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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.'"
Malice, or simple incompetence? Given Microsoft's track record, I can believe either one.
I know there are a lot of smart people working for Microsoft. But somehow it's as if there's a reverse gestalt phenomenon going on in their company - the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
#DeleteChrome
I know Microsoft is being its usual self, but perhaps the ODF alliance should promoting a certification program and a compliance logo to raise the quality of interoperability of ALL ODF based applications.
If you write a standard and clamor to get it adopted by law, don't leave Redmond-sized holes in it. Someone might just try to drive a Microsoft through it.
Doesn't seems strange to you that only Microsoft handle it very differently?
L.
Although nobody is really surprised that Microsoft has made their software comply with the letter of the law and not the spirit, is this really a big issue? If, as the summary says, the marketplace is demanding a grand interoperability between software products, then we might see the rapid uptake of OOO in the near future. Failing that, if nobody switches, then the market has spoken loud and clear, Nobody cares.
Honestly, the single most productive thing you could do to ensure the rapid uptake of open standards would be to make openoffice.org an amazing product. Put all of your time and effort into making it clearly superior, and at that point everyone will use an ODF by default.
Shouldn't the file be an ODF format?
You're not trying to let them edit it. You're trying to influence them with a fixed document. So a display-only format is fine.
Further: You're trying to influence people who are NOT YET onboard with ODF. So you want a format that is viewable by as wide an audience as possible while displaying conveniently in an easy-on-the-eyes form. Right now that's PDF.
Putting it out in ODF means it's only viewable by people who already have ODF installed. That's mainly the people who are already onboard and don't need to be convinced. So it would be a case of "preaching to the choir" rather than "converting the heathen". Useful for giving your evangelists more talking points perhaps. But not all that useful for the purpose intended.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Um, the difference is Office 2007 formats aren't a standard. OOXML is, but even MS's own implementation doesn't match up to the specs.
ODF on the other hand has an open implementation, free source code, open specs, royalty free, etc.
ODF alliance warning about sub-par ODF support on Office 2007 which ODF is totally open, is different than MS warning about not supporting their closed, undocumented format.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Microsoft followed the ODF specification to the letter
Are you paid to astroturf? Thy did not follow it to the letter and they ignored the reference implementations and if they tested for compatibility like everyone else they did so to make sure things would not work. Given their market share, that's criminal.
Or they could ask the proper author (I don't know who owns the copyright on that particular portion of OOo) for a license to do so. I betcha that someone interested enough in OOo's future to write a save/load algorithm for it would let Microsoft use it (in part or in whole) for Office. Complete compatibility between the two program suites would work heavily in OOo's favor, for reasons that seem obvious (to me) and that I won't go into to avoid creating a tl;dr situation.
Maybe if someone out there knows anyone (or is on) the OOo team drops the idea of a public offer to give Microsoft a special license to their already working code, some traction could be gained, or at least some light could be shed on the willingness of Microsoft to rectify the situation. I hope they are honestly willing to achieve cross-compatibility, but my guess is that that is likely too optimistic.
If the standard is strict like other open standards, and they still fail to be compatiable[sic], I wouldn't "apologize" for them.
Please. The standard is just fine for any honest company trying to make a product that works. It just wasn't written as an ironclad legal contract to keep MS from playing dumb and intentionally breaking compatibility.
Actually, if you read another comment on this article, you'd see that other applications actually didn't handle the standard all that well like you claim.
Other comments? I don't have to because I actually bothered to read about the topic before discussing it. There is one other compatibility problem among the programs tested and it is because one of the programs is using the newer version of the spec. Saving from OO as ODF 1.1 is compatible. Thats completely different from being incompatible with every other program implementing the same version of the spec.
"Free code". You do realize that many of those "free" code samples are licensed that would require Microsoft to open source Office or portions of Office.
Please educate yourself before trying to argue. There is a working plug-in for MSOffice licensed under the BSD license so MS can simply copy and paste if they want. They've done it before with BSD code.
This is about a standard that was weak and failed to state everything clearly.
Bullcrap. This is about a standard that is fine for any honest company and about one company intentionally trying to break things to harm competition.
Asking any company to follow it is insane.
Yeah, except nobody else had any real problems including small hobbyist groups. Believing your crap is insane. In fact, your position is so unbelievable, I strongly suspect you're an astroturfer. You have a history of all of 13 comments, almost all of which are defending Microsoft. You're either a paid shill or you really drank to kool-aid.
Microsoft did what they had to do to break compatibility. They must have been laughing themselves silly when they realised that other users of ODF had left the door open for them to both break compatibility AND claim compliance.
Don't kid yourself, they may have been very happy to claim that they are compliant, but compliance was not the aim. Breaking compatibility was the primary purpose.
Absolute nonsense and petty attempt to justify malice.
There IS a standard which was NOT completely respected by Microsoft.
However, we arent talking about that part: in this instance, the only claim you can make against the standard is its failing to provide formula specification for spreadsheets.
This is something that MS and all implementors can be asumed to have known BEFORE starting to implement the standard. All other implementations, INCLUDING the BSD licensed one by a microsoft contractor, chose INTEROPERABILITY, Microsoft in their second and internally executed implementation, chose to BREAK IT, and thus it DOES NOT interperate with anything at all.
You can only claim compliance, but you cannot provide evidence that this choices werent taken with WRONGFUL WILL (them being the evil fuckers theyve always been). It was an ill willed decision, that is obvious and the evidence is that, hey, they DONT interoperate at all when they COULD and actually DID interoperate in OTHER implementations.
Damn... how much do they pay for astroturfing?
NO SIG
Microsoft did it: they managed to make ODF scary - it may or may not work. It was a brilliant FUD move.