Slashdot Mirror
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 de fucking Icaza has been kissing Microsoft's ass for years now. Can we please get rid of him already?!
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
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?
"Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard'"
There is really only a few possibilities:
1) The community is wrong and OOXML is really an open/good standard (heh)
2) One of the heads of GNOME is so inept as not to be able to see that OOXML is far from being an open standard
3) Icaza was bought off
Or is it something else:
4) ???
This is slashdot. Everybody here knows that OOXML is just another msft attempt to control the standard. OOXML is not open, and everybody here knows it.
I happen to think that mono and evolution suck. I'll bet a lot of other people think so also.
Why doesn't Miguel just go work for msft? If Miguel is so happy sucking up to msft, and working with msft to ruin F/OSS; then I think that F/OSS community would be just as happy to see Miguel take his suckie dev tools elsewhere.
Does anybody even use mono?
The article author is either stupid beyond belief or deliberately trying to cause spite and malice. Neither GNOME the project, nor The GNOME Foundation is in any way or form backing OOXML! Miguel de Icaza is, but most other foundation members are staunchly against it. Not that it matters, there is a big fucking difference between individuals opinions and the stance of an organization. If the author has some beef with de Icaza, then he should say so, but don't try to paint the GNOME Foundation with the same brush. Fucking moron troll.
Football Odds
But I wouldn't be surprised. Mr. Miguel de Icaza has been very clear about his love for Microsoft and "their" technologies. I never actually hear him choosing community technologies to boast, but maybe that is just due to bias reporting. Either way, it will be interesting to see his reaction if think ever really go bad. I'd also be interested in hearing his opinion on the recent law suit against RedHat.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
What do YOU do?
I choose "Don't support them."
And they have help a LOT the OS community.
With Gnome and some other projects, maybe. OTOH, supporting a bloated, low quality, error-prone, semi-open standard that contains references to proprietary (read as 'closed') MS information is hardly helping the OS community.
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?
That sounds nice but it falls down when M$ sends in a clown car full of patent lawyers. That's one of the big reasons OOXML needs to be shot down by ISO. The others are a lack of completeness and 998 other technical problems. OOXML is not doing well in the marketplace and probably never will. If ever there was a case of wasted effort, OOXML is it. Resources are better spent making better ODF applications.
As for a better way to lure Windows users, have you seen Vista?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I've been developing in C# for sometime now. I've also done extensive development in Java, PHP, and Perl. I can tell you that the .Net framework and Visual Studio is by FAR the most productive environment for developing desktop applications, and (in some instances) web apps.
.Net framework, and the .Net development environment itself, to Linux?
And you're complaining that someone is working to bring all the applications developed on the
WTF is your problem? Are you really that stupid to think that interoperability with MS tools/frameworks is a BAD thing? How many people do you think would use Linux at ALL if Samba didn't allow communication to Windows boxes? Or what if there was no way to read/write an NTFS partition? Interoperability is key, and the task Miguel has undertaken is a good one. Quit complaining that someone's working to make Linux a more competitive OS.
" ... This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease ... Please, just tell people to use KDE." -- Linus Torvalds
There may be more problems, but the one I like the most is "because it cedes control over how people develop software (C# and the .NET API) for a free platform (Mono) to Microsoft". With such control in hand, Microsoft can make the development as awkward or costly as they want. And in the unlikely hypothesis developers succeed, Microsoft may call in all their patents and make half of Gnome illegal in the US.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Miguel has stated why he likes OOXML: it's easy to take an existing Microsoft Word reader/writer and turn it into an OOXML reader/writer, because the file structures are so similar. That makes transitioning existing Microsoft-compatible software to OOXML much easier than transitioning to ODF.
That's a reasonable position. I still think it's wrong.
The purpose of an XML document format is to enable other people to do interesting things with the format, not to make life easy for the few people porting existing Microsoft Word compatible software. Furthermore, open source projects need to support ODF anyway because ODF is here and it's here to stay.
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.)
-
Miguel interviewed for a job at MS
-
However, they could finance him to subvert linux
-
This is all documented information
-
He's the kind of guy they like -- not a US citizen and willing to work cheap
The assertions are plausible, but without just one reference, one piece of evidence, it doesn't really advance the conversation any more than "LOL M$ suxors!!!111!"I've heard that, but without, oh I dunno... a reference, it isn't that informative.
Just one piece of evidence? Possibly an insightful statement... but conspiracy theories without evidence are little more than that.
WHERE???
That sounds like unfounded xenophobia to me. You have to have a reference for a statement like that. How much did he want? Was it less than an American doing his job would earn?
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
You don't have to clone Windows to produce a viable alternative platform... and in fact if you do end up cloning Windows you'll have eliminated everything that makes the result "alternative".
.NET and your formats and user interface and APIs are driven by compatibility with Windows? If I want to run an OS that's compatible with Windows, I've already got that option.
