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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."
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.
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.
No need to flame, the french like their small independent booksellers and they moved to protect them.
I don't think anyone really believes that any document standard is evil, it was the process of getting everyone to agree on one or the other that bothered me. It looked to me like MS just bought the commission so it could continue its monopoly.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
If you ever had to write a parser for OOXML, you'd understand.
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.
The complaint is that the format is a standard in name only (i.e., it is vague and difficult to implement).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
One of the biggest problems with this "standard" is that it specifically allows proprietary add-ons. That's no standard at all. Programs like Ooo.org will still not be able to properly open a Office document because A) you can bet your ass that Microsoft Office will be using any number of proprietary add-ons to the format, thereby screwing up Ooo.org's ability to render it correctly. And B), Microsoft will do like what they ddi with the internet and intentionally render it incorrectly. Since they have the lion's share of the market, this "not to standard" rendering will of course be the standard, and competitors will be forced to guess at how microsoft intentionally broke the standard in order to display Microsoft Office generated OOXML files, or just not display them correctly at all.
When Microsoft was doing this with the web, web developers had to create all kidns of hacks to get their page to display properly in IE, often times breaking the page in Mozilla. The non-techie types, of course, don't blame this on IE, they say that it must be Firefox that doesn't work correctly. It will happen exactly the same way with Ooo.org. It won't be Office that's doing it wrong, it will be blamed by the ignorant on Ooo.org.
I've gone on the record supporting Microsoft before, but OOXML is not one of the times I'll be doing that. This whole thing stinks.
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"
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The actual complaint is not in relation to OOXML but the interoperability of Office 2007 with Open Office et al. BECTA can not recommend Office 2007 because it does not currently support ODF a format widely used by it's cheaper rivals. BECTA's concern here is that they kids (well their parents) on the edge of poverty will have to shell out for Office 2007 and Windows or face being unable to work on their documents at home. If Office 2007 without addons is deployed in a school it is an active barrier to learning and Microsoft should be ashamed for allowing parents to even have to think about the question 'Office 2007 or food?' when they go shopping.
I've never heard that mentioned in the standard. Also, you know that the term "binary blobs" has a very specific meaning, right? given that meaning... I'm not sure why someone would need to insert something into the kernal to add functionality to ODF... are you sure we're talking about the same thing?
No.. seems I'm sick of the hypocritical and ignorant slamming that's prevalent here on slashdot.
Very few of the complaints about the format are technical in nature, and those that are can also be leveled at ODF.
Personally I don't even use an office suite... and any office files I receive get opened in google docs.
"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.
Actually, they are receiving lots of money from MS. Last time I checked, they'd received some 900 million Euros so far in the form of fines from MS for not following EU antitrust regulations, this OOXML bit being part of that.
They ARE looking into it.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If the French really like small independent booksellers, why would they need a law to protect them?
Wouldn't most French people patronize the small bookstores thereby driving amazon out of business?
Of course, if it turns out that most people prefer amazon's low prices, then your statement that "the french like their small independent booksellers" would be proven false.
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.
OOXML isn't open due to the poor quality of the specification. Where the specification is vague or completely undefined it means that defacto standards will step in and that's how Microsoft Office maintains its monopoly. Here's my list of example remaining problems in OOXML that will result in the ISO promoting a defacto commercial application, Microsoft Office.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
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.
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
Everyone has to make a decision between X and food. Goods and services are scarce resources that people need to economize. I'd be willing to bet that most of the parents you are talking about also smoke, buy lottery tickets, and alcohol.
The same parents will also have to make the choice between a computer and food.
It would be interesting to see how many families are rich enough to be able to afford a computer, yet cannot afford Windows 98 and Office 97. Which would enable them to inter-operate with a computer at school running Windows Vista and Office 2007.
I just looked at craigslist and found a computer with a Windows 2000 and Office 2000 for $45. Office 2007 will save documents in Office 97 format.
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?
Oooo I like it!
"Stand up to MS not implementing ODF! Won't SOMEONE please think of the poor children?"
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Just curious: Do you happen to know if they still have "render like Office 97" in the spec? I knew any kind of "open" standard when it comes from "the king of the funky formats" would be an impossible to follow pile of gibberish that even their own engineers wouldn't be able to make a functioning model out of, but when I read the line "render like Office 97" in the highlights of the first spec I nearly choked laughing! Like there is anyone at Microsoft that can even remember what the legacy voodoo code from back then even does. But it doesn't really matter to me, as I've finally switched from my old friend Office 2K to Open Office 3 as the latter has a nicer interface and seems to manage memory better. But that is my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
thanks for the list - i think i got another topic for you: iirc ooxml REQUIRES apps to have the same year 1900 bug (I'll google that)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Hi,
They've either documented or removed those 'behaveLikeWW8' style flags. As engineering criteria however the documentation hasn't been reviewed to see whether it accurately describes Microsoft Office, and it was added late in the process (early 2008, I think).
What remains however are Microsoft OLE references without documentation or patent coverage, accessibility problems, and huge areas of OOXML entirely without documentation that mean that ISO OOXML promotes defacto standards.
Read my blog for a few posts on how no one voting on OOXML saw a final specification.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Thanks but I'm not really maintaining a list, those are only examples and I made that document as part of New Zealands ISO process. New Zealand and Canada voted No.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
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.
The French like their small independent booksellers but the average citizen will use the cheapest service (as per the free market!), so they need to protect them as a government. This is similar to how all governments are moving to reduce emissions but only a minority of citizens are taking their own steps.
One standard was sorely needed at the time, and was peer reviewed and developed by a multitude of parties.
A second standard wasn't needed at all, and came late to the party while being inferior in many ways to the first, and was also developed by only one party with no input from anyone else.
When a standard already exists, what's the point in creating a new incompatible and inferior one?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Slightly off-topic but I couldn't let it pass unchallenged....
a "bash America" strategy.The complaint regarding free shipping was levelled at Amazon.fr. This company is trading in France and France has the right to make sure that all companies that operate within its borders comply with the relevant laws to ensure a level playing field for all businesses. Now, how do you make that US bashing?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
The 900 million euros was for manipulating the server operating system market to disenfranchise competitors. Microsoft refused to change and got fined for the refusal. The matter is over (bar the appeal of the amount).
Microsoft is currently being investigated:
* There a huge list.. but my personal favourite was sending regional MS employees as delegates for war-torn African nations, all in order to pass the vote.
"A hole was discovered today on the M1. Police are looking into it."
Whaddya mean offtopic?!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Just a thought, but have you considered looking for some other forum more to your liking? Perhaps this isn't the right place for you. Yeah, that way this place can turn into even more of an echo chamber. Great idea.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Now there's a load of assumptions between the lines there.
One, you assume it's customers who decide which shops stay and which shops go. It isn't. A large enough company can sell for less than the small shop next door, while at the same time making more profit due to scale, better deals with suppliers, etc.
You assume that "like" is the same as "buy from". It doesn't have to be.
You assume that money is the only currency that matters, but on the scale of society, there are a whole lot of other things that matter, too. Otherwise we wouldn't have art, education, friendship or anything else that makes up culture.
You assume that low prices was what the small shops could not cope with, but do you have evidence? I don't know what exactly it was, but knowing the business a little bit I can imagine a whole lot of other reasons, such as the convenience of online shopping, the amount of books you have available right now (many potential customers do not come back if you don't have a book today, but can have it tomorrow), or simply the size of your store (there's more browsing going on in a bookstore than in virtually any other shop).
And some of those factors may very well fall on the "like" side, while they fail on the "money" side.
Finally, you assume that the government does something for no reason. I haven't heard of protests, maybe the government did exactly what the people wanted?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Both OOo and KWord insert their own tags in ODF files written. Notably of the form '' and such. Faulting the standard for oddities in high-profile implementations is not really useful, there are almost invariably extensions to any good standard, and they tend to remain useful anyway.
Now, if you really want to complain about OOXML, what about the lack of a compliance test suite? Is there a way for an independent third-party to definitively determine whether an implementation meets the specification, and hence whether it is able to claim to be OOXML-compliant? That would do a lot towards ensuring that it is a real standard. Whether or not you actually like it or the method by which the spec was produced are a separate and lesser matter.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
The French like their small independent booksellers but the average citizen
I thought the average citizen in France was French.
One, you assume it's customers who decide which shops stay and which shops go. It isn't.
... such as the convenience of online shopping, the amount of books you have available right now (many potential customers do not come back if you don't have a book today, but can have it tomorrow)...
You are correct and I was wrong. Apparently, it is the government which decides who stays and who goes. Not the customers.
I was thinking of a world where a business has to keep the customers happy to survive.
You assume that "like" is the same as "buy from". It doesn't have to be.
So what you're saying is that even though people *say* they want something, when it is time to put their money where their collective mouths were, they don't?
Then isn't what they really wanted lower prices, despite what they said?
You assume that low prices was what the small shops could not cope with, but do you have evidence?
So the bigger stores not only provide lower prices, but also other things that benefit the customer? Oh the horror! Kick them out.
Finally, you assume that the government does something for no reason. I haven't heard of protests, maybe the government did exactly what the people wanted?
Maybe. Maybe not. There is one way to find out though.
Let everyone compete and the people spending their money, time and effort will tell you *exactly* what they prefer. No need to guess. No need to see if anyone protests.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I just hope that the EU smacks them hard enough over this and other asshatery that they are forced to fully open their specs on Office and server. I personally would love it if I was assured that every distro would play nice with AD networks and Exchange servers like my Xandros Business 4 laptop does, and anything that makes it easier to choose a network topology based on needs instead of being trapped by former network administrators proprietary choices would be a good thing. Of course this is while MSFT will hang onto those specs for as long as humanly possible,because lock-in has always been a core strategy of their business. But that is my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There is a lot of protectionism going around. Both in Europe and the US, small farmers get subsidies because they can't compete with the cheaper products from bigger farmers elsewhere (not necessarily China but usually out-of-state farmers). This in turn makes it that they don't make any effort to expand to match or exceed the possibilities of the other farmers since they get the money for free anyway.
