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UK Agency Files OOXML Complaint, EU Demurs
Christopher Blanc writes to let us know that although BECTA, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, has filed a complaint with EU regulators about Microsoft's business practices, the European Commission won't be doing anything particular about it. BECTA claimed that the OOXML format discourages competition. BECTA lodged a similar complaint with the UK Office of Fair Trading last October. A Commission press officer said, "We are already looking into the issues raised in that complaint already and we are not treating it as a formal complaint to us."
1st post
Wonder what its going to take in order to make it a "formal" complaint. Maybe attach a tazer to that complaint to get some attention from someone there. Or the Microsoft way, just pay the person to make it formal right?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Live, from ChinA - the Olympics of earthquake survival. All bets are on the chinese to win. Rumours are Tibet will sneak in a victory, however.
One doc standard, ODF, is cool; another, OOXML is somehow evil. A truly bizzare thought process.
Of course, the French ruled that free shipping offered by Amazon is somehow unfair to French booksellers (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080115-amazons-free-shipping-costing-1000-per-day-in-france.html), so maybe this is just another Eurocrat implementing a "bash America" strategy.
Flame away, my kevlar and asbestos suit is at the ready.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
For those that don't know Becta is a UK organisation that acts to advice the nations schools on their IT strategies.
It doesn't have any formal powers from what I understand in forcing schools to or not to use certain technologies however it does produce a list of Becta authorised providers which some schools will choose only to work with.
That said it has a lot of power in the UK educational arena and has always been quite pro-open source on many occasions, it's still recommending against Office 2007 in schools and as such has been quite successful in warding many schools off switching to Office 2007.
It's not the most powerful organisation there is and it doesn't really have any power over standards, but it's very influental in UK education and if Microsoft pisses them off enough I could very well imagine them making an ever stronger drive towards open source to the point they will likely put together resources that make it easy for schools to make the switch.
Some areas of local goverment, schools and in some cases, university policy is largely based around what Becta recommends in the UK.
Open Office may implement OOXML, in fact it will in version 3.0 out of sheer necessity. But. MS Will implement OOXML incorrectly deliberately. OOXML will have cryptic format parameters like IndentLikeWord95. Only MS will know what that means. So, OO.org will have an OOXML implementation that half works on other platforms, but screws up stuff and OO.org will be playing "Lets see what strange modifcation we have to fix now."
If ODF had become the accepted standard, MS would have had no choice but to start using ODF as well, or Governments would start leaving eventually. By Ram-rodding the Standards process they create a psuedo-standard they control and can break for other platforms. The whole election was a total sham. So there you have it, at least five more years of OO.org playing formate and feature catch up to MS.
"We are already looking into the issues raised in that complaint already and we are not treating it as a formal complaint to us."
Translation:
"We got more money from MS to procrastinate than we did from you to see this through."
Read my blog you know you want to
Somebody needs to kick that euroscum in the nuts.
So now making a document format a standard is anticompetitive? I'm confused. Wasn't it anticompetitive when the document format was closed?
Note that the EC commission said: "We are already looking into the issues raised in that complaint"
Reading between the lines, and doing some extrapolation based on previous event, I am guessing that what is going in the their minds is something like that:
"Microsoft think they are above our laws and disrespect our authority by ignoring our rulings. That complaint is redundant because we are already investigating the OOXML mess, since it's going to be great ammunition when we need to bash them on the head AGAIN for continuing to break the rules"
AASOCIATION OF
"Britain should always be on the side of law and justice, so long as we don't allow it to affect our foreign policy."
"It is well known that in the Foreign Office an order from the Prime Minister becomes a request from the Foreign Secretary, then a recommendation from the Minister of State, finally just a suggestion from the Ambassador. If it ever gets that far."
(Read the first as an EU guide to business policy, and the second as to why a demand from a British agency can never be a formal request.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Here I was thinking that a spreadsheet was just a tool for redundant and boring business accounting and that kids should be taught something more fundamental like ... math.
Either way you look at it, a free spreadsheet will teach the same lesson as the non free one, so the schools might as well save their money and teach kids the benefits of free software. When you know how to use one sheet, you know them all so there's no case for a school to waste money on Office. Businesses should learn this lesson too and most of them are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
BECTA may not have any formal power but they are an authority. They are independent and know what they are talking about. It's not about Microsoft pissing them off, it's about Microsoft offering a bad deal.
There is near unanimity in the technical world that OOXML is not a worthwhile or well written standard. It is not complete or consistent. There is not even a working reference and it is also patent encumbered. That it passed is a textbook example of how position and power can be abused. The ISO is taking steps to fix this.
Troll much?
The Ferrari V-12 engine discourages competition. Quick! Someone call the European Commission!
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
would probably allow for more choice in platform. Since the 80's, both MS and Apple have donated and plowed money and software into schools. Both are proprietary and that's why they did it. To create future market. MS had deeper pockets and over time outspent Apple. That was the 80's. By the 90's, business by then was solidly MS DOS/early Windows and had a flock of people entering the workforce who were MS familiar. This is continuing today. Schools have come to depend on donations of software and computers and if MS wants to pony up vista machines with OOXML Office 2007 packages, they'll take it.
