published without copyright notice before the US joined the Berne convention, and have since been been proven safe to use, and on the other hand we have a set of APIs that are actively controlled by a company that has a history of using submarine patents, and who is currently attempting to monetize them... with some success.
If you can't see there is a difference there you're deliberately not looking at it.
1) OOX was easier to deal for several reasons. Yes, some of it was because Gnumeric's data structures were designed around the Excel UI and hence matched nicely with the MS file formats. However, that was only part of the issue. SpreadsheetML was clearly written by the Excel team, whereas the ODF spreadsheet functionality frequently feels like it was written by XML document people. ODF is missing critical spreadsheet features like shared expressions and strings. It took me about 12 hours of hacking to implement chart import for OOX to a reasonable level. I've just wasted 48 hours on ODF chart import trying to reverse engineer how to allocate data to charts. That kind of ratio is not the way to make people love ODF.
2) 'very rich support'. This depends on how you parse things. Our OOX importer was more advanced that the ODF importer after about 1 week of effort. At the time Brian made his comment the _exporter_ was not terribly advanced. That is being rectified for the upcoming gnumeric 1.8.x release. Calling gnumeric's round trip capabilities for OOX 'very rich' was an exaggeration, but it's a stretch to call it a complete lie. On the flip side, ODF proponents seem happy to tout our suboptimal ODF implementation. Both filters are improving, but it's more than a bit hypocritical to try and complain about OOX and laud ODF for filters of comparable quality.
Consider Microsoft's past. Then, consider Microsoft's most recent behaviour, which would be considered criminal elections fraud in any nominally democratic country, had it been in a political election instead of the ISO process.
At this point, you should be able to see why people would consider it unethical to support Microsoft in any way.
http://outcampaign.org/
That's ridiculous, Python and Java don't make C# obsolete. That's like saying that there's a complete lack of need for Python because Perl and Ruby already exist. The only reason why people dislike C# is because it's created by MS.