Slashdot Log In
ODF Threat to Microsoft in US Governments Grows
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Mar 05, 2007 12:19 AM
from the cropping-up-everywhere dept.
from the cropping-up-everywhere dept.
Tookis writes "Another setback for Microsoft has cropped up in the space of document formats in government organizations. The state of California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement in the software used by state agencies. Similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota has added further to the pressure on Microsoft, which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007. The bill doesn't specify ODF by name, but instead requires the use of an open XML-based format."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
So how many States is that now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, California... anywhere else? I'm (happily) beginning to lose count!
More than one in five people and growing. (Score:3, Informative)
An AC taunts:
46 to go.
OK, let's take that to Google.
What's that 66/300, 22%? Better than 4/50 or 8% would suggest. California alone is better than 8%.
Don't worry, there will be more soon. States like NY, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, etc. usually follow the tech savvy lead of CA, TX and MA quickly.
History? (Score:5, Interesting)
X(HT)ML+CSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like, seriously, why not? Have we not been here before, going "so we need to separate content from display" and was not the eventual solution actually rather good. It took ten years or so to get adopted, but nobody is denying that css has made the web a less obnoxious place. There are no technical reasons why it can't be extended to all aspects of "office" publishing/collaboration, and indeed a book has been published using XML+CSS [princexml.com].
I know that ODF is "here now", and it must be an improvement over Office's internal format
Dave
Re:X(HT)ML+CSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
XHTML and CSS are mainly for representing information in a web browser, they are great for that. Word processing is in many ways a whole different world and it makes sense to have a different format there (though one also defined by XML like XHTML is). Namely, CSS lacks a lot of the physical positioning stuff that a word processor needs, concepts such as page breaks, and so on (some things it does have, but they are generally never implemented and probably aren't enough anyhow).
XHTML is also meant for people to hand-write, it's a simple markup representing simple text. Word processing is never marked up by hand, the documents can be very complex, and anyone not looking at the source programatically will indeed think that it's a memory dump between angle brackets. That doesn't mean that it's a bad format, it's just not meant to be read that way.
Really, I don't think XHTML is the solution everywhere and pretty much any format is fine in word processing land as long as its truly open (not in the MS sense) and text-based.
Parent
Re:X(HT)ML+CSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:X(HT)ML+CSS? (Score:5, Informative)
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/In
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/Fo
And let me know if you still think the ODF is merely a 'memory dump in angle brackets'. Maybe they could have reused a good chunk of CSS, but that would also require another type of basic parser in implementations. I imagine you've heard of expat, but can you name a standard CSS parser library? I can't, and once upon a time, I had CVS checkin privs on mozilla. Looks simple enough, but ask a web developer if they've ever heard of any major browser having CSS parser bugs.
And it looks like ODF's style definitions could maybe be generously described as CSS in XML, too. Regardless, I think you could make a pretty compelling argument that the layout needs that have historically driven CSS are a little different than a word processor's needs.
Back when I worked on Abiword, the native format was very similar to XHTML/CSS. Some arbitrary element renamings -- I believe our equivalent to the span tag was a single letter. The XML->XHTML conversion could probably have been handled by a simple sed script.
For styling, we reused as much CSS as possible. I learned about a lot of nifty stuff in CSS3 back then. I hope I get to use some of that stuff in browsers some day. But we were well on our way to the first draft of a hypothetical CSS3 Wordprocessor Module, too.
The OOXML format does strike me as a brain dead C struct to XML encoder, however. And I know the doc format pretty well, having written some non-trivial bits of wvware and the Abiword importer based on it. We actually once got a post on the mailing list from someone looking for technical details on the doc format, and they had been forwarded to us by someone on the Word team at Microsoft. They had their time-tested, battle-worn libraries, but we apparently understood the actual bytes better than anyone still in Redmond willing to help a customer.
But we all knew that the eventual Microsoft XML format was going to be silly. Actually, it's better than I expected. I had considered the occasional base64 encoded binary data structure wrapped in data tag to be a very real possibility.
In my mind, the most astonishing thing is that they just arbitrarily reimplemented -- and generally very badly -- dozens of standards, including many ISO ones. I believe they have several novel timestamp definitions, in addition to ISO's.
