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The Anti-ODF Whisper Campaign
eldavojohn writes "Groklaw is examining the possibility of an anti-ODF whisper campaign and the effects it has had on the ODF and OOXML Wikipedia articles. In the ODF article, Alex Brown bends the truth to make it seem like no one is supporting ODF, and that it is a flawed and incomplete standard. From the conclusion, 'So what is one to do? You obviously can't trust Wikipedia whatsoever in this area. This is unfortunate, since I am a big fan of Wikipedia. But since the day when Microsoft decided they needed to pay people to "improve" the ODF and OOXML articles, they have been a cesspool of FUD, spin and outright lies, seemingly manufactured for Microsoft's re-use in their whisper campaign. My advice would be to seek out official information on the standards, from the relevant organizations, like OASIS, the chairs of the relevant committees, etc. Ask the questions in public places and seek a public response. That is the ultimate weakness of FUD and lies. They cannot stand the light of public exposure. Sunlight is the best antiseptic.'"
It might be useful to acknowledge what software DOES actually support ODF--including pretty much all of the more popular office and word processing suites [from Wikipedia]:
That doesn't sound like "no one" to me.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It really shows how desperate a company is when they have to get the FUD written so they can refer to it as tho it were fact. Its just like "get the facts" which was show up as paid for information. How many times have we seen information come from Microsoft that states the truth but they leave out the relevant parts that make it the complete opposite of what they say. Rob Weir gives an example of Microsoft have 15 proposals for ODF 1.2 and Microsoft says none of them made it into ODF 1.2. All was true but they failed to say they withdrew so it wouldn't hold 1.2 up. So what they say may be true but one still can't believe what they. I can't anyway and I think more and more people worldwide are starting to see thru them.
Sunlight is the best antiseptic.
Exactly. Watch the history of the Wikipedia article. Now that light has been shed on the issue, I'll bet the article becomes extremely accurate by the end of the day.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard that ODF documents created in, say, OpenOffice weren't entirely compatible with AbiWord. Granted, I haven't had the chance to try this out myself.
Also, from what I hear, OOXML is even worse, since it seems to be deliberately broken.
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If people tell each other that Microsoft sucks, and that Microsoft products are buggy and easily penetrated, would you say there is a 'whisper campaign' against Microsoft?
If people say that republicans are dishonest assholes, is that a 'whisper campaign' against republicans?
In short, how do you define 'whisper campaign'? Is it simply "when people we don't like speak negatively about something we like without being purely factual"?
Unless of course the person in question is a *known* paid anti-odf shill from Microsoft. As in this case.
Jeremy.
So where is Alex Brown's Wikipedia page? One needs to be created so that every Slashbot can update it every second of the day to say that he is a Microsoft marketing agent.
What defines accurate?
I love how ambiguous this all is. It really comes down to is "Bob doesn't think this but Rob does" How does the average person on the street know when accurate has been reached?
One could say that the accuracy of the article will suffer even more based on the bias of the site this article was submitted to.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'm not at all saying that the wikipedia article is accurate... but I'd hardly say consulting the people who are behind the standards are the best ones to get an honest view of its stability, completeness, and real-world support. That's like turning to Larry Ellison and asking if Oracle is the best database in the world. Of COURSE he's going to pimp his own goods. I'd prefer to see people pointed to an independent third-party. Whether that be a forum full of users, or large corporations who have standardized on it in the business sector.
Here.
Weir's tests of MS's ODF implementation made a big point of the fact that if you saved a spreadsheet in OO, and read it with Office, it was not fully functional (you get the cell values, but not the formulas, so it becomes a static snapshot of the data).
Yet Lotus Symphony has almost exactly the same problem. Weir got around that by using a beta of a future version of Symphony that fixes the problem.
And then sending that information to national standards committees to argue against the adoption of ODF, and to other government officials. Yes, I think that when you use this mechanism to deceive governments (or any other customers for that matter) it is scandalous. Marketing/spin is one thing. But outright lies and deception is something else, don't you think?
I wasn't aware of that. Could you please elaborate on that, with authoritative references? Thank you.
Which makes Rob Weir what, exactly?
http://www.robweir.com/blog/rob.html
Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.
Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere to paint Microsoft and everything they do in a negative light. I'd suggest these people either suck it up now, or stop whining about how Wikipedia is being gamed and use their considerable energy and time to work the website's bureaucracy. $Deity knows they're going to need it. I loved this part of that Groklaw article:
For anyone involved with OOXML on the Microsoft side, this is sweet revenge. Hoisted by their own petard and so on. I think it's funny as hell.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
[citation needed]
-knewter
I remember that the Budweiser article read like a marketing brochure one time, but it appears to have been cleaned up. The worst offender I've seen is the Debeers. I went there once after reading an article about successful marketing of diamonds for wedding rings in Japan, and was shocked to find that it didn't even have a history page (it now does). Revisions of the article from it's early days gave me a pretty good idea of it's history. You can see a great deal of controversy via it's talk page.
It's obviously in Microsoft's best interest to highlight these issues with ODF, even though the same sentiment, "flawed and imcomplete", could also be applied to any of their own file formats...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Which conveniently omits that ODF was submitted under PAS - the process for reviewing and approving something that's already a standard and is already in use. ODF officially started the standardization process in OASIS in December of 2002, starting from the StarOffice format.
As for OASIS's track record, I refer you to http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/ that lists the standards they've originated. These include DocBook and a large number of SOAP-related standards. That's hardly "no track record at all". And their heavy concentration in XML-based standards makes them a good place for another XML-based standard.
As far as I can tell, the problem here is that the article is not bending the truth to match the usual reality-distorted pro-ODF bias expected by slashdot users and other FSF goons.
Let's start with this statement:
In the ODF article, Alex Brown bends the truth to make it seem like no one is supporting ODF, and that it is a flawed and incomplete standard.
It seems to be like he doesn't fail to bend the truth. It's a flawed and incomplete standard, in some ways it is vague, in others it's simply inconsistent.
Let's take tracked changes for instance, a feature in ODF 1.1 which pretends to be complete. The reality is that the standard is so vague and broken that the most popular implementation, Google Docs, ignores the standard entirely, implementing changes in their proprietary system. Microsoft simply solves the problem by disabling the functionality in order to avoid future breaking.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/13/tracked-changes.aspx
Let's not talk about ODF 1.2 either, since its only a working draft.
So Microsoft was somehow able to do a perfect by the letter implementation of the ODF 1.1 (the current standard) spec, and yet they haven't got full interoperability with OpenOffice? It sounds an awful lot like Sun took a very liberal interpretation of their vague standard and are now standing by their wonky mess of source code (Ooo) as the standard-- similar to Solaris and POSIX. Thats unacceptable, ODF passed the standards bodies, not OpenOffice.org.
The fact that Microsoft could create one of the only correct implementations of the ODF standard and still break interoperability suggests that the ubiquity of this standard is largely overstated:
http://adjb.net/post/Notes-on-Document-Conformance-and-Portability-4.aspx
There are arguments to be made on the subject of digging through Sun's source code to make this vague standard work, but then ODF violates the FSF's very quote bashing MS-OOXML:
"For any standard it is essential that it is implementable by any third party without necessity of cooperation by another company"
Source: http://fsfe.org/documents/msooxml-questions
So, you can't make interoperable ODF without referencing OpenOffice because it is vague and incomplete... but it's not a complete standard unless you don't have to rely on the assistance of a certain corporation (Sun) to implement it properly?
It sounds to me like ODF is locking functionality to Sun's software the same way DOC locks functionality to Microsoft Office. MS-OOXML may be wordy, but it turns out that you need a lot of words to make a complete office standard. ODF is a paper tiger, end of story. The problem slashdot points out here is simply a lack of reality-distorting pro-ODF bias... this "whisper campaign" might be the seeping shadow of "reality" in the reality of writing a complete and interoperable standard escapes Sun--leaving them with something terse but heavily marketed with a vicious and aggressive activist campaign by angel advertisers who fancy themselves freedom fighters.
Versus Rob Weir being a known paid anti-ooxml shill from IBM?
Yes, that way people who write articles on, let's say, Abortion, can be tracked down by radical pro-life "enforcers" and harassed or worse.
There's a reason why anonymous editing is allowed.
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