I can't fault a school for taking such a deal (provided they are true donations). MS is just taking advantage of the fact that schools in a lot of jurisdictions are underfunded. For that to change, the electorate has to kick up a stink. In the meantime, if I'm running a school and need money for a new boiler etc, and MS gives me free software and computers, I'm taking it. That's an expense I don't have to worry about. At least the developing world got OLPCs.
Darn it, Twitter. One sock per thread. How hard is that to understand?
If you start with Gat0r3oy, they stick with it, at least for this story.
because microsoft (et al.) will not die simply because we flame them, they'll die for various reasons (in this case because OSS is going to whip microsoft's @$$)
$ make available
I hear a lot of people defending OOXML or oblivious as to why it is really a problem. Let me spell it in no uncertain terms.
Microsoft has illegally used its monopoly position to eliminate competition. This is a fact as found in a court of law.
One of the methods of illegally maintaining their monopoly has been the upgrade treadmill. With regards to MS Office document formats, it works like this: version 'N' of the office software can not read documents created by version 'O.' This forces users of version 'N' to upgrade to version 'O.' -- Profit for Microsoft.
3rd party ISVs are in a similar situation, once they finally figure out how to support the document version in version 'N,' they have to continue development to support vesion 'O.'
This means that 3rd party ISVs and users have a continuing problem maintaining their environment and interoperability without risking incompatibility or continually expending capital.
"Standards" are generally used to stop this exploitation and create a more level marketplace allowing innovation above the standardized foundation, eliminating the constant capital expenditure of keeping up.
The OOXML is a sham. It is nothing more than a continuation of Microsoft's monopoly defacto bullshit standard. OOXML is nothing more than a way to game the system and do nothing more than they already do. Upon release of a new MS office version, they submit their changes to ISO, and move on from there.
It gives users and ISVs no relief. It creates no usable standard. It does nothing to level the market place. It does nothing to help the consumer. It does nothing to help the industry.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Ok, I found something about that issue:
the year 1900 bug has been "resolved" by declaring it non-mandatory...
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/101224
(german)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
So MS bought a compatibility ruling to allow its 8000 page specification to become a "standard". With very suspicious actions on the part of Norway, Denmark and Germany...
So all MS has to do in the future is to make MS Office just slightly incompatible with the specification so that Open Office and others can't always correctly read MS documents and voila, the incompatibility remains. We are just where we were before with proprietary formats. MS will insist they are compatible and the it's the others who have not implemented their version correctly.
In fact, I recently read a report that office 2007 does not correctly follow the OOXML specification.
BECTA claimed that the OOXML format discourages competition And how would that discourage competition? ISO-standard doesn't mean you have to use it, it just means it is a standard.. You don't HAVE to use the format if you don't want to.. I really don't understand the fuzz, I personally hate XML based formats because they are SOOOOOO inefficient in space, but I do know that people bitch if you don't use one 'generic' format because their program can't read it.. Now MS has put out a format (which they can't easily change now since it's ISO, they can only extend it) so a lot of programs can use it for their own benefit.. Look at the opensource alternative, ODF, it was to become a standard until the initialdevelopers dropped it all together, so that's also a format you can't use..
Oops.
"A hole was discovered today on the M1. Police are looking into it."
Whaddya mean offtopic?!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I've already seen examples of MOO-XML that are compliant to the schema but won't load in Office. I would link to the blog in question, but searching for "office not compliant OOXML" now chokes up so many links (mostly about how bad it is) that I had trouble finding it.
And just being able to reproduce the format doesn't say anything about the behaviour of your application either. A schema cannot verify that you are implementing the behaviour for indentLikeWord97 (or whatever they search/replaced it with), so you have no idea from reading the schema OR the standard how to implement it.
Your only recourse would be to get a copy of Word97, and reverse-engineer a painstaking model of how it indented things, and implement that yourself. And repeat this ad-infinitum for all 6,000 pages of the spec. Which is clearly not a viable option ; not even for Microsoft, who rather obviously produced this "standard" by serializing their internal binary formats and then nailing a schema on top and filling in the annotation tags.
Even MS don't know how to indentLikeWord97, but the fusty old indent routine languishing in the back of the Office source tree does. The only way to implement the "standard" with reasonable alacrity is therefore to have that source code ; which of course, is never going be allowed by MS ; not that anyone wants it anyway.
The rest is utterly redundant and sugar for us flies.
Bad free publicity is free publicity.
Clean the windshield.
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* Sigh *
Those silly FOSSies! There isn't even a released product using OOXML yet!
IMO, the problem is simply that OpenOffice's programmers aren't good enough to program in support for a different standard, which is why they were virtually forced into trying to shove their format down the world's throat.
Fortunately, the IEEE decided not to leave the world at the mercy of poor programmers working on third tier also-ran projects.