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OpenDocument Foundation To Drop ODF
poet sends us to Computerworld for a story on the intention of the OpenDocument Foundation to drop support for Open Document Format, OASIS and ISO standards not withstanding, in favor of the Compound Documents Format being promoted by the W3C. The foundation's director of business affairs, Sam Hiser, dropped this bomb in a blog posting a couple of weeks ago. Hiser believes CDF has a better shot at compatibility with Microsoft's OOXML, and says that the foundation has been disappointed with the direction of ODF over the last year.
Nothing has a chance at compatibility with OOXML except the bloated crap churned out by Word and its ilk.
Driving to achieve closeness or compatibility with Microsoft formats, except as something kept at arms length, is essentially suicide.
That will have agencies and large corporations running away from ODF - and any successors - right into the welcoming arms of Microsoft.
I almost hoped that it was April, 1st - but when I checked, it was still October. Damn.
No, Sun and IBM, Wordperfect and others are still working with it. It is strange to me that the so called Open Document Foundation can do this as was pointed out in the article link, that it is a non-profit established to help with Open Document Format, that they would steer their organization to an opposite position to its namesake. I think all the officers should be kicked out and a realignment with their charter should be taken.
If OpenOffice.org, Sun (StarOffice), IBM (Lotus Symphony) and KDE (KOffice) all continue to support ODF, what difference does it make what the Foundation does or says?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
First, it was disability support. It was shot down.
Second, it was not supported by Microsoft Office. It was shot down too, with developed plugins already available for organisations.
Third, it was "let's have two formats and let's live together peacefully". Yeah, right. Formats don't get accepted by ISO just because there are "very important to keeping in touch with old good ole Microsoft Office".
And finally, we get "interoperability with Microsoft formats" argument. What a croak.
Get this people - truely open document format will NEVER have anything to do with Microsoft Office wet dream to keep domination. NEVER.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Actually, it's just three guys:
http://opendocumentfoundation.us/we.htm
Not much of a foundation.
The *real* ODF group is:
http://www.odfalliance.org/memberlist.php
I think that the only honest thing the "The OpenDocument Foundation" can do is rename
itself "The Compound Documents Format Foundation", since to do otherwise would be as
deceitful as Microsoft choosing to name OOXML "Office Open XML". But honestly, I doubt
they will. Their comparison chart between CDF and ODF betrays a few lies:
http://opendocument.foundation.googlepages.com/GOSCON_Chart.pdf
In particular:
* CDF is not OOXML compatible, nor has any implementation shown this to be possible. ODF at least has a not-100% compatible conversion.
* ODF has a lot more big vendor support than CDF
* Neither are universal formats, but ODF is supported by more vendors and software projects at the moment.
Personally, I think that the reasons for "The OpenDocument Foundation" changing it's
support from ODF to CDF is self-interest. When ODF was first introduced, there was
money to be made for a small company to write MS Office/Corel Office/Mac Office plugins
and other conversion services. But then Sun and others started offering free converters
and conversion services. There's just too much competition too quickly
CDF, OTOH is not as well supported universally, so there's a lot more room for
a small company. And if the CDF growth rate is slow, the "The OpenDocument Foundation"
has the chance to become *the CDF conversion experts* and make a lot of money.
Also, since CDF (if you believe their claims) is more web oriented, it would be good
for transactional converters of many types that need to be used for each message.
With ODF, you convert your document once and don't have to worry about going back
(by purpose....ODF is best for documents that have to be read, as is 100 years
from now). The difference in profit between one-time business and licensed per
transaction business could huge, even if CDF has a smaller market.
Sadly, Microsoft often doesn't have to pay shills like this. They can sell their services in "promoting compatibility" to third parties who don't know any better.
Witness the career of Meng Weng Wong, who naively cooperated with Microsoft in accepting SenderID into his SPF standard and watched Microsoft's proprietary, patented XML lunacy effectively destroy further SPF deployment, while allowing Microsoft and SenderID to take credit for all the good SPF had already done.
It's like dealing with Wal-mart: you may be forced into doing so in the short term by the need for expansion, but in the long term, it's usually death for you company or your project.
Excuse me, but there is no such thing as ".doc" format. There at least half a dozen, if not more, mutually distinct formats labeled ".doc". Each of them has features and capabilities not available in all the others, and transformations among them are non-reversible: translating a document from an old Word 95 format to Word 2003, to Word for Macintosh version whatever, will not reproduce your original document. It's even worse for spreadsheets, which are also part of the format.
The denominators for it are not "common", they're nearly fractal in their complexity.
Well, of course, since Esperanto is just as easily learned by people as ODF can be taught to computers...
Universally spreading Esperanto requires an effort from a lot of governments around the world to promote it and teach it; universally implementing ODF requires some programmers, some coffee, and a couple of months, to code a filter that can be then reused in future versions or other applications.
Don't confuse intent with possibility of realization.
My 0.02 cents
First, the idea of more compatibility with OOXML is not even remotely the issue. These are separate specifications. They are by nature incompatible. One format is not compatible with another. Second, you don't pull the rug out from underneath an existing format that has been approved by the organizations that matter, and Microsoft is not one of those that matter. As far as performance goes, what is he talking about? Milliseconds, adoption?
This whole thing sounds like complete malarkey to me. Something is awry. If you can't buy the standard organizations I guess they can buy the ODF key players.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
While that bit of logic is similar, Esperanto never had any country that actually used it. ODF does, in the OpenOffice and StarOffice suites of software. Thus, it never had a base of native users to support or to eveolve it.
Next strawman?
As has been mentioned several times in the comment, the "Open Document Foundation" has no real connection to the Open Document Format, and the writeup reads like a MS-shill press release. So please fix it with an addendum so that casual readers of Slashdot don't take it at face value.
Well, that's pure bullshit.
The primary value of ODF is that it reduces archival, retrieval, and distribution costs of our largest institutions. You know, the really big and long-lived ones, like nations, states, businesses that have celebrated their centennial year, and so on. We will start to see the benefits in about 10 years, in improved information services, and therefore lower taxes and cost of goods than would otherwise be the case.
The direct costs to implement this are lower than any alternative. There are only two other strategies, and one variant of the ODF strategy, so let's do an exhaustive listing:
The indirect costs of implementation are dependent on how effective Microsoft can be with its campaign of FUD, bribery, and astroturfing. They do not seem to be as good at this as they used to be— their notoriety now precedes them— but they are still a force to be reckoned with.
Hey, you damn astroturfers, get your crap out of our meadow!
I can't understand why it's important to make a document format that is compatible with OOXML. Come to think of it, I can't understand what they mean by a document format being compatible with OOXML. Did MS push a few bucketloads of money in the direction of the OD Foundation to help them change their mind?
-- Cheers!