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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.'"
post?
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
Shouldn't the file be an ODF format?
is Ctl-Alt-Del.
Yours In Socialism,
K. Trout, C.I.O.
Yeah, ever since the whole 'teabagging' thing, this is officially the replacement for 'foot in mouth.'
Just wondering, is Microsoft warning governments about OpenOffice's .DOC support?
That the standards created for the ODF formats are no where near perfect.
In fact, the ODF specification for spreadsheets doesn't state where formulas should go in a document. Something OpenOffice and Microsoft handle very differently. Because of these loopholes it's possible for software deveopers (Not just Microsoft) to do what they think is best instead of follow the standard.
What the OpenOffice and Open Source communities should be doing is working to resolve these loopholes so Microsoft and other developers can follow.
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.
I don't get the section on Office 2003. Their gripe is that it doesn't support ODF. Well if MS doesn't release a service pack, why complain that 2003 doesn't support ODF when 2007 doesn't either (without SP2)? Focus on their current (insufficient) efforts to update software, not on software they haven't yet decided to update. There's no threat to ODF interop in 2003 if it can't read them at all...
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Microsoft, in turn, should warn governments about OpenOffice's subpar support for Office 2007 formats. Assuming you want to be fair on this one, of course.
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.
Really.
Whatever sort of incentives or punishment officials come up with, MS will make the odf support half assed on purpose. Simply because they see that as the most lucrative solution for themselves.
Of course third party plugins and open source office suites have better support for odf, they are made by people trying to implement the best possible support. MS want lock-in, "forcing" them otherwise is not going to help.
MS' business model haven't changed. And it won't in a long time.
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
Having spent three years as the sysadmin for a high school, managing the imaging for several computer labs, I observed the following:
- Even as late as 2007, I used Office XP on everything, mainly to eliminate the XP->2003 learning curve.
- I had to install some Microsoft add-on to allow Office 2007 documents to be opened in Office XP, since some students came in with Office 2007 documents.
- I think I had to install some add-on for Office 97 too, for the same reason.
- Ditto for MS Works, IIRC.
- I also installed OpenOffice in the labs, for the very small number of students who had OpenOffice documents from home.
- Even though I had OpenOffice, I could not remove MS Office, since I would be accused of "removing the Microsofts" from computers. The word "Microsoft" is apparently very reassuring to idiots/teachers.
So maybe MS should warn governments about MS Office's sub-par support for MS Office formats.
To be fair, and all...
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.
your code written from it is MS licensed too?
Bullshit.
Algorithms are not copyrightable. Non-expressive elements are not copyrightable. If there's only one way to do something, you can't copyright it.
For a commercial vendor, GPL licensed code is not "open" or "available" at all. They have to code it to the spec, and code to the spec they did. How is it their fault that the spec is busted?
Nope, that was 12 years ago.
Are we done with these yet?
"Good news, everyone!"
That's a very insightful, proactive suggestion. Why bitch about the usual MS attitudes if you can provide a constructive path ahead, right?
Actually, it shouldn't be all that hard (but, it may well be tedious work) to put together a document that includes samples of *all* features of the spreadsheet / text editor / drawing / presentation document.
Providing verification is probably a bigger challenge. I wonder if it could be done as macros in any of the ODF-supporting suites, or if that's akin to an SOD violation?
"Good news, everyone!"
There's a couple reasons why they'd do it differently:
1) 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." They don't want MS to go and say "Well we implemented some of the standard, but changed it in ways we like." So MS has been sticking strictly to the standard. Not all the other implementations do. So, you get a difference in results. Now you can argue that the right way of doing things is everyone else doing the same thing, even if it isn't the standard, but that really isn't an option for MS. They need the CYA ability to say "We implemented the standard 100% to spec, no deviation."
2) 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, of course, or they'd have to open up their software which they don't want to do. In theory they could look at it and then "reverse engineer" it so to speak and reimplement but that's dangerous. They won't want to fight claims of violating the GPL. So best to just have your dev team pretend it doesn't exist and do their own thing.
Basically the ODF spec isn't clear and precise. So there are areas where you kinda have to decide how you want to do shit. MS isn't going to look at how it was done in OO's code, so their own design culture, which is different, will dictate how things are done. So you get differences right there. Then there are cases where the popular ODF implementations aren't compliant with the spec. They work because they are all not compliant in the same way, but then that won't work with MS's compliant implementation.
More or less it looks like the ODF alliance needs to shut up, and write a better standard. For something like this, a good standard will be very complex and extremely specific. There's just no avoiding that. If you want to be able to have all of this different, rich functionality, and you want it to work the same way and display the same way everywhere, the standard has to be very very detailed. Everything has to be specified precisely. You can't leave it up to the developer on how to do anything, or you are going to get differences.