I'm pretty shocked anyone is even pretending OOXML is being seriously considered as a standard. I think some people in Redmond had an April Fools' joke get out of hand. If this gets standardized, I expect the next anti-trust case is going to reveal internal Microsoft emails with text such as "holy shit, ISO just accepted our format!"
PS: I don't even read slashdot that often anymore, and I very rarely post. The few times I do, I generally don't even bother to login. But it would seem that several years of random hobbyist open-source contributions have made me quite likely one of the top few dozen or so domain experts on the planet regarding your specific post. I thought that was kind of amusing myself. I don't know if anyone actually cares, but my name is Justin Bradford, and I imagine google retains sufficient evidence of what I claim.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And, microsoft have always been a member of OASIS and could have contributed to the development of the ODF format, it was their choice not to.
Pretty lame excuse (Score:3, Insightful)
This argument doesn't wash AT ALL. Firstly, OO.o manages to be pretty full-featured using ODF as its native format and nobody has produced a list of MS Office features that could not be represented in an ODF-structured document. Being that MS is supposedly a participant in the
Incorrect Name (Score:2, Informative)
It's a Long Way to Tipperary (Score:5, Insightful)
People get the monopolies they deserve (Score:3, Insightful)
On the one hand we have a company which names it's format as "Office Open XML" but documents the specification in over 6000 pages, using words like Windows 95 compatibility etc. in that spec... and yet has the guts to call it Open.
And on the other, we have a bunch of companies who have realised it's no use talking to the 800lb gorilla.. and basically decided to implement a workable, truly open, truly interoperable format... that may or may no
In the year 2120 (Score:3, Funny)
"Nothing." I say, "...except for a string of text...'Girly men'."
"Girly men?" He says.
"Yes," I repeat, "Girly men!".
"Well damn it!" he says, "In what context??"
Why is ODF a threat to Microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)
threat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft can easily implement ODF. Microsoft will probably lose some marketshare, but they will do that anyway, and Office will probably still remain the dominant office suite either way.
So, let's go easy on language like "threat".
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Informative)
"The new bill, introduced by Californian Democrat Mark Leno, does not name ODF specifically but has stipulated that by 2008 agencies must be equipped to store and exchange documents in an open, XML-based format. Although the name of Microsoft's Office Open XML suggests that it would match the requirement, it is in fact a proprietary format that would fail the open standards test."
It appears that there are more tests than the blurb indicates as to what 'standard' would be accepted. To me, it sounds like the bill is not trying to eliminate any possible software, simply to ensure that all of the apps can play nice together. That is common sense to me as far as business decisions go.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Interesting)
While I hope ISO doesn't ratify OOXLM, the cynical side of me doesn't have a whole lot of hope.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If Microsoft is successful in getting ISO approval, this California law will essentially get read in as a "Thou shalt use Microsoft Office" law.
When last I read of this law it included two provisions that seemed to indicate otherwise. One provision was a requirement that the standard be maintained by a third party with a process for altering and improving the standard that allowed input from multiple parties. The second provision was a requirement of several, independent implementations. Regardless of MS's shenanigans I don't see how they would meet either criteria. MS completely controls "Open"XML and third parties are not allowed to make change
Re:Define Open (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as multiple implementations... Corel has already announced support for OOXML in Word Perfect. Novel has announced an OOXML filter for OpenOffice.org suite. Lovely how Novel's little deal is more and more of a stab in the back.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's "Office Open XML" name reminds me of a lot of country names. Whenever one hears a country called "The People's Democratic Republic of [Somewhere]", one instantly knows it is communist. Likewise, anything "open" from Microsoft is invariably closed. Microsoft does develop open formats (like RTF) but they are never advertised as such.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Let me fix that for you (Score:3)
RTF is example of what can go wrong (Score:5, Informative)
When WordPerfect generated RTF documents did not open correctly in Microsoft Word, WordPerfect was blamed. To this day, RTF implementations struggle to be bug for bug compatible with Microsoft's original buggy implementation and the stadnard is next to useless.
Parent
The pitiful RTF pseudostandard (Score:3, Informative)
* March 1987: An article by Nancy Andrews of Microsoft.
