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.'"
Or maybe the ODF Alliance should actually complete the standard without leaving gaping holes, such as a complete lack of ODS functions. Then Microsoft would actually be on the hook to implement the ODS functions spec allowing for interop between Office and OpenOffice. Instead everyone would rather bitch that Microsoft didn't implement the proprietary and non-standard OpenOffice implementation of functions within ODS.
As for certification and compliance testing, if W3C CSS2.1 is any indication then Microsoft will probably dictate that as well as nobody seems terribly interested in actually coming up with public test cases for anything. Making those test cases must be terribly boring which is why nobody is actually bothered to do anything about it.
Office 2007 SP2 does what ODF 1.1 says, not what OpenOffice bastardized. If you want better, fix ODF.
No, not at all. 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. So they only looked at the standard... which is seriously lacking.
This smells of arse covering wrapped up in finger-pointing.
Microsoft followed the ODF specification to the letter and now the ODF Alliance have the cheek to blame them for the fact that the documentation turns out to be incomplete, poorly written and makes a bucket load of assumptions?
This is going to do nothing to help ODF adoption and whilst Microsoft deserve some critisism for not being flexible when came to implementing it, the Alliance shouldn't think it is entirely blameless in the whole matter.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Um, the difference is Office 2007 formats aren't a standard.
They arent?
Some standards (the good ones) are set by an un-stated popularity contest, and only THEN codified into a specification, which was the word you meant. The problem with all of these open document formats is that they were not refined in this manner, leading to what we have today: specifications that aren't even sufficient for something trivial and obvious like encoding formula in spread-sheets.
It's like they didn't even imagine what the format was going to be used for! When I first heard about this my first thought was 'you gotta be shitting me' but god damn... they really did define a spread-sheet format that doesn't encode formula
Leave the document formats to the people in the business of storing real documents with real software for real people.
(and ISO should be ashamed of themselves for publishing a 'standard in progress')
"His name was James Damore."
In other words, ODF blows and nobody really wants to use it, but enough "activists" were able to convince those in government that it was a good idea. What could possibly go wrong?
So what you're saying is Microsoft shouldn't follow the standard?
And further to that, are you suggesting that all it takes is to look at a few spreadsheets and reverse engineer them. How many would they have to look at to get all the scenarios? 100? 1000? 10,000? Somehow I don't think that's an option unless all you want to do is sums.
Until there is a complete standard there is nothing to interoperate with...there are only non-standard implementations. So Microsoft loses either way - either they comply with the standard such that it is and get dinged for not interoperating with OpenOffice, or they comply with OpenOffice and will get dinged for not guessing how OpenOffice does it correctly. It's a lose lose situation for Microsoft, and the only way to solve it is to have a complete & specific standard.
Standards do not work that way. Implementing something in a way contrary to the standard is not following the standard, no matter how many other (partial/noncompliant) implementations of the standard do the same thing.
And which "reference" implementation fully implements ODF 1.1 in a way that interoperates with other software?
Microsoft is following the published ODF 1.1 standard. "The nonstandard way that OpenOffice.org and a lot of applications do it" is not a standard.
Other companies do have trouble implementing the standard. Having to "copy OpenOffice.org's nonstandard activity" means they are either not strictly implementing the standard or implementing added functionality not covered in the standard (that is, nonstandard functionality.)
MS is expected to have a standards-compliant implementation ODF 1.1, not one that emulates some other implementation's non-standard behaviors. People tend to get upset when Microsoft ignores or doesn't fully implement standards. OpenOffice.org 3's implementation of the not-yet finalized ODF 1.2 standard is not a published standard. "ODF 1.1+proprietary extras" is not a standard, either.
Microsoft said they were going to implement the published standard ODF 1.1, and this is what they claimed to have done. They did not say they were going to implement OpenOffice.org's specific way of using ODF with its nonstandard behavior. They did not say they were going to implement the (not finalized) ODF 1.2 as used by OpenOffice.org 3.
Serious question time: Is it possible for anyone who is against Microsoft on this issue to have a serious conversation about this, and not resort to accusations of astroturfing?
This is a discussion between adults (hopefully) and if you're interested in it being a discussion then lets leave the astroturfing comments out of this.