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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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