* 1.0 June 1992: Word (for Windows) v2
* 1.1 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.2 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.3 January 1994:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In recent history, conquering powers often used the promise of communist economic reform to gain support for their dictatorship. Once they have power, they implement systems that are neither communist nor democratic.
The US government brainwashed the populace so well during the cold war that most Americans don't even know the difference between an economic and governm
Common sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Open Source" doesn't create competition, open file formats do - by allowing companies to pick and choose which software they use to work with their documents.
The sooner people figure this out, the better.
Parent
Open source and competition (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. The important thing is to create *COMPETITION*. "Open Source" doesn't create competition, open file formats do - by allowing companies to pick and choose which software they use to work with their documents.
Although I agree that open file formats create competition, I would also say that Open Source does create competition in the sense that if a company (or state) uses an Open Source program it can put several contractors in competition for the maintenance/development of the program.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we dare to dream of a world where you couldn't (and wouldn't have to) guess, with 99% accuracy, which office suite a company was using before you emailed them a document? The idea seems totally far fetched to me.
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Informative)
Dammit people, read the damn bill [ca.gov], it's quite short. It has a four part test for formats to be adopted.
It's not perfectly worded (what are internal and external?), and it's not a perfect list, but it's a quite reasonable starting place and it doesn't allow any of the hand-wringing excuses I'm seeing in these comments. This open document stuff has been being debated in the public sector for some years now. Politicians may be many things, but they're not incapable of reading.
I've written my California Assemblyperson, you can too [ca.gov].
Parent
Re: you can too - CA assemblyperson (Score:4, Funny)
I am a Louisiana resident who would like to ask you to support ODF as a standard file format for your state.
I do not reside in California, although I went there once for technical training and there was an earthquake.
I am not too eager to go back.
I assure you I will be writing my Louisiana assembly person about this issue in about 10 to 15 years when our state attempts to catch up to the rest of the country. Your state will be a role model for the rest of the nation.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Done and done. If that's all it takes for them to conquer the English language, boy, are we in trouble.
(Although, more seriously, did you know that Microsoft has its own dictionary [msn.com]? They haven't quite figured out how to embrace, extend, and extinguish those other, legacy dictionaries, but I'm sure they're working on it.)
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Informative)
The definition as per M$N Encarta - 4. comput publicly available computer system: a product or system whose internal features and interfaces can be used or modified by users or developers in any way they wish.
M$ obviously doesn't make use of M$N Encarta when it comes to defining there own software, perhaps the M$ marketdroids should look up words in their own dictionary before using them.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the job we want here?
Documents created with office software usually need to do a number of things, things that when described in plain text and all the associated markup must result in incredibly bloated files. For example, how do you save an embedded image? An embedded audio clip? An embedded video? Base
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Insightful)
> XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the
> job we want here?
As I understand it, the big advantage of using XML in ODF (don't know about OOXML) is that you can extract the actual content of your document as XML, change it, resave it and it all renders properly (this assumes that your styles etc. are set up correctly).
For example, in theory I should be able to create an empty document that just contains all my style info, insert *all* the content with appropriate pointers to the styles I want to use, save it, and then someone else can come along, open my document and read my content in their program of choice. If my raw content is XML (as is increasingly the case these days), I can fairly easily automate converting it to ODF format (just as I've been able to easily convert it to HTML, PDF and a bunch of other formats for a while now). ODF then becomes a simple "container" that anyone anywhere can use without needing any proprietary tools to do so.
I can then save my content as strict XML, then render it in whatever format the user requires. If they've got Acrobat, I'll give them a PDF file; if they've got OpenOffice or AbiWord, I'll give them an ODF doc; if they've got a Web browser, I'll give them HTML. *This* is the big plus of open document formats in general; the actual format of the document essentially becomes unimportant, since anyone who wants to look at it can do so in their tool of choice. If one tool is crappy, or becomes unavailable, or doesn't support e.g. Swahili, no problem - just find a different tool.
