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Study Says OOXML Unsuitable For Norwegian Government
angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML.)"
If Microsoft can get enough lock-in, even a small market can end up making them a lot of money with long term support and maintenance.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The government of Fredonia chooses .txt, ASCII, with \n line endings.
The OOXML-standardization backstory is pretty convoluted, so I'm not sure I can give an accurate summary, but as far as I can tell this is basically another round in the ongoing fight that seems to have, for some reason, been more active in Norway than elsewhere. The article mentions that the main author of this report was involved in the controversy at the ISO, and there was also a related controversy in one of Norway's national standards bodies.
Strange, that the name of the consultancy is Hypatia. She, after all, was a mathematician-philosopher who ascribed to Plotinus's ideal... that empirical research is inherently flawed, and only logic and mathematics can achieve truth.
I mean, there's a clear relationship here that I find very amusing. Microsoft's OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office, is not logically more interoperable due to the nature of what MS has done to the "open" standard.
Delicious allegory.
[1] DIFI is the Norwegian Agency responsible for the decision.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Because software costs money to make; but virtually no money to reproduce.
The Norwegian government likely spends somewhere between some hundreds of thousands and some millions on software that must interpret their chosen document format(ie. actual copies of an office suite, server-side components that generate documents in response to web input, data archive widgetry that needs to be able to read inside the files it stores, etc.) Those who must exchange documents with the Norwegian government presumably spend some millions more.
If that money is being spent on ODF-supporting software, the cost of ODF-supporting software goes down for everybody(or, more precisely, if they chose to build on OSS foundations, the cost for everybody stays the same, and the amount and quality available rises. If they end up going with something commercial, that commercial offering now has more customers across the same roughly fixed cost of development).
It isn't so much that Norway is a vital source of Microsoft revenue, as they likely aren't. It's that their future software demand is going to subsidize improvements to Microsoft's competitors, rather than being high-margin purchases of licences to code that Microsoft has already developed.
OOXML.. I'm a regular user of Openoffice. I'm pretty interested in it succeeding, and was pretty aware of the OOXML v. ODF issues a year ago. And still, when I saw the title of this article, my first thought for 10 seconds was... oh shit.. they're ditching Openoffice in Scandanavia! Almost like someone deliberately named OOXML to create a little confusion, isn't it?
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough. All governments and organizations believing, or pretending to believe, that OOXML is a standard now know they're fools, and/or not fooling anyone.
Plus hopefully the Norwegian government has produced a document explaining their position, that will be quotable for reference.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It's symptomatic.
The neat thing is, as more and more European governments make large scale use of ODF, the tool support should improve to match their needs. This makes it practical for more organizations to switch.
Why does this matter so much? Once one (now two) countries reject OOXML, it means it cannot become *the* international/European document standard for the public sector.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
It means something to those who care less about Microsoft's failure than they do about free formats' success.
It isn't OOXML, it is MOOXML.
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough.
Except nowhere does the original article say that OOXML is not a standard. It does say that it "is not a standard that's in sync with the way one looks at documents in 2010", but that is actually refering to it as a standard. It is a strange claim too, given that the standard must really be in sync with the way one looks a documents because it is used by the most popular office application out there.
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard")
The first thing to do is to look up the definition of the word.
For instance, A technical standard is an established norm or requirement.
Then you look up the facts relevant to the question. Office Open XML (also referred to as OOXML or Open XML) is an ISO/IEC standardized ZIP-compatible file format originally developed by Microsoft.
Now, I know your confusion stems from the many uses of the word "standard" (OOXML is clearly not a type of flag), but you're the one that sound like a fool when you say it's a lie that OOXML is a standard.
P.S. I hate Microsoft, I also hate disinformation. This is a fight between standards, don't pretend otherwise.
You can't take the sky from me...
There are many parts of the OOXML 'standard' which refer to documents not available to the public, or which say something along the lines of 'do this the way office 97 does it'. A standard must contain all the information necessary to implement it, or else it is incomplete and thus not a standard.
Plus hopefully the Norwegian government has produced a document explaining their position, that will be quotable for reference.
