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UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle

Posted by kdawson on from the single-conforming-implementation-gosh-that-sounds-familiar dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "Long-time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF, for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and on Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It's called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short). How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there's price: Evermore's professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it's clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days' time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen."

2 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Separating the ideas from the source by jesterzog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On the one hand, you have MS (anti-competitive, anti-freedom), and on the other, you have China (anti-freedom, police state).

    I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?

    I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?

    Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.

  2. "speaking for the Chinese government" by Ritz_Just_Ritz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You don't get to be in a position where you're the CEO/President of a company who's standard is "blessed" by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough...corruption/nepotism...cough).

    More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101.