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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.
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.
Maybe you could suggest the wiki entry be deleted. It doesn't sound like this guys posts have enough external reference points to hold itself up, and it doesn't sound like it is relevent enough to warrant a wiki article... There was a thing a while back about how wikipedia was clearing out those kind of entries. Just a thought.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
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 wouldn't use MS' ODF, last time I wanted to export ODF from MS Office, I used the plug in provided by Sun microsystems. I haven't used it lately, but it's up to version 3.1. Last version I used was 1.1.
Sun ODF Plugin
A whisper campaign is when you tell outright lies in private that you would never dare to say in public, because they are so outrageously false that you would be immediately challenged on it. Saying that Microsoft products are buggy, etc., is not a whisper campaign, because we can and do say this publicly without fear of contradiction.
I heard that ODF documents created in, say, OpenOffice weren't entirely compatible with AbiWord.
Here is a simple study.
Any spec is going to have some ambiguity about how things should be handled in some cases, so compatibility will always depend, to some degree, on whether or not software authors want to be compatible with other implementations. As ODF matures, more of the details will get nailed down, and there should be less compatibility wiggle-room.
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.
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.
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.
Still a deception either way, right? The whisper campaign in the bar would not work if you announced who you worked for. It only works because the recipient of the whisper is kept from the entire truth.
Versus Rob Weir being a known paid anti-ooxml shill from IBM?