But nobody else can read it because they all use Microsoft Office :-P
(this is a joke)
MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1] So, if ODF is chosen as the standard in Norway, the Norwegian government is still free to buy copies of Microsoft Office, as long as it can do a good job of reading and writing ODF files.
Of course, Microsoft will still view this as some kind of defeat, because they would prefer their own standard be adopted; OOXML will be just as much of a lockin trap as the older binary Microsoft formats. If OOXML is adopted, everyone has to buy Microsoft Office; if ODF is adopted, everyone can choose from among many alternatives, several of which are completely free.
It is obvious why Microsoft would prefer OOXML adoption for government (and everywhere else). It is less obvious why government should adopt OOXML instead of ODF.
[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Last time I read about it, Office 2007 does not generate documents that comply with OOXML. Microsoft admitted that they would have to change their software to comply with their standard, and I think that might happen with the next release of Office.
Except nowhere does the original article say that OOXML is not a standard.
One thing that's always struck me about the name OOXML ("Office Open XML") is the confusion it stirs up with OpenOffice. Seems to me that it would have made more sense for Microsoft to highlight a distinction from its OSS competitor.
Unless, of course Microsoft's marketing department has been taking its cues from Monty Python:
"Are you the Judean People's Front?"
"Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea!"
So she was into string theory, was she?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One of the core principles behind a standard I think is that it is immutable. It is a fixed, a priori known way of doing things. So that as long as you write a document following the standard, everyone can read and lay-out that document correctly by just following that same standard. Even if the document is from 10 years ago, or longer. Such as the standard with which a CD is recorded.
But obviously not so for Microsoft:
"It's natural in the development of standards that the standards evolve. That's the nature of standards,"
says a MS representative as quoted in TFA. This as reaction to the allegation by the Norwegian committee that OOXML is "unstable" and thus unsuitable as standard.
Of course during the DEVELOPMENT a standard evolves, that's what development is about. After that it becomes a standard, and it becomes frozen to that standard. One can of course continue development, but that is going to be a new standard. An OOXML1.1 or so. Like with HTML which now and then gets an update in the form of a new standard.
It seems to me that MS with such a statement confirms that from the beginning didn't plan on this to be a true standard, but that it would be a basis for them to start tacking on proprietary extensions, that then would prevent the standard to work across platforms. Luckily Norway saw through that, calls the standard "unstable" and refuses to included it in "recommended formats" for government use.
The standard being proprietary has obviously nothing to do with it, as they happily do include Adobe's pdf format.
Does anyone have a link to the darned report itself?
Preferably, in English?
Thanks in advance if someone can help out.
Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings when voting for OOXML as a "standard"? Not only that, but it doesn't pass any kind of rigorous review as a standard... it is all but an XML representation of the original .doc format, just re-jiggered around, and is so convoluted that nobody but Microsoft has a hope of actually interoperating with it properly. And by the time someone might do so, they've got the next version out.
Seriously, just google around a bit:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/norwegian-standards-body-implodes-over-ooxml-controversy.ars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
1. Norway has decided to use ODF allmost a year ago ...and several other countries has choosen ODF too.
2. Denmark has NOT choosen ODF, "we" made a positive list which contains one item, ODF, but may be expanded if the requirements a met.
because it is used by the most popular office application out there
Really?! At the time OOXML was approved as a "standard", no conforming implementation existed. Microsoft expressed an intention of implementing it at some point in the future, but AFAIK they haven't yet done so. They also announced that they'd be supporting import/export of ODF before they supported OOXML. Have they changed this?
Except that not even Microsoft was able to write an OOXML-spec document writer. So no, it does not have everything necessary to implement it.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings
All this has absolutely nothing to do with what the grand parent asserted. Obarthelemy claimed that the author of the report didn't think that OOXML was a standard. This was not backed up by the article. Also, at no stage did I make any judgement on whether OOXML was a standard or not, so telling me to go look up Google is not relevant.
