Slashdot Mirror
ODF Alliance Warns Governments About Office 2007 ODF Support
omz writes "The ODF Alliance has prepared a Fact Sheet for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF. The report revealed 'serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the marketplace, especially governments, is demanding.'"
If you can believe Microsoft, they're not the only ones. Lots of ODF implementations have interoperability issues.
Doug Mahugh at MSFT has been blogging about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/09/1-2-1.aspx
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/13/tracked-changes.aspx
Pretty much, yes. Bear in mind that Microsoft already has code that does handle the spreadsheet formulas correctly. The plug-in that Microsoft itself commissioned and that they own the code for not only preserves the formulas, it correctly parses and interprets them so that cells get recalculated properly as data changes and it correctly writes changed formulas back out. All Microsoft had to do was to not do all the work a second time. And even if they had re-done the work, the XML parser automatically populates the DOM with the formula strings and the internal implementation in Excel already can preserve arbitrary metadata from external formats even when it can't interpret it. All they'd've had to do is not touch things the user hadn't edited and the preservation would've happened automatically. I do this all the time when dealing with XML code, to the point where I have to make a deliberate effort not to write data-preserving code.
The others are open source projects, and can look at each other's code. MS can't, or they'd have to open source their code.
This is a completely misleading statement and totally misses the point. Well done!
You don't need to look at the source code to see what other products do. You just need to look at the ODF files they produce. Indeed, given the licenses of the products that implement ODF, you can obtain the copies you need for testing FOR FREE.
Similarly, while your legal department might bar you from reading competitors code for fear of copyright co-mingling, there is nothing to stop you employing a third party to go look on your behalf and write a report on what was done. So you can have your cake and eat it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The whole reason they are doing the ODF thing is pressure from the EU with regards to anti-trust. Part of that pressure is that "You have to do it according to the standard."
So you're arguing that MS's lawyers are completely incompetent and didn't know that being incompatible was a violation of antirust law and that antitrust law doesn't mention anything about standards compliance? I think that's a naive.
All the other ODF stuff I've seen is open source. As with most open source, they borrow heavily form other open source projects. In the case of ODF, the modus operandi seems to be "Do what Open Office does." Ok that's great, but again not an option for MS. They can't take OOs code...
They already own BSD licensed code that works on MS Office. Next argument please!
Basically the ODF spec isn't clear and precise.
But it's clear an precise enough that it worked for everyone else and there are multiple working open source implementations, one of which they can literally copy and paste from and which they helped fund the creation of and probably have full rights to it even if it wasn't BSD licensed. Sorry, that argument doesn't fly either.
Then there are cases where the popular ODF implementations aren't compliant with the spec.
Example please.
More or less it looks like the ODF alliance needs to shut up, and write a better standard.
They already did. MS doesn't want a standard for interoperability. They are simply looking for any way they can be compliant but still be incompatible.
Everything has to be specified precisely.
Not really, that's what reference implementations are for. If you have any doubt about how to handle this, see the reference implementations and do it that way.
The only argument you made that has any legs is the first one regarding compliance with the spec, but only if you assume ignorance of the law (I assume you perhaps aren't that familiar with antitrust law). I assure you, while it may at times appear that all of MS's lawyers have never heard of antitrust law, that is not the case in reality.
There's a lot more than 2 implementations. Besides OpenOffice and MS Office there's AbiWord, KOffice, Google Docs, WordPerfect Office X4, IBM's Lotus Symphony, the Sun ODF plug-in for MS Word and the BSD-licensed ODF plug-in for Word that Microsoft funded and hosted on SourceForge. That last is important, BTW. Not only is Office 2007's implementation of ODF incompatible with OpenOffice, it's incompatible with Microsoft's own other implementation of ODF.
Before you judge on this issue, it helps to read comments by various involved parts - those raising the issue to attention, MS people who have implemented ODF, and informed commenters outside this dispute. So, here's a bunch of links to start with.
First of all, a series of blog post by OASIS' Rob Weir (who's criticizing MSOffice) and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh (who's defending it) that evolved into a kind of a public discussion on the issue. Here they are in chronological / meaningful reading order:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/05/odf-spreadsheet-interoperability.aspx
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/09/1-2-1.aspx
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/battle-for-odf-interoperability.html
Then there's some outside commentary. I've taken the following links from comments in Doug's blog posts, and they tend to either be neutral or side with MS on this, so it may not be a representative sample. If you have any representing informed argument for the other side (e.g. by members of ODF committee, or ODF implementers - in general, people who know the ins and outs of the spec, and can accurately judge on its wording and intent - not random blogosphere FUD from either side), please mention them in replies.
http://ajg.math.concordia.ab.ca/?p=4
http://adjb.net/post/Notes-on-Document-Conformance-and-Portability-4.aspx
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/odf-11-formula-support-in-office-sp2.html