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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.'
I don't think it means a thing for honesty, it might mean there is less corporate corruption going on but really how is it "honest"? OOXML really makes no difference to the average IT company except for benefits of not having to go through an overpriced, closed vendor (MS) to get the "standards".
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
In fact facilitating technical progress requires that the "no contradicting standards" rule cannot be strictly enforced.
In this situation however there is a serious problem. Because of Microsoft's dominant market position, if OOXML gets ISO/IEC approval, that will probably kill ODF. The problem with this is that this kills investments in ODF. If Microsoft is allowed to get away with this, the net result will be a chilling effect on all investments in non-Microsoft standards.
OOXML sucks technically, but that's not even the real problem. The real problem is Microsoft's waffling on making the standard open. If they had unequivocally placed the standard and all necessary patents in the public domain and committed to keeping it stable, more people might vote for it.
I'm Anti-Microsoft, Pro-Linux, Pro-F/OSS, Pro-Open Standards, all that.
But just because someone is against Microsoft on this issue doesn't mean they are 'honest' or honorable with their intent or motivation.
India is a growing IT powerhouse. When Microsoft provides the basis for participation in IT products and services, it goes without saying that they have influence in your success or failure. It may well be that India's motivation is simply to help Microsoft become irrelevant so that their potential is no longer dependent on Microsoft's will. After all, Microsoft is an American company and as such is subject to influence of the U.S. government. You can see that there's plenty of reason to mistrust Microsoft.
While I applaud the moves in recent times to give us standards within the field of office documents that we can all work with, it doesn't solve the fundamental problems. Chasing after Microsoft, trying to get ISO committees to reject OOXML and trying to get governments to mandate proper standards (a worthy goal, as IT has so very few) is, unfortunately, a saga destined to never end. The reason for this is that Microsoft has the dominant office suite in the world today held in place by the platform they control (Windows), they can mandate any formats they like and they can keep going back to the ISO to get a puppet standard through.
If IBM and others are as serious as people like Rob Weir seem to be then I strongly suggest they stop being chicken shits after the way in which they capitulated OS/2 in the face of Windows, start funding a really viable alternative to Windows and start really getting just what is required. This would be a desktop operating system that would circumvent the OEM channels Microsoft controls by being given away freely so that everybody, including OEMs, can install it free of Microsoft's control, and it will be a desktop good enough in terms of developers' tools and installation so software can get to users. With enough effort then you'd definitely carve out a market large enough to make it viable, and you'd then have an office suite with enough of an installed base. Governments and other organisations would then pick it up as a result.
Winging about OOXML isn't going to get anybody anywhere, sadly. It's only maintaining the status quo.
Either they are dishonest because they don't understand what they're doing while claiming to understand, or they're dishonest because they're knowingly voting against their country's best interest.
Nota bene, the representatives of Microsoft Corporation and partner companies are not necessarily dishonest in their lobbying for "APPROVE" votes, since what they ask for is genuinely in their interest. But the national bodies are supposed to represent the correspondiong national interest!
Completely agreed. Voting for what is genuinely in the public interest doesn't imply honesty. In fact, most of the arguments which are being made against MS-OOXML are based on misinformed, false premises or are otherwise dishonest. (The same can be said about most of the arguments in favor of MS-OOXML).
From the perspective of MS competitors, OOXML is an attempt to kill the document format that they have been investing in (ODF).
autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules.
First you say "I don't think it means a thing for honesty", then you say "it might mean there is less corporate corruption going on". That is a contradiction, dude. If you said it in fewer words, it would be called an "oxymoron".
Then, you say "OOXML really makes no difference", and continue on to say "except for... not having... an overpriced, closed vendor...".
Ditto. You start each sentence one way, then contradict yourself later in the same sentence. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways.
India voting against OOXML is not news, they already voted against it in September.
The only news here is (possibly) the insight the article gives as to why and how India has been and will be voting against OOXML, therefore the "India Votes Against OOXML" title is really stupid.
For OOXML to be a standard it should not go through the fast track method. It should have been the slow 2 - 5 year way for all of the ahem "backwards compatible/forwards compatible" to be ironed out. Then and only then could it look something like a standard and not controlled by one company. For the time being now you should probably stick with ODF.
But isn't that ironical that the INDIAN companies (backed by NASSCOM) were supporting Microsoft?? Sad reality is that India did a good thing, not because of Indian firms.
Infosys, Wipro and TCS are in Microsoft pockets for long time. Of course, they don't want to lose their big projects with Microsoft. But that does not justify their support for OOXML.
Even if they're forced now to make OOXML a genuinely open and technically acceptable standard (that isn't the case yet but might happen eventually), it's a huge win for Microsoft if the free world has to play catch-up-if-you-can to OOXML as opposed to Microsoft having to struggle to create a reasonably bug-free implementation of ODF. Remember: Microsoft is good at lobbying and at strategic marketing, but not necessarily so good at software development.
As soon as the revised spec is published by Ecma, the information will be in the public domain. It's crap all right, but it's not "proprietary crap" any longer. And it's certainly no longer an example of missing information in the OOXML spec.
I agree that it is debatable at least whether this kind of information really belongs into a standard. But what would you suggest that should be done with this information?
Just like they were "willing to support Java", and "willing to support OS/2", and the like?
They're going about it completely the wrong way, why not just make the existing markup describing spacing and line breaking flexible enough to cater to the bugs in these old apps, and then have the conversion process handle it accordingly. No need to enshrine these old bugs in a new format at all.
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From the perspective of document format users, OOXML is better than what MS customers had before.
How do you figure that? Anyone implementing OOXML readers or writers still has to reverse-engineer Microsoft's applications. It doesn't make a lot of difference whether the undocumented proprietary code looks like "xmlns..." instead of "{\rtf..." or binary gibberish.
Honestly, most companies will go with Office anyway because there's still Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. Most of those are at least as entrenched as Word.
ODF vs OOXML is important in a philosophical kinda way, but I don't expect much practical change.
Maybe not
Many gouvernments around the world are making the use of open standards mandatory these days. The importance of the ODF vs OOXML battle goes way beyond philosophical.
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But what would you suggest that should be done with this information?
.doc format, rather into this "standard". Microsoft could even keep it secret if they wanted...
They should convert that information into the equivalent representation in their new format. Replacement of specific spaces with hard breaks or forced non-breaks or whatever will cause the resulting document to print exactly the same and would not require this stuff.
This puts all the ugly part of implementing this information into the program that is reading the
What do you foresee some of the practical implications being? Companies continue to use Office exclusively, but now their internal documents are saved in ODF?
Standardization is great, but this is such a small step I don't see it having an impact. Nobody is going to use two office suites. Nobody is going to buy Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access separately and then use OpenOffice for word processing. Until there are standardized formats covering the rest of Office's components, any actual change is going to be minimal.
Maybe not
I disagree. For the time being, MS has almost nothing to lose from this. Companies and governments are still going to buy Office for Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook. Worst case scenario, they'll have to shell out an extra $50 for a third party ODF import/export plugin. More likely, MS will make their own exporter and include it. Hell, they could sell it as an add-on and make even more money off of Office. Just because Word will have to support ODF doesn't mean it has to be the default format. It only has to be supported well enough that people don't complain about it.
Like any geek, I like the idea of Microsoft being forced into submission, but document format standardization isn't going to be what does it. Maybe when the rest of the office formats are standardized.
Maybe not