As it happens I am well aware of what went on during the standards approval process. I suggest that a flawed standard is still a standard. The current ODF standard has its own flaws too, which is how Microsoft was able to stick to the letter of the standard in their implementation and still get chided for not being compatible with OpenOffice.org. This means that ODF contains its own versions of the famous "do like Word97". Does that make it not a standard too?
Fortunately, the next version of the ODF standard will fix these limitations. I think a lot of the problems stemmed from not specifying the spreadsheet functions. While I can understand why they wouldn't want to fix the standard to a specific set of functions (thus limiting what each program can add), but they should at least have some base functions in it, and also have a known way of implementing program specific extra functions.
And how do you know this was because of incomplete standards doc? Were you on the MS Office team that was tasked with writing it?
Plus hopefully the Norwegian government has produced a document explaining their position, that will be quotable for reference.
Newsflash from Oslo. In a press conference today, the Norwegian Gov't said, "Bjork Bjork Bjork."
And that's *after* translation.
Original text: "Bjork Bjork Bjork."
A standard must contain all the information necessary to implement it, or else it is incomplete and thus not a standard.
Or point to other documents which are standards.
For instance, you could have the Microsoft VBA Specification. If that was complete, then both the OOXML/Document spec and the OOXML/Spreadsheet spec could refer to it, kinda' like a subroutine. (Note: I said if. I don't know, and don't think, that Microsoft has done this.)
Don't some of the RFCs do something like this?
Amusing little story:
"Norwegian" is split into two languages. "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk". Directly translated one is Book-language and New Norwegian.
Bokmål is based on danish with norwegian pronunciation (overly simplified of course).
Nynorsk is based on a multitude of dialects from a large area of Norway.
Microsoft used to only support office for Bokmål. They were told as long as it wasnt available as Nynorsk it could not be used in the public sector. They quickly produced a localized version in Nynorsk.
So the market has to be of -some- importance.
And the Norweigan government matters, why? They're probably a drop in the bucket for Microsoft's revenue.
Then why do Microsoft pursue any dissent in their corporate customers so strongly? And no.. I'm not going to cite examples. We have all heard of the crack sales teams descending on companies and governments who dare to leave the MS embrace, armed with the authority to practically give the MS products away rather than lose an influential customer. You are absolutely correct. A government switching away from Office is trivial. But only if you are counting licenses. If you count influence, then MS are in for a decidedly nasty future. And another government rejecting MS file formats is a bad thing for MS. Even a city local government is enough to make MS bring in the heavy negotiators. If the file format goes from essential to optional, then so does Office. Right.. Said my piece. Astroturf away.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
The Domino Effect
What a bunch of suckers the U.S. has become. On domestic issues, the Slashdot crowd is all gung-ho on open source. But as soon as someone mentions a foreign nation discarding some proprietary Merkin B.S. software, all principles and freedom ideals are thrown overboard. LOLOLOLO RETARDS!
The pattern is pretty similar to dictatorship and revolution...if one guy stands up against it, everybody is laughing, but somewhere someone is also standing up "Hey, if he can do it, I can do it, too!", and that's the point where the Domino-Effect kicks in.
I wonder instead if the government after this reevaluation will go on an ass-kicking spree on the iso committee that allowed it to exist in the first place http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/norwegian-standards-body-implodes-over-ooxml-controversy.ars
Original text: "Bjork Bjork Bjork."
Are you sure you don't mean "Björk Björk Björk"?
Max Tegmark, an eminent physicist, describes himself as an extreme platonist.
No, must've meant "Bjørk Bjørk Bjørk". They're Norwegian, after all.
You'll never find an unbiased source then. Your requirement is that someone must, ABSOLUTELY MUST, accept any and all proposals else they are partisan.
MSOOXML isn't even supported by Microsoft.
THAT is how unsupported MSOOXML is.
The standard being proprietary has obviously nothing to do with it, as they happily do include Adobe's pdf format.
PDF was approved as an ISO standard before OOXML was.
The most advanced country in the world is a trend setter for the rest. Bangladesh has tens of times the population of Norway, but I bet Microsoft doesn't care a lot about it.
