Re: [tlug] Stand Up for OpenOffice!!

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jean-Christophe Helary writes:

 > My understanding is that even though the change is a top-down thing->  
 > practically speaking you can't put anything on an official machine if  
 > the boss does not agree <- but it comes from a lot of lobying from  
 > the French community. They are really _that_ active.

That's one of the things I really like about the French. :-)

 > >> I think a lot of places that are required to adopt ISO practices
 > >> will have to move to ODF and thus to OOo in the middle term. ODF is
 > >> still young as an ISO standard (March)
 > >
 > > Yeah, and it will have a "little" brother this coming March, most
 > > likely, called "ISO OOXML".  So Microsoft will have its own open
 > > document format with ISO sanction.  We can hope it goes the way of OSI
 > > :-).
 > 
 > Do you think the 6000 pages will make it through the process ? I've  
 > heard that some parts of the document were incontradiction with other  
 > ISO standards etc.

I don't know about the process for resolving contradictions in the
ISO, so I can't really speak to that.

I do know that (1) it is relatively easy to get an ECMA standard
reissued as an ISO standard, and (2) Rick Jeliffe, who is a respected
O'Reilly author and expert on XML standards, is on record as saying
that claims that OOXML are in contradiction are generally FUD and the
rest can be resolved fairly easily with Microsoft help.  N.B. Jeliffe
has been saying that for a while; that is why Microsoft asked him to
edit Wikipedia, not the other way around.

So yes, I do expect it to get through the process, and on the fast
track.

To be honest, although anything that is 6000 pages long is almost
certainly a bad standard (think "OSI"), even in this case I think
having a bad standard is better than having no standard.  ISO
standards are not mandates unless the market or the government demands
them.  In the case of the market, you can just ignore it unless you
claim conformance.  Who is going to do that, except Microsoft?  So
this binds them (only a little bit), and everybody else is free to
adopt ODF.  And they will, unless clients get bought off and actually
write OOXML conformance into RFPs.  But then Microsoft is
contractually obliged to implement those 6000 pages.

Sure, it provides a tool for Microsoft to leverage its market share,
but they don't really need one.  As a practical matter, backward
compatibility with Office formats is a requirement that clients are
going to specify.  So this is of some use to those who want to try to
compete with Microsoft, because it provides (admittedly ambiguous and
incomplete) documentation for those formats.  On balance, a net loss
for Redmond, and a net gain for the world.

Also, AIUI the ODF claims of complete backward compatibility to MS
Office are FUD.  It's true, as claimed, that there are provisions in
ODF for extensions, but what I've heard is that in practice the only
one that really promises to preserve all of the semantics of legacy
Office documents is embedding as a foreