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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."
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.
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.
"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)
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
You hit the nail right on the head. To me this article is pure flamebait. This is already being investigated, it was mentioned right in the summary, and the article was even said as being "from the we-know-we-know-already dept." for fuck's sake! All that is filtered out by Slashdot groupthink, though, so that we can launch into the latest edition of the Two Minutes Hate.
I've started tagging most MS articles with "twominuteshate" because most of them are just like this one -- they add nothing new to the discussion and are just an excuse for people to get off on an anti-MS rant. Who the hell is running this site, twitter?
Look, I'm no MS apologist but Slashdot has become like the boy who cried wolf -- even when a valid point is raised (instead of just being a flamebait article), I just can't get enthused because I'm tired of the nonsense.
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.
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
Actually, the article is FUD. Becta never asked that it's complaint be
treated as a new complaint. It asked that it be added to the already
existing complaint regarding OOXML. It has been.
Here is what Becta said in its statement announcing it had sent its
complaint already filed with the UK antitrust regulator to the EU
Commission:
"Following discussions with the OFT, Becta has now referred its interoperability complaint and related evidence to the European Commission in support of the Commission's wider investigation."
Someone decided to write an article as if Becta had been denied its
complaint as being redundant. That isn't accurate. It was added to
the other complaint about OOXML, which is *exactly what Becta asked for*.
Somehow it gets turned around and described as some kind of Microsoft
victory.
Disgusted you say? Ditto.