Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill 191
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."
Why the govt? Why not the fortune 500 companies? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Do they even make software anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure they buy in lots of software and rebrand it, they also copy a load of stuff and then try to bundle into their existing products. However, have they actually developed anything in the last year or two that did not suck and then disappear?
Well, of course they are... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks,
Mike
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:1, Insightful)
These formats have absolutely nothing to do with the
"which exist for legacy purposes only" (Score:5, Insightful)
Any conversion of such things should reasonably be done in the tool doing the file conversion, not in the file format itself.
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, an implementation that doesn't include these tags will not be disadvantaged in practical terms, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal. Because what this means is that Microsoft will be able to say, quite truthfully, that only Microsoft can offer a 100%-compliant implementation of the standard. This is not how open standards should be - the whole purpose of open standards is to level the playing field and let products compete on their true merits. Being able to wrap Asian text in exactly the same way as Word 6.0 for Macintosh is not a big advantage for the average American consumer, but what average American consumer is going to understand that when Microsoft says "OpenOffice.org is not 100% compliant!", they're talking about crap like that? The sole purpose of these tags is to enable Microsoft to use misleading advertising. This is not what standards are for.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if several people receive such emails, that doesn't prove it is from Microsoft. Is there any official reaction by them, or proof that it came from an official Microsoft email account?
Regardless of this matter, the push for ODF is a great idea.
Re:Why the govt? Why not the fortune 500 companies (Score:2, Insightful)
Firstly - "chickenfeed" on Windows and MS Office? Are you insane? Have you ever been involved in procurement for the Microsoft tools? I'm guessing not, as then you'd realise just how expensive it is to provide Windows, Office and a few other bits and bobs for a 10,000+ strong userbase. Either that or you're Bill Gates and several million dollars is chickenfeed to you.
Secondly - yes, Excel is a popular platform, but not just amongst managers. It's one of the few tools that most office based employees use on a regular basis, far more so than Word, Access and in quite a lot of cases even more so than the web. I know plenty of users who don't have a clue how to use websites and find them intimidating but are still comfortable with Excel, as they have to do their reporting through it and use it for home accounts etc. As such, while it's not an ideal platform for developers, interoperability and much more, it is pretty damned useful for putting out straightforward productivity tools that don't scare the general public.
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with this statement is that Office 2007 still contains most of the code base for Office 95, and it contains the code of every Office version thereafter. So unless you know something I don't know -- there is no way to be sure that "the OpenXML format is completely open for every feature" of Office 2007.
The second problem is that during its anti-trust case, Bill Gates was on the record saying that his Office Suite wasn't tied to his Operating System, and that some kind of wall was erected between those two divisions so they couldn't talk to each other and share undocumented features, when in fact current analysis of their leaked code -- shows the exact opposite -- that their Office suite was indeed and (still is) closely intermingled with their OS at the undocumented system's calls level.
So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you must not only know something I don't, but you must also be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this subject, since he either lied under oath about this particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what was happening at the source code implementation level.
In either case, I'm not even sure why we're even discussing this. If you have to argue, and if I have to take your word for it, that a particular piece of closed source code, inside an "open" data format, does nothing that's needed by Office 2007, then this "open" format is not really open -- is it?
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because you don't understand the context. XML isn't for making documents easy for *people* to read and understand, it's for making documents easy for *programs* to read and understand.
It's far easier to make a computer program read and understand the XML excerpt you quoted than it is to make a computer program read and understand a document that, when encoded, looks like binary gibberish.
That said, even though I'm no XML expert, the XML you displayed looked pretty easy to understand to me.
Re:Personally... (Score:4, Insightful)
A law that dictates that ODF is used for the state's documents does not exclude any vendor from the market. Microsoft is welcome to add ODF support to its office suite, but refuses to do so. In other words, they are excluding themselves from competing by not supporting ODF. Instead of adding support for ODF, they try to push states to standardize on their format instead.
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:3, Insightful)
What would be most easy to read for a computerprogram would probably some "binary gibberish" as this could be more or less a dump of the RAM portion that deals with the document (not unlike the old
If nothing else, you could explain to me why hardly any file format before the 90's was based on formats similar to XML...
Re:Why the govt? Why not the fortune 500 companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:1, Insightful)
You may as well claim that C is not a standardised programming languages and should not be used because some compilers implement non-standard language extensions.
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:2, Insightful)
> must not only know something I don't, but you must also
> be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this
> subject, since he either lied under oath about this
> particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what
> was happening at the source code implementation level.
It is on record that M$ has even lied to its own staff about development/release timeframes.
The bottom line is that M$ is not a corporation that can be trusted.
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't "have" to go back to the application to read the file. If you do not understand the difference between "you can" and "you have to", then I pity your existence.
On the other hand, with closed formats -- and for all practical purposes this includes MS OOXML -- you can't go back to the source, so you do have to use the original app.
Re:Allow Me to Summarize (Score:3, Insightful)
That's certainly an advantage, but the biggest benefit is the existence of standardized XML parsing libraries. Other formats, like \nattribute:value\n, are just as human readable.
No, it's quite clear. The < > indicate a tag; the w: indicates the namespace of the tag; some tags have attributes. Closing tags have a / before the >. The semantics of tag names and attributes are defined by the "w" namespace. Different text is encoded by different tags, which seem to indicate formatting information. The tags indicate that, for example, the text "This is a " is modified by the p, r and t tags. XML is really a meta-language; the "w" namespace indicates the "language" of each tag.
It's not the processing that makes it easy or hard for a program to read, it's the encoding. If there were a standard way to describe binary tags, then that would be almost as good as the standard way to describe text tags used by XML.
A programmer looking at the XML encoded stuff knows what the tags are; they're the parts surrounded by %gt; %lt; etc. that I described above. He doesn't have to, though, because he can use his standard XML library. A programmer looking at a binary encoding doesn't have any such indicators, so it's harder to make a computer program that parses a binary format. He has to know what the format is ahead of time and make his own read() calls or whatever.
The computers of that time were so slow that the overhead imposed by text-based protocols was significant. Even today, for some applications it is significant and for some it is not. Some XML parsers make a function call, or allocate memory, for each tag.