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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.'
While voting for OOXML does not automatically make one dishonest, I think it is fair to say that voting against is a sign of honesty.
Please don't click it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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!
While Mr Gates may be starting to feel that he's loosing it,this really means good news for India. In a country where more than 70% of the people use pirated software,ignorant of any software licenses. As an Indian,i've seen that when people buy a computer,they just pay for the hardware. It probably is too obvious for them that software (pirated windows) should come free with it! Here only Open Source can ensure that people get it right. Rejecting OOXML is of course a big step for starters. ODF FTW :)
It's a bite that MS can always come late to the table with something broken and then get equal billing in the press. MOOX came as an attempt to compete with ODF, after some 600 companies reviewed ODF as an open standard. How is it then, that no matter how positive the articles is to open standards, the situation always gets spun as MS vs MS competitors? Really, how else can it be? One the one side you have the cult of MS. On the other side, all the major companies, governments and universities, except for the cult of MS. So by definition these are going to be 'MS competitors'. How about some reality injections here.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
India, IBM, and every one at the fight against OOXML expect to break down the dominance of Microsoft at the desktop.
IBM, Google, and many others have a vision on a ubiquity desktop, even Microsoft have this. But due the dominance of the desktop. This isn't able because the locking of the server and desktop for the collaboration and the portability to slimmed down applications. This doesn't work for IBM, Google and many others, so they're aligning to put ODF as an standard, because is a warrant for a better opportunity to get a stake at the desktop, first the corporative desktop, then the desktop @ home, so since ur application will be "service provided" u don't need to install anything and further more with the wireless technology, called wimax, 3g and or whatever flavor u like, u will have the bandwidth to use ur document or data everywhere.
As long as we are tied down the desktop, using doc documents. That will not happen.
Another virtue of XML, is that u doesn't need to understand all the tags of a XML file, only what you really care, and just don't touch everything else, this kind of virtue, plus wireless, plus low cost mobile devices (not talking about treos, ipaq, and so on, talking about under 100 usd regular cellphone), and you have the ultimate production platform for ur task force.
The future is now, and Microsoft is holding us down, also the ISPs....
out there there is a big variety of interesting hardware, that can be used for situation where u don't need to parse all the xml, and doesn't need to handle bloated binary files...
That is the real fight, thinking about India as good because vote against OOXML is naive, this is a battle for a stake of that BIG, BIG, BIG cake called the desktops computer. And since, India has a vast amount of capacity to create applications, they are tied to develop "big" applications mostly due Microsoft position at the market. Make the market able to shift away from Microsoft, and a hole new world of revenue is opened... Look at the server market with Linux. Ask Redhat and Suse and Xandros and many Linux vendors...
That's is all about. Sure, one part is about freedom to access your information. But really thats a small part compared to the monetary interest behind the "war of formats"...
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080302-xml-spec-editor-ooxml-iso-process-is-unadulterated-bs.html
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.
> 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."