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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.
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.
Doesn't interoperability mean ability to work with diverse systems?
If users of MS Office share documents, that's not interoperability since they all use the same software family. You have to look at users who transfer documents back and forth between diverse software systems, eg MS Office, Open Office, Lotus Symphony, AppleWorks, etc.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions easy.
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
To summarize; Microsoft sabotaged the standards body with their own people to solidify OOXML as t h e standard. Despite their boldness in daylight to buy a standards body, the irony is; of all groups of people, governments are recognizing Microsoft to be nothing more than a Mobster/racketeer in shrink wrap.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Doesn't interoperability mean ability to work with diverse systems?
Yes and no. The hiccup is the semantics of 'diverse'.
I could, for example, argue that a random sampling of end users computers make for a collection of 'diverse systems'.
The wikipedia article you linked for example contains this bit of doublespeak:
According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms, interoperability is defined as follows: "The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units"
If you were to interpret 'functional units' to be end users PCs, then the most interoperable format is the one that works seamlessly on the most PCs.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions easy.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions *unnecessary*.
It's not a phenomenon limited to the office software industry, either; in the electricity distribution industry, for example, many very large organisations are watching what's happening in Portugal and Spain and have stated they want to incorporate that experience before they launch their own programmes of change.
Why? Simply because they're doing it first. I guess it's because they're smaller and a bit more agile, I don't know. But it's much cheaper to watch someone else make mistakes and follow blind alleys rather than take the risk on yourself. Risk is expensive.
So, the electricity world watches Iberia. The bureaucracies of the world will be watching Norway, make no mistake.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
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.
The government of Fredonia chooses .txt, ASCII, with \n line endings.
Unfortunately, US-ASCII does not contain all characters that Fredonians use.
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LOL. They had to give examples because what supposed to be mathematical and logical is ridden with decades of bugs.
ODF choose wisely to do it right way.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
In the context - file format standardization - your response makes absolutely no sense. Not in slightest.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
No, this, you dummy:
The "Doesn't mandate mistakes" alone made the whole debacle worth the pains.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Its not a standard if you have to "figure out how WP6 did it". A standard should detail how to do something. A recipe saying "Make the sauce the way KFC do it" cannot be followed by anyone except KFC. Similarly, OOXML contains instructions only Microsoft can follow exactly (although, funnily enough - they still fail at it.).
Nowhere in ODF does it say "Do it like they way we did it in that secret thing only we know about". Thats what makes it a standard.