Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill

ZJMX writes "Microsoft is going through its email and phone lists asking people to support their opposition to California A.B. 1668 — 'Open Document Format, Open Source' — by writing to the California Assemblymen involved in this bill (contact info in the link). Apparently they fear that California will join Massachusetts in wanting documents based on open standards in their government. Let's see if this community can raise as much support for the California ODF bill as Microsoft can raise opposition."

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[swab79]

As I understand it, the Microsoft format is not open but just an XML wrapper around their old .doc format. They still don't open up on how to implement their format.

Re:Why the govt? Why not the fortune 500 companies

[MichaelSmith]

Corporate America is not demanding true interoperability and a level playing field for their vendors. Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors. Or these people are really dumb.

Excel is the only thing they know. Manager cred is based on the beauty of your spreadsheet programming. If they saved the chickenfeed which gets spent on windows and MS office then they would have to save the larger amount they spend on junkets and bonuses. And that is never going to happen.

Keys: politeness ; personal contact ; information

[Anonymous Coward]

When contacting people, please remember what is crucial:

Be polite - this will make them much more likely to listen. If you are feeling angry, take a walk outside, have a nice snack then come back when you are calmed down.

Make personal contact - fax or phone where you can; reinforce emails by calling up to check that they got them. Write your own letter, based on somebody elses template if you need, but with your own information. If they promise to look into it, call back later to find out what they found out.

State clearly your relationship to them - resident of the state / local business / supporter / floating voter etc. Always find a reason why they should take notice of you. Identify yourself clearly and let them call you back later (better to give a business phone or mobile so that they don't call you at home during election campaign time though)

Give information - links to pages about problems [grokdoc.net] - specific links to ODF sites [odfalliance.org] or the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] etc. to show alternatives. However, read through those pages yourself and pick out and explain specific points from them that you think are important.

Be efficient. Make your point early; don't drown them in extra information; Say only things which you think are important.

Be original. Give specific information about your position and how you will benefit from alternative solutions. Show that you care about it and why.

Dear Mr Leno;

I am the owner of a small web hosting company. I am writing to support "California A.B. 1668 : Open Document Format, Open Source.". We would like to be able to automatically send out pre-filled billing forms from our billing system and expect all our customers to be able to complete them easily. Unfortuantely, the current de-facto standard for documents is Microsofts .doc format and that is too complex for us to be able to add it to the billing system. A new alteranative exists in the ISO standard Open Document Format. If that was widely adopted our problem would be solved. Unfortuantely, Microsoft is trying to block this adoption by having a fake new standard based on .doc. This isn't really a standard because it doesn't fully specifiy how the format works (please see http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections [grokdoc.net] section 10.2 "Cloning the behaviour of proprietary applications") and is far to big for us to deal with, let alone be a reasonably reviewed ISO standard ( see http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections [grokdoc.net] secton 11 "Ecma 376 cannot be adequately evaluated within the 30-day evaluation period")

We believe that if Microsofts standard is blocked and the Open Document Format is standardised for state use, in future we would be able to rely on it's availability everywhere and our buisiness would be able to work much better with its customers.

As you know well, we are strongly committed to supporting the good of our state and my wife and I have often run coffee mornings for the state assembly which you have attended yourself. We think that this bill would clearly improve life in our state and look forward to hearing that you are committed to supporting it.

Best Regards
Jason R Kovacs Jr.

Re:Why the govt? Why not the fortune 500 companies

[Pecisk]

Surprise, _yes_, Microsoft lobbies IT managers and even managers from higher levels. And they have done it some much that managers already have used to it and assumes it as "natural" right to have "gifts" from Microsoft. Not to blame only Microsoft entirely, it is common "marketing style" of lot of companies who produces so-so products.

It is corruption? yes. Corruption is still corruption, whatever government or shareholder's company is involved. However, you will have hard time to convince those managers not to accept these presents. Because overall atmosphere and dignity in such jobs are long gone. Only if you inform heavily shareholders you maybe will do something.

Not only in Cali

[npace]

Apparently, it happened in Florida also. State Representative Ed Homan added the use of open standards to a bill in state senate. A day later, he was visited by three people from Microsoft. The bill about the open standards was rejected. http://uf.freeculture.org/2007/04/01/legislature-2 007-state-of-florida-it/ [freeculture.org]

Re:Personally...

[couchslug]

This isn't about vendor preference, it's about freedom of public access to public documents.
For the public to allow vendor lock and depend on a single vendor for future access because they accepted a vendor standard is "just plain stupid".

No vendor whould be forced out, but the product the public entities buy would be standardized.

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[init100]

These formats have absolutely nothing to do with the .DOC format. .DOC was literally a memory dump of the data structures. The XML files are well structured. Style and content are highly separated. They are quite easy to read and understand.

Quite easy to read and understand?

Open XML:

<w:p>
<w:r><w:t>This is a </w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:rPr><w:b /></w:rPr><w:t>very basic</w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:t> document </w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:rPr><w:i /></w:rPr><w:t>with some</w:t></w:r>
<w:r><w:t> formatting, and a </w:t></w:r><w:hyperlink w:rel="rId4" w:history="1">
<w:r><w:rPr><w:rStyle w:val="Hyperlink" /></w:rPr><w:t>hyperlink</w:t></w:r>
</w:hyperlink>
</w:p>

I wouldn't call that easy to read and understand.

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[LO0G]

You mean like these [msdn.com] legacy tags that only OpenOffice can implement? (yeah, I know it's a Microsoft site, but the only other reference I was able to find was this [slashdot.org] /. post).

According to Microsoft, the only way those legacy tags will ever be found is if they came from a document that was created by an old version of Office. So it should be really easy to verify if current versions of office ever produce those "legacy" tags.

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[imroy]

There are a few tags which are not explicit in their implementation which exist for legacy purposes only, such as supporting defunct features found in Word 95. These formats have absolutely nothing to do with the .DOC format. .DOC was literally a memory dump of the data structures. The XML files are well structured. Style and content are highly separated. They are quite easy to read and understand.

Sorry mate, but bullshit. Yes, the DOC format was an object serialization of the in-memory format. But OOXML is no saint by any measure. Not only does it include references to Word 95, but also Word 6.0, Word 5.0, Word 97, Word 2002, and Wordperfect 6.x [slashdot.org]. It also references several Word/Office versions on the Macintosh, because heavens forbid MS make a cross-platform application that works the same on both Windows and Mac. It even references east Asian font rendering in a specific version of Word. And note I say "references", because that's all the standard does. Finding out what all those different versions of MS Office did on both Windows and Macintosh, and possibly also for different languages or regions of the world is left up to anyone trying to implement Microsoft's "Open" Office XML format. Even though the documentation for OOXML is huge compared to ODF, these details are still not included.

So please tell me, what do these few tags/attributes do?

• lineWrapLikeWord6
• mwSmallCaps
• shapeLayoutLikeWW8
• truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6
• useWord2002TableStyleRules
• useWord97LineBreakRules
• wpJustification
• shapeLayoutLikeWW8

Anyone claiming OOXML is in any way comparable to ODF is either misinformed and/or a shill. As we can see with this story, MS has a lot of money and influence to throw around for the purpose of muddying the waters and making OOXML look like a viable "standard".

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[shaitand]

shhh don't tell anyone but OpenOffice is open source. Anyone can look at the code and see how to implement anything in it. Including any tags.

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[swillden]

Try the OpenDoc equivalent:

<text:p text:style-name="Standard">This is a
<text:span text:style-name="T1">very basic </text:span>
<text:span text:style-name="T2">document </text:span>
<text:span text:style-name="T3">with some </text:span>
<text:span text:style-name="T4">formatting, and a </text:span>
<text:a xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="http://slashdot.org/">hyperlink</text: a>
</text:p>

Of course, I omitted the declarations of text styles T1 through T4, but they're also pretty clear.

It looks like Microsoft has tried to make their tags very compact for some reason, perhaps in a mistaken effort to reduce file size. That's foolish since any XML-based format is going to result in large file sizes unless compressed, and if you're compressing anyway, more verbose and hence more self-explanatory tag names don't cost anything[*]. Personally, I find the OpenDoc version to be much clearer. I also think it's much better to apply style attributes to text spans, rather than to define tags that implement specific stylistic effects (bold, italic, etc.).

IMO, OpenDoc is not only more open, it's clearer and better-designed as well.

[*] Given a perfect compression algorithm, the cost of using more verbose tags is precisely zero, because the longer tags don't increase the entropy of the file. The reality, of course, is that compression algorithms aren't perfect, and there may be a small cost, but in practice the algorithms are good enough that the cost is negligible, particularly for large documents where it really matters.

Re:"which exist for legacy purposes only"

[killjoe]

"Any conversion of such things should reasonably be done in the tool doing the file conversion, not in the file format itself."

Any by a strange coincidence only MS tools will be able to convert them.

Re:Allow Me to Summarize

[thephotoman]

OpenOffice is not under the GPL. It's under the LGPL, which allows for most of it to be in the proprietary StarOffice, which is still around.