Why should I care about a Linux-based system where your applications are written in
What makes Linux an alternative is that it's an Open Systems environment that happens to be Open Source as well. That applications written for it aren't locked in to Linux, they'll run on any Open Systems platform. If the interfaces and protocols it uses are Microsoft's, then why should anyone care whether it's got a Linux or an NT kernel under the hood?
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.
FFS, give it a rest guys: "Gutsy Gibbon is the code name for Ubuntu 7.10, the current Ubuntu release. It was released on 18 October 2007." What bearing a 10 day old distro release has on the role of NTFS write capability on the past decade's plus adoption of Linux is beyond me, but I'll leave you all to sort that out while I go shopping.
Morons. Should have kept the cure... why would you toss out the only good to come of it?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I dislike Gnome more by the day. While I know and fully agree with the idea that you can't make an unpaid programmer work on something he doesn't want to work on, I can't help but wonder where KDE would be if Gnome wasn't siphoning off potential developers. Since it's generally accepted that at least one of Gnome's core developers (Miguel) is a Microsoft patsy, and that FOSS market fragmentation is very convenient for Microsoft, the professional paranoid in me can't help but to see connections even if there aren't any.
Gnome devs: ditch Miguel. I'm not the only person that's starting to look at you guys suspiciously. Guilt by association, you understand.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Want to make a GPL-only fork of Qt? Go right ahead, Trolltech won't do a thing to stop you. In fact, up until the latest 4.3.2 release there was first a big project to port Qt3 to Windows, then a small one to add the compiler support to Qt4 that was missing compared to the commercial version and Trolltech never complained. But if you want Trolltech do to something for you, like adopt your source into their tree and maintain it, they're asking for something in return - that they can sell it for closed source software as well. I don't get your sense of entitlement, do you demand Linus accept your code as well? Or are they perfectly free to ask for something in return, or just to tell you to fuck off? Yes, they are.
Trolltech delivers a kick-ass platform for open-source development. They do it for free under the GPL, using their own paid developers to do it. How do they get paid? Well, they've found a way to make closed-source companies pay them for the use of their code. Who are you crying for? Those poor companies? That you can't ruin their business model by forcing them to take code they can't sell that way? That you have to run your own fork/patch set? Oh cry me a river... no, YOU go to hell. I bet Trolltech has done 1000x times as much for open source as you ever have.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While working for Novell I was able to join both OASIS for ODF and ECMA for OOX. After leaving the OO.o development team at Novell to return to other work I lost both memberships and had to scramble to rejoin. Maintaing Gnumeric is a hobby, and my current employer is not involved in the standardization process. Paying out the membership costs of either OASIS or ECMA was not going to happen at the personal or corporate level. Thankfully there was a non-profit tier available, and the GNOME Foundation generously sponsored me to re-join ECMA and TC45 to continue to participate in the the specification process. After spending the last 8 years playing proctologist to every spreadsheet format around, and complaining loudly at the poor quality of documentation for XLS it seems ridiculous to pass up the opportunity to engage MS, and ensure that the spec of their new format was more detailed than previous efforts.
My personal opinion (not speaking for the GNOME foundation or past or present employers) is that both specs should be standards
http://www.gnome.org/~jody/files/2007-ON-Linux-Beyond-ISO-Dome.pdf
The FLOSS community is going to need to implement importers for both formats to help our users, and I'll be happiest when both OOX and ODF are significantly clearer. 5700 pages of OOX is too _short_, Likewise the 700 + 300 (Open formula) in ODF is far too short. Lets double the size of OOX (although with better formatting the number of pages would likely be unchanged), and lets quadruple the level of detail in ODF to get it into a useful state. I only wish that ODF had undergone a fraction of the review that OOX has seen.
This is not about GNOME endorsing OOX, it's about GNOME doing the work necessary for users. There should be reps from Sun's OO.o team on the ECMA TC, and MS reps in the ODF meetings. The goal of this process is to produce useful documentation, and it takes an implementor to know where the really important details are. It hardly seems in the best interest of the FLOSS community to leave the standardization efforts up to corporate interests at Microsoft, Sun, or IBM.
Winamp as a free mp3 player for Windows has been around for ten years. Yeah, but for the past six, it's consistently failed to kick alpacan derrière.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Personally, I think that Less is More. We don't need more standards. We don't need more complex standards either. We don't need more pages. We need less.
The point of standards is that they should encourage the maximum number of implementations, and the best way to do it is by not being a burden on the implementation. If the implementation has to implement two different standards, it will be double the burden, and to what benefit?
I agree that the specification should be clear and in some cases that would mean adding more pages to it, but what you're saying seems to me you're encouraging adding complexity, you're advocating "adding more pages" when in fact you should advocate specifying some things better without compromising its simplicity and conciseness.
--
"Standards are so great that everyone should have its own."
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/