In terms of whether XML is the optimal format for this type of data in the first place, it's probably a good fit for almost all cases, as distinct from being a really great fit for only a few cases. Depending on how you define "better", it's not hard to come up with a better format for a book than:
<title>My document</title>
<subtitle>Written by me</subtitle>
<chapter>First chapter</chapter>
<chaptertext>The quick brown fox...</chaptertext>
However, XML is here now, works well enough, is insufficiently bad to try to replace it with something else (assuming that "something else" is actually better than XML), and a lot of tools and libraries (both free and commercial) exist that make working with it pretty straightforward.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Informative)
I have untarred several documents from the ODF family and found them easy to understand. I would suggest you do the same as the software to create these files is Free [operoffice.org]. If you can't be arsed to do that, then stop writing inane commentary. :)
The specification for ODF is available online [oasis-open.org]. Since that is the case, please attempt to read it before spouting-off about it being unreadable. It is 722 pages long, I've had a brief look at it and it seems very readable (better than that: it looks implementable!)
In my opinion Microsoft's format is neither XML, or open. It's binary, patentable cruft in an XML wrapper [grokdoc.net]. So it's best not to describe it as an 'XML Format' at all. The specification for this is reportedly 6,000 pages long. This is also available online [ecma-international.org].
The advantages of XML file formats are:
All of these were copied from the OpenOffice Web Site [openoffice.org], explanation of the items in that list can be found there.
Parent
Re:Define Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you heard that Microsoft hired it's own wikipedia contributer to (try to) control the spin on the OOXML and ODF pages?
And I guess you haven't heard about the parts of the OOXML "spec" that say something ot the effect of: "Word95Spacing - This tag means that document spacing should conform to that produced by Word95. That's too complicated to go into here, see Word95 for details."
This is a spec? This is open?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What you're failing to take into account is that Microsoft have a paid shill [arstechnica.com] editing Wikipedia for them.
OOXML is not open, see the list of objections [grokdoc.net]. Also ask yourself: if Microsoft wanted to use an open file format, why didn't they use ODF? They had plenty of time to implement it within Office 2007 and were asked to be part of ODF's development. Firstly the ignored it, now that it's gaining traction they're trying to destroy it with a competing 'standard'.
Re:Hooray for... (Score:4, Insightful)
The government is not forcing this on anyone. They have zero interest in forcing you or anyone else outside the government to use any given format. This is not Big Brother, this is a great case of the market economy at work! Microsoft's largest customer is saying that they they are in the market for a system that meets specific criteria. They don't care who provides it or where it comes from, just as long as it does what they need it to do. Now, the market decides who will provide them what they want.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The government, like any other organization, has the right to
Re:Hooray for... (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, California's government is supposed to let each of its agencies choose (or not choose) its own standard for documents, so that one part of the government can't communicate with another? Talk about mediocrity.
Parent
That's backward. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hooray for Government mandated mediocrity.
The only way applications can compete on merit is if they all use published standards to exchange information. No one can compete with secret formats and no public document should ever use one. Nothing but greed and fear of competition is keeping M$ from using ODF or inventing an equally well documented standard. Well, perhaps a little incompetence keeps them second rate.
Freedom means more than quality. (Score:5, Insightful)
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on; letting some kind of popularity contest decide what format is "better" is also a bad idea because that boils down to spending more on advertising (which, of course, Microsoft would love to do because they can spend millions on ads that never discuss the shortcomings of their products). Microsoft's track record on their
We can't afford to push aside the importance to citizens here: people need the freedom to print, copy, and publish documents whenever they want (even if some government or corporation deems it inappropriate) without overcoming digital restrictions. Governments shouldn't be allowed to spend taxpayer money on documents that deny users these freedoms.
Parent
Re:Not necessarily a "threat" at all (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea of open standards is compatibility and being able to make choices, not market-share and trying to force your software ideology on someone else, unless of course you're trying to hold on to a monopoly sustained by a closed standard.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Open source is a nice idea, but so is socialism.
Open source, like socialism, is often appropriate, like for public roads and schools. You, however, seem to be confusing open source with open standards. Not all the software that uses the ODF format is open source.
The revenue model for most open source software, is to give the software away and provide support at a premium price, or place ads in the software.
As someone who has worked his entire life at companies that worked on open source software, but who never worked at one that tried to survive on support revenue from them I find your comment to be misinformed. Support is not the most common revenue model for open source software. Are you sur