ODF Threat to Microsoft in US Governments Grows 269
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."
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.
Incorrect Name (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Define Open (Score:2, Informative)
Later in the article it goes on to talk about criticism by the FSF, Sun and others "The essential premise behind some of this criticism, apart from several technical issues, is that Microsoft has standardised its proprietary format in order to prevent the widespread adoption of the OpenDocument format, which could threaten the dominance of Microsoft's own Office suite."
But surely if OOXML is as open as the wikipedia page (and everything I've heard) makes it sound, then it's just as open as ODF and there really is nothing to choose. Is this just the usual MS bashing, or is it really something that should concern the FOSS and open standards world?
Reading further in the article it is a little concerning that within the formats MS doesn't choose to use standards, such as avoiding SVG and MathML. It's also concerning that MS "incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year" due to using a non-standard date system for spreadsheets.
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. Sooner or later all of them do.
Microsoft will soon have to compete with something other than secret file formats and other dirty tricks. If Vista is the best they've got, it's over.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
Good ODF Word Processor? (Score:1, Informative)
I am looking for a word processor that can handle transitioning between 4 written/spoken languages (English, Norwegian, Spanish, and Hebrew) at least as well as Word does. When I switch between these languages in Word, the spelling and grammar checkers adapt to what I'm writing quite well. In fact, it even handles inserting single words or phrases from other languages pretty well.
The text/graphics quality in Word 2007 is amazing. I can manipulate tables extremely easily and it responds like lightning. I can find everything I need without looking very hard in Word 2003 and 2007 and I've never really bothered trying to "Learn" them.
Recently I needed to alter 2500 word processing documents in a batch to make a correction, I was able to write a script that did it painlessly.
When I develop applications that need to produce forms, I use Word since I can just use OLE Automation to control all components of the program.
When I make graphics using Visio, I can drop them into a Word document painlessly. In OpenOffice, it really destroys all my scaling by scaling some objects but not others.
So if anyone can recommend a word processor capable of competing with Word on these fronts, I would love to hear it.
Now regarding the document format? Well, as long as Office allows me to write scripts and use OLE automation, I can't really imagine a reason that I would need to deal with anything else.
For exchangability, well RTF is as good as anything else.
Oh.. and if anyone actually needs to read the document that doesn't have Word, I'm pretty sure there's a free viewer or I can send them a PDF
Re:Over-restrictive (Score:1, Informative)
<xml>
<title>bla</title>
<subtitle>bli</subtitle>
<content>this</content>
</xml>
Where the tag was added in a new version, or simply not supported (yet) by your parser. It can still _parse_ it, since it is XML, and keep it in the tree structure, even though it may not _render_ it. Subsequently, when saving the document, all information can be retained, even that information which the parser didn't understand. Most binary formats don't have this advantage, and the few that do are basically binary XML variants. The requirement for XML may be over-zealous, but it's a proven, standardized, format. It's probably a good idea.
Re:Compelling (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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 sure you understand how most open source software is developed?
What does the government have to do with it? The whole point of the open source model is that companies and governnments and organizations pay only for what they need and that no one else has needed. Assuming my company were to standardize on OpenOffice at work, but we needed it to be able to import one of our proprietary XML report formats, we might make some improvements to the import routines, maybe building a plug-in system so we did not clutter up the main product. We could do this using our own employees if we had the time and expertise or we could hire someone else. Our company is only acting in our own self interests, but at the same time our work benefits others. A thousand companies all doing this same thing and a hundred thousand using it and just reporting bugs and that is the common open source business model. Most open source is not developed by one dedicated company that is trying to make money off the software itself, rather it is created by the community who are trying to make money doing business which that software happens to facilitate. The only problem is when someone who does not understand this model starts calling it "socialism" and confuses people even more. The confusion is understandable because it is an application of common property, but it is very much part of capitalism, developed and shared for profit by the users, not out of some sort of selfless hippy idealism.
Re:History? (Score:1, Informative)
The ODF switch-over was supposed to happen January 1st, 2007.
It's not even close to starting, and I personally doubt it ever will.
Re:Define Open (Score:2, Informative)
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: Word v6
* 1.4 September 1995: Word v7 (Word 95)
* 1.5 April 1997: Word v8 (Word 97)
* 1.6 May 1999: Word v9 (Word 2000)
* 1.7 August 2001: Word v10 (Word 2002)
* 1.8 April 2004: Word v11 (Word 2003)
The above list happens to be more complete than any Microsoft document, for example way back in 2006 see here. [microsoft.com]
Re:X(HT)ML+CSS? (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.