Slashdot Mirror
ODF Editor Says ODF Loses If OOXML Does
An anonymous reader writes "The editor of the Open Document Format standard has written a letter (PDF) that strongly supports recognizing Microsoft's OOXML file format as a standard, arguing that if it fails, ODF will suffer. 'As the editor of OpenDocument, I want to promote OpenDocument, extol its features, urge the widest use of it as possible, none of which is accomplished by the anti-OpenXML position in ISO,' Patrick Durusau wrote. 'The bottom line is that OpenDocument, among others, will lose if OpenXML loses... Passage of OpenXML in ISO is going to benefit OpenDocument as much as anyone else.'"
Why is this marked troll?
Should be like, +2 funny
1) This guy works for a company that sold its soul to Microsoft in exchange for a useless patent agreement 2) This guy got a large quantity of money from Microsoft in the recent past 3) This guy got a large quantity of crack from Microsoft in the recent past and consumed it 4) Going by the date in the letter (March 24) they released the letter 8 days early
His argument is too tenacious,
Get yourself a dictionary!
Finally someone with some sense. Instead of being part of the torch wielding crazy mob against MS, he at least has thought ahead.
If OOXML doesn't get ISO, Ms is prolly still going to go ahead and use it in its products - which make up 90% of the office suite using crowd anyway. Does any of the normal users care about the ISO definition. They will continue to use Office products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and share successfully with each other.
However, when some of us who use "other" products like OpenOffice etc. try to open these files, it wont be able to. and Ms won't be inclined nor interested in supporting or even divulging the details of its format anymore since it got rejected as an ISO std. So when you can't open an Office file, the people who send you the file are gonna say that _your_ office suite sucks - not theirs, since they will be able to open not just Office formats but ODF formats as well.
I think including Rob Weir's response is topical, but let's be honest here. He's pretty much the single most outspoken critic of OOXML. That he and Durusau are examining the same situation and drawing very different conclusions isn't much of a surprise.
Personally, I think Weir's kidding himself if he thinks Microsoft was on the wrong side of open standards, if wrong is defined as "bad for Microsoft." Office being Office, millions of people will still be using OOXML because the factors that most businesses evaluate in choosing a word processor / spreadsheet / etc. are far from the factors that seem to be important to Weir. It already will be the de facto standard regardless of how bad it is or isn't or what ISO or anyone else has to say, so it might as well be documented and open for others to implement without legal harassment from Microsoft.
Two of your first three reasons apply equally to ODF. Do you oppose that too?
First, ODF is very incomplete. To actually implement it, and have a chance of your documents interoperating with others, you have to base your implementation on reverse engineering OpenOffice. You cannot base it just on the spec and have any hope of interoperability.
Second, there are no binary blobs in OOXML that aren't also in ODF. One wonders if you ever actually have downloaded and looked at the ODF spec?
Anti-OOXML arguments would be a lot more persuasive if they didn't rely on declaring things as bad that work exactly the same way in ODF!