What do I mean ? It starts by assuming that you know what ODF is, giving it a name ''the OpenDocument Format'' doesn't really help -- the average Member of Parliament/Senate/Dictatorship/... will not have a clue what you are talking about. All sorts of other buzz words abound, there are names of unknown things like KSpread and Symphony -- who has heard of them ?
I am sympathetic to what they are doing - it is a great idea, unfortunately it won't get much legislator/bureaucrat/... eyeball time because it doesn't explain what it is all about. It needs to be prefixed by a page that explains it all in nice, friendly words that everyone can understand and say that the technical details are on the next pages -- which starts with page 1 of what they have produced.
Watch what happens if openoffice makes any kind of real dent in office's market share. It'll be just like the RIAA going after downloaders...
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The only way this document could have been presented more sloppily is if it were made from old newspaper cuttings: "suPPoRt Odf oR we BReaK l3Gs". Then again it could just have been done in OpenOffice (ducks)
Governments is demanding interoperability! And cats is demanding lol!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
People are seriously arguing that Microsoft should munge the standard to go along with the most common implementation? Welcome to the web, circa 1996. That's exactly how web standards got to be the mess they are. Browser manufacturers wrote browsers to be compatible with each other and to support new features, instead of following the standards. And thus the standard fell behind and became increasingly useless.
Microsoft is writing an ODF document, *not* an OpenOffice document. And, long-term, that's exactly the correct thing to do.
If you want them to follow the standard, write a decent standard for them to follow and stop whining. And, just like the web failed to do, if you want the standard to be worth the paper it's written on, the resources have to be committed to get them out in a timely fashion.
Honestly, this document could have been three lines:
1. When reading an ODF spreadsheet, MS Office Excel 2007 strips out formulas.
2. Microsoft Office 2007 does not support encryption (password-protection) in ODF files.
3. Microsoft Office 2007 does not support tracked changes in ODF.
The majority of the rest of the doc is just whining about how other ODF supporters did things right, and that Microsoft promised that they would get it right but they didn't! Waaahhh I want my mommy!
Seriously, write up a fact finding report that states in technical details what is wrong, and be done with it. Anything else is fluff to make MS look bad and ODF look like something worth caring about.
The last two bolded items are total bs:
- ODF Support in MS Office 2007 Only
- Commitment to Support Future Versions of ODF
The doc is supposed to be about how O2K7 is non-compliant. Not about support for previous versions, and not about future versions.
Also, PDF is a ISO standard aswell (ISO 32000-1:2008).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
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?
The whining tone of the "fact sheet" makes me giggle. Microsoft "must" do this, they "must" do that. Simply because someone published something and called it a "standard". I especially like the "Microsoft must support the revised ODF standard in the first Office release or Office service pack after a revised standard is published"... totally unrealistic. Rapid implementation of standards has never been accomplished in any part of the IT industry. Hell, support for SQL-92 is still spotty, much less SQL:2006. HTML 4.01 is still not fully implemented in any browser. And don't get me started on SOAP.
Hey, Microsoft published OOXML as a standard, also through an established standards organization. Are OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, etc going to be "required" to support OOXML in their next releases? If no, why not? Because Microsoft is a big corporation with gobs of money? So are IBM, Google, and Oracle.
MS doesn't look at open source code. The MS lawyers are worried that some code in FOSS might be included in their commercial products, by accident.
I've discussed this with MS Evangelists. It is probably part of the employment agreement now.
> That's the problem - the spec is too vague to be implemented properly.
The hell it is! There are reference implementations. There's BSD code they could copy-paste. The oft-referenced "problems" have already been dealt with by many other comments. If you're going to complain about ODF 1.2 documents in ODF 1.1 programs, I'm going to have to complain about Word 2003 documents that don't work right in Word 95, even if you use save as to save it to the old version.
And then I'll quote one of your own comments (including the typo) back to you:
"Ever wonder how all these other people can get it working, and you can't? Every thought it might not be the technology, it might be you? Just asking..."
oh just get the f**k out if you can't even release a proper standard:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/13/tracked-changes.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/09/1-2-1.aspx
seriously, get the f**k out. openoffice is a piece of garbage, with the stability of a mind of a psychic killer, at least have the guts not to speak badly of other implementations if you can neither draft the standard nor implement it correctly.
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
Here is my argument:
Since the non-interoperable part of MS's implementation is NOT in the standard, this is NOT an issue of compliance. Both OO.O and MSO are fully compliant.
Another BSD licensed and MS funded effort, when presented with the exact same standard, CHOSE to make the non-standard formulas inter-operable with most other implementations. They succeded.
This turn, with their own internal ODF implementation, MS CHOSE not to be inter-operable: they made the conscious decision to BREAK compatibility to thwart competition in a market they claim - as monopolies do- as if it was their private property, by using the petty argument that formulas are not specified. And thats why we see all this astrotufers claiming the standard is "wrong". It IS NOT. Both suites comply with them. The problem here is that on the parts of the problem-domain of spreadsheets, Microsoft CHOSE to not be inter-operable.
And that's that chums. I hope the EU nails them to the wall.
NO SIG
In other words, ODF [is bad] and nobody really wants to use it, but enough "activists" were able to convince those in government that it was a good idea.
Nope.
ODF is new and not yet widely deployed.
Just as you can't use television ads to sell televisions to people who only have radio, you can't use documents in ODF format to pitch the advantages of ODF to people who only have readers for .pdf and .doc.
Thanks, troll. If you didn't exist we'd have to invent you. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A common claim on Slashdot that always makes me laugh. Wonder who is paying the FSF shills to post on Slashdot?
But yeah, pretty childish, no?
Microsoft did it: they managed to make ODF scary - it may or may not work. It was a brilliant FUD move.
A) Microsoft has not publicly stated this anywhere, that the reason they are not compatible with other implementations such as OO.org is because of concerns they have for legal issues if they look at OO.org's source code.
So why are you? Why are you attempting to speak for them? I want to see where Microsoft is making this argument, and the content of the argument. If they're not, then you're just talking out your kazoo.
B) Besides which, standards implementations usually rely on cooperation between implementers. Do you have any evidence Microsoft asked OO.org, "Hey, we'd really like to implement ODF the right way, the way you do, but we're concerned about the legal implications if we do - you might sue us. Could we come to some agreement here?"
If you don't have that evidence, then again, you are talking out yer piehole and raising strawman arguments nobody else is.
Microsoft already gave the reason their implementation doesn't work: They decided that conformance to the spec (at which it is alleged they also failed) was more important than interoperability. http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/08/05/guiding-principles-for-office-s-odf-implementation.aspx
Mahugh says nothing there about being legally prevented from conforming to the way in which OO.org does things.
What the hell is wrong with people. Microsoft does not have any real interest in being compatible with other office software, it doesn't currently help their bottom line. I can understand their employees and shareholders sticking up for them, but the average user has nothing to gain supporting them on this issue. All the other office software programs that use ODF are more compatible with each other than any of them with MS's version of ODF. Doesn't look like MS even tried.
If you use OD format, then use Open Office, and if you want to import to Excel, save as an Excel 97 spreadsheet - Voilla formula's work. Same with all Open Office suite - you can save as MS format. So that fact MS doesn't care too much about OD format is a bit irrelevant and it's not worth their effort untill a format has been agreed.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Malice, or simple incompetence? Given Microsoft's track record, I can believe either one.
Or perhaps they said, we have to make this available, we don't have to do it well. And use the support calls that come in as a metric for measuring how much demand there is. Let the business drive it. Since there's problems with it, unless businesses are alert and are specifically pushing towards ODF, then this allows MS to continue pushing people into their own formats.
It is "in the pipeline"; it's presumably not going to change very much more. So both MS Office 2007 SP2 and ODF 1.2 could have "converged" so to speak. I mean, surely that's a reason why they are members of the OpenDocument TC of OASIS. :-)
An earlier posting by Rob Weir (february 2009): ODF 1.2 committee draft 1
Microsoft announced MS Office 2007 SP2 in april 2009; I do understand that it takes time to implement a large standard
<dream-on-mode>
Now I hope MS will announce they'll support ODF 1.2 in their upcoming Office 2007 SP3, don't buy SP2 in the meantime because it's incompatible.
</dream-on-mode>
Looking a bit closer, there's a significant burst of work in november 2007 (230 pages). Presumably enough to start working, at least. And then in june 2008 there were a lot of revisions one after the other. The last version in june 2008, pre-draft 9, was 435 pages; nothing to be sneezed at!
Finally, annotated pre-draft 11 from december 2008 has 436 pages. A quick document comparison showed that the first change is in the page describing the "large" group of functions, of which several were added. I couldn't find any changes in the "small" or "medium" groups of functions, whereas I think "medium" is important for spreadsheet implementers because an annotation comment (OpenDocument-formula-20081221.odt (ODF), on p.29 describes "medium" as
Then from december 2008 to now, most changes I looked at were improved comments for the test case scenarios.
What I'm getting at is that, had Microsoft wanted to implement ODF 1.2, they could have already made experimental MS Office code last year, gradually adapting it with the further amendments and changes in the OpenFormula spec. This wouldn't have interfered with their stated target, ODF v1.1 compliance (because ODF 1.1 doesn't specify the formulas, except for their general syntax).
And *THEN* they could say, while delivering Office 2007 SP2, that it is only guaranteed compliant with ODF v1.1.
They could make the last modifications while the ODF committee draft's changes are implemented circa end 2009, so they can sell it as "now also ODF 1.2 compliant" Office 2007 SP3 in 2010.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?