Microsoft's Proprietary Office XML
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
"Birch birch birch" -- sounds like an eager beaver.
Then how the hell did they get an ISO certification? :S
Oh, crap, ISO is in the pocket of major industry players? :(
You can't take the sky from me...
I suppose it could just be MS incompetence. Do you have a better explanation of why MS haven't managed to get their own "standard" in their own product, despite years of work on that product whilst the standard was written?
Well if you followed the story on /. that is indeed quite true. Many MS-allies became member of ISO shortly before this vote (enough in numbers to swing it), and it caused serious controversy in the ISO committees of a.o. Norway. There have been many stories on /. about this voting process and, yes, alleged corruption and loss of integrity within ISO. The whole organisation's image has taken a serious hit with this saga. And these quotes from the MS spokesman confirm many people's fears: MS doesn't see standards as standard, but merely a guideline or starting point to implement their own way.
BING!
And that's the most expensive machine in the whole hospital. Aren't you lucky?!
The administration is coming!
Quick! Turn everything on!
I suspect that there are three basic factors there(these would be the same for any similar software outfit, not just Microsoft).
1. Localizing costs money, so you'll generally avoid it/drag your feet on it if you can(with the specific exception of charities whose mandate includes "maligned group X and the digital divide"). However, localizing doesn't cost all that much money, so for markets of any reasonable size, it will be in your economic interest to give in and localize(at least to some minimal standard) if you get the sense that it is, in fact, a hard requirement.
2. Even if localizing looks like an economically dubious idea, you really don't want to force your potential customer to develop an alternative to you. Because software is expensive to write and cheap to copy, the incumbent can almost always offer a price that, even if it is lower than they would like, makes developing an alternative economically stupid. The extreme case, of course, is just tolerating piracy. Up from there, is virtually any site licence discount that fits the situation. If, however, some not-strictly-economic factor(like some sort of government language accessability mandate) intervenes, than your potential customer may be forced to develop an alternative to you, no matter how nice the price you give them. And, once they develop their alternative, it too can be given away at virtually any price, since its development is now a sunk cost.
3. "Evil American Multinational spits on picturesque local language" just isn't good PR.
MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1]
[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software
steveha
Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did. And they open sourced their plugin for MS Office. What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs.. but I'm really curious. And it would appear I guessed right.
Original text: "Bjork Bjork Bjork."
Are you sure you don't mean "Björk Björk Björk"?
Actually, I *did* mean that, but didn't think SlashDot supported those characters.
I see from a follow up reply that both of us appear wrong, it's "Bjørk Bjørk Bjørk".
I guess THAT was the BEFORE translation text...
When Microsoft suddenly saw the need for a nynorsk version of Office after ignoring it for 20 years or so, it was because OpenOffice had already been translated. For a very short while, OpenOffice was the only legal option for schools. Its a great example of the leverage FLOSS can provide when wrestling with a monopolist.
Correct.
MS' OOXML file format is different from the ISO/IEC 29500 OOXML file format that MS bought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooxml#Application_support
MS will either have to change Office or buy yet another ISO standard to have a product that creates ISO compliant files!
For now, when you go for MS' lunch special, it's a white elephant on the menu.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Satandad? Would that be George Bush, senior?
Geeze, doesn't anyone brush up on their Muppets anymore? ;)
Cheers,
Hur, de hur de hur, dee dee, bum - Bork Bork Bork!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
But seriously, you make a very powerful point here:
I'm not Jewish (heck, I'm not anything religion-wise), but my wife spent some years teaching at a Jewish school, and I learned quite a lot about Judaism that I didn't know before. One thing I very much respect (for those that follow it) is the principle of tikkun olam , or the idea of repairing the world. I don't happen to think the world is busted, but the underlying ideal of being an involved and productive participant is very close to my own thoughts on at least part of what makes someone a good person.
Adding to the complexity, beauty, and learning of the world at large -- and not because you're forced to by any external factor, but because you are compelled to by your very nature. That sounds to me like a geek. :)
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Try the veal, I'll be here all decade...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
They are just waiting for the OOFDa standard to be finalized!