In this world, you'll have to match your bigger competitors somehow. Whether it's usability, customer service or quality, it can be done since all the little businesses aren't dead yet and every year there are new businesses opened but giving money because they're small just makes them more complacent in general.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Try unzip a .odp file for example.
The manifest entries (<manifest:file-entry>) have an attribute manifest:media-type which contains the MIME-type of the blob (e.g. a picture of a cute kitten) and its location (usually in the Pictures directory).
So, as long as only open-standard MIME-types are used, I don't see why this is a problem for interoperability. Anyone can implement JPEG, GIF and PNG, for example. Maybe not in the USA but that will hopefully soon be harmonized with the more enlightened EU patent model, now that they saw the light, if I understand TEC plan (pdf) correctly ;-) (hint: I probably don't ;-))
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
The rest is utterly redundant and sugar for us flies.
Bad free publicity is free publicity.
Clean the windshield.
--------
* Sigh *
You completely ignored my point on the first argument, that's not an honest way to have a discussion.
You are right on the second point, people don't alway put their money on what they value. If that was news to you, I feel sorry for you.
And I very much challenge your assumption that money is the better democracy. It isn't. The idea that markets can solve everything and a market mechanic always provides the best answer to everything has been refuted decades ago. If it were true, we would buy our friends, instead of making them, for example.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
By the same token, Microsoft can just as easily break ODF. They did it to HTML, didn't they, and that was pretty open. Sure, Office 2010's ODF export is not standards-compliant. But what can anyone else do about it other than point fingers and cry foul? Pretty much everybody's been doing that since Microsoft began as a company, and look where Microsoft is, and where SGI, Lotus, DEC, Corel, etc. are, not to mention Sun, IBM, Novell, and even Apple... Is there anything the industry can do to prevent Microsoft from breaking ODF if they so wanted? Until Microsoft loses their market dominance, I very much doubt it.
The one and only reason Microsoft pushed OOXML out as a standard is because numerous national and local governments were suddenly mandating that their document software save to standardized file formats. To be able to sell to these government agencies, Microsoft Office would have to be standards compliant. However, they would be able to break ODF and follow the "standards compliant" rule at the same time, so they effectively created their own where they could remain anti-competitive while being standards compliant.
All that those arguing against OOXML being a standard only need to and should point out is that it fails as a standard in and of itself, either by being too vague and hence not a standard at all but perhaps an outline of one, or by not encompassing the full domain that a document standard should cover, in which case it is incomplete.
The argument that Microsoft breaks file formats unfortunately holds no water, and only makes the other arguments weaker (guilt by association).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
You are right on the second point, people don't alway put their money on what they value. If that was news to you, I feel sorry for you.
So that is how we have an honest discussion!
So, people say they want A, but pay for B. And not only that, they wouldn't put up with a little inconvenience and cost to support A either.
And in your view, A is what they want? Isn't that your point? My argument is that they really want B.
Now that I've really simplified and cleared that up, I hope you address that and not make any patronising comments.
And I very much challenge your assumption that money is the better democracy
You are confusing money with freedom.
Money is a medium of storing value. Money has as much to do with free markets as ink has to do with literature.
If it were true, we would buy our friends, instead of making them, for example.
Yes. And you are *free* to make your own friends. That is the essence of the free market argument - that you are the person who knows what you want.
The argument you are making is that each individual is not the best person to pick their friends and the government should do it for them.
You can get older (obsolete) computers for free, they won't be capable of running the latest versions of windows/office and may or may not come with an old version.
Office 2007 doesn't save in the 97 format by default.
But you can get a free obsolete computer and put linux and openoffice on it easily, schools should really do this using computers thrown out by businesses (they would have to pay for disposal otherwise).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yes, but "The French" is not the average citizen, it is the government. That is, the long view.
So a majority of the individual French people want A, but the government that represents these individuals, wants B. And that is good because the government is smarter than the average citizen and is taking the long view.
Hmmm...so maybe the Patriot act, the war on terror, no bid contracts to Halliburton, etc are all good because, even though the general US public does not want it, the Bush administration - the government - is smarter and is taking the "long view"?
I didn't say that. Things must be taken on a case-by-base basis. Why do you think the founders of America (assuming you are American) made the country a republic and not a direct democracy? Precisely because of the long view.
You didn't say that, but the principle you are advocating - that the govt. knows better, takes the long view and is generally wiser than the individuals whom it governs, etc - leads one to that conclusion.
It seems that you only believe your own priciples only when you believe that the cause is just (eg. the French ban). And you abandon your principle when you do not agree with the actions (like the Patriot act).
If one isn't consistent in his principles that means he has convenient principles.
My principle in both case - the French ban and the Bush shenanigans - is that the individual is the person who knows what is best for him, in the short and long term. No all-knowing, omnipotent superhumans are needed to assist him in buying a book.