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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
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.
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.
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.
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!"
If anyone is interested in specifically what is "broken"(read: incompatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0)... which I doubt... here is some very good information detailing which decisions were made in implementing ODF and why they were made:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/default.aspx
The last couple blog posts should be what everyone is looking for.
Beyond this, Microsoft is simply implementing ODF 1.1 because ODF 1.2 is not done yet. If Microsoft is going to support a standard, they will support the standard not the most popular implementation's interpretation of the standard.
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.
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.
ODF 1.1 was a very simple standard to follow. It was only one page. In fact, it's only one sentence: "Do whatever OpenOffice does." Is that your idea of a "reference implementation"?
If that was the case, sure since OO is open source and well documented code. That isn't that case though. It's much better to simply code to the standards and look at one of the several interoperable open source implementations when there is question about what to do. And, or course, when you have a working version you should test it for interoperability with the existing implementations, or at least the working implementation for your program, already in use, which you helped to fund.
So, when MS Office SP2 implements ODF 1.1 with MathML to the letter and OpenOffice cannot read it because of a bug in OpenOffice, who is to blame?
If it is a bug in OpenOffice they are to blame, assuming MS tested and tried to be compliant and interoperable. If, however, OO is compliant and MS is complaint and MS manages to create a compliant solution which does not work with all the other existing implementations, which all work with one another... yeah that's MS's fault.
Oh, right, you think that MS should have followed OpenOffice's bug, not the ODF spec.
Are you trying to imply that MS had to break the standard to work with OO and all the other implementations?
How about all of the implementation bugs between OpenOffice and other non-MS ODF suites?
There is only one of those that I know of, which is a problem with OO writing files using the 1.2 version of ODF by default and the program in question not handling it gracefully enough. MS, on the other hand is incompatible with every other implementation.
Fix your fucking spec or shut the fuck up.
If you're going to be profane at least have some guts worm. Anonymous coward indeed.
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!
Plenty of info here:
You seem to have fallen for marketing nonsense. There exists a spec, which no one including MS has implemented. Then there exists the docx files MS office creates which are not compliant with the standards you link to and which are not fully documented anywhere.
From the first link you posted, a quote about when MS will be compliant with the published version of the spec:
On March 13, 2008 Doug Mahugh, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft specializing in Office client interoperability and the Open XML file formats confirmed that version 1.0 of the Open XML Format SDK "will definitely be 100% compliant with the final ISO/IEC 29500 spec, including the changes accepted at the BRM"
To date they have not managed to comply fully with their own format specification and no other company has a fully compatible version either, that I know of.
So where is the documentation for the docx format Word creates today? Where is the fully compliant, BSD licensed reference implementation for Linux that OO can copy and paste code from? I think your argument pretty much went down the crapper at this point.
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.
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.
Interesting, but isn't Openoffice the generally accepted reference implimentation, even if it is not 100% of the way there yet? I'm pretty sure the other apps in the MS blog list use OpenOffice.org that way too. Really, there is no real excuse.
The generally accepted reference is and should be the OASIS ODF standard itself. Digging through the source code of competing products to see which assumptions they made while implementing a standard does not constitute proper standards behavior. There's no reason to assume OpenOffice is the correct implementation of ODF, since Sun went to great lengths to get governance of the standard outside their organization. The question is whether Microsoft wants to implement the standard itself or write a minor OpenOffice compatibility layer into their software. OpenOffice is not necessarily a juggernaut product, anyway.
Their implementation passes compliance testing as far as ODF 1.1 is concerned. In fact, it's the only implementation that does for spreadsheets (aside from Kspread, apparently). At the same time, it also serves the purpose of both increasing compatibility and exposing the weakness of the standard and format. If Sun wants ODF to be the de facto office standard, they should tie up the many vague loose ends that allow Microsoft to do a perfectly compliant implementation that is incompatible. The examples outlined in the msdn blog demonstrate just how open ended and inconsistent this "standard format" is.
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
Microsoft did it: they managed to make ODF scary - it may or may not work. It was a brilliant FUD move.