Slashdot Mirror
India Votes Against OOXML
harsha_c sends in a local Indian perspective on the vote against Microsoft's OOXML ahead of the March 29 deadline. Of 19 companies participating, only 5 voted in favor of OOXML. "It was the ultimate battle for control over global IT standard for documents — between Microsoft-promoted OOXML and Sun and IBM-backed Open Document Format. It was played out between Indian IT giants, namely Infosys, Wipro, TCS supported by Nasscom on one side and the global IT biggies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat backed by te IITs, IIMs and IISc on the other, on their respective positions on Microsoft's OOXML standard. Microsoft understandably expressed its disspointment. 'While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS committee, we are encouraged by the support from NASSCOM.'
Please don't click it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
OOXML can't kill ODF, because ODF is open, and OOXML isnt. People who want to guarantee access to their documents in perpetuity (eg legitimate governments) cannot use OOXML because it cannot meet their needs.
Microsoft is working hard on making OOXML as open as it needs to be in order to meet the requirements of the relevant decision-makers. Of course, whether that is open enough to allow genuine free software implementations is not a question that Microsoft really cares about, so we have to educate the decision-makers about what are the important criteria.
But if you think that ODF can survive in competition against OOXML if both are ISO standards, you're kidding yourself.
It doesn't matter whether OOXML is properly documented --- as Stephane Rodriguez explains, even if it were properly documented, it doesn't accomplish what a standard should, which is to enable interoperability (with Office 2007).
Your argument does not support your subject line. And in fact, the argument is incorrect. "Most" of the arguments being made against OOXML are based on these two facts: (1) There are hundreds of technical problems with OOXML (literally hundreds... read the articles) that were found by those who studied it, and which Microsoft has refused to address, and (2) the fact that it does not conform to the often-stated needs of a truly "open" standard.
This is not something I made up. All you have to do is read the articles linked to from here, and perhaps Ars Technica. Other places too, but that should be enough to convince anyone.
Recently I accidentally went to a short promotional Microsoft presentation (non-US) about OOXML for work. From the description about integrating with Office from a programmers' perspective, I'd thought it was going to be about writing Office addins, but it turned out to be a promotional-fest for OOXML in front of about 30 or so local software architechts for various companies and government organisations.
They started with a couple of locals without explaining what was coming -- one guy had built a Silverlight application that could parse basic OOXML Word documents and display them according to the OOXML specification. The other guy had written a web app that generated its own Office 2007 documents (Word and Excel) without having to rely on any third party or binary manipulation.
Then the local Microsoft CIO jumped up, having recently returned from Geneva, and started complaining about how there were really a small segment of people who had gripes with Microsoft and were refusing to work with Microsoft and trying to stop the standard going through for its own sake. They made a big thing about how the two people who'd just presented hadn't needed to read a complete 6000 page specification to do what they'd done, and he used the phrase "defacto standard" in virtually every sentence. They were preaching to the converted on this occasion, considering the room was full of people who were already big Microsoft customers, and really only wanted reassurance rather than to be convinced. I was tempted to ask if Microsoft ever had any plans to support the OASIS standard, but I didn't in the end.
I came away from that presentation with the impression that Microsoft as a company, and especially at the executive level, doesn't actually have a clear understanding of what an Open Standard is. The entire focus of Microsoft is that their Office suite is by far the most popular (for whatever reason), and therefore Microsoft should be the one to decide the standard. If someone else did that while Microsoft was looking the other way, then it must have been an accidental quirk that now needs to be corrected.
Perhaps there's some idea somewhere up in the ranks of leveraging their broken format in the future to reinforce their market dominance should there ever be a problem, but I think for most of them, they're just a bit pissed off or shocked that someone else has already defined a standard and is now trying to tell Microsoft that it can't do what it wants to do. After all, it's not "supposed" to work that way in their minds... Surely the "defacto standard" that's used everywhere should be the one that matters, right?
In their own minds, most of the Microsoft managers are quite certain that Microsoft would never abuse its position, or their already fundamentally of the belief that it's only fair that money should always change hands for these kinds of things, and that if Open Source apps can't find sources of funding then it's their own problem. (Money makes Microsoft go round, after all. It shouldn't be surprising for Microsoft employees to have those kinds of ethics.)
The frustrating addendum to this is that many businesses are in exactly the same mindset as Microsoft because money makes their business go around, too. If Microsoft starts using badly documented parts of their spec and charging for others to implement it, those people will quite happily either keep using Microsoft products, or pay for a product that costs extra as part of the necessity of paying the Microsoft tax. These people haven't even consciously dealt with concepts like standards definitions before, they don't appreciate how critically important it is to get it right, and they don't want to now. That's where Microsoft is getting its support from.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080302-xml-spec-editor-ooxml-iso-process-is-unadulterated-bs.html
You did exactly the right thing. The way it works with posting and modding, is we can't 'mod' the same articles we post to, and, conversely, we can't post to the same articles we have already modded, or the mods will disappear. So, posting something is an easy way to 'fix' a goof-up.
Can you give your definition of "open"?
OOXML is not open because only Microsoft products can open it by design.Where as my
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
> ODF used the fast-track process too. No. "OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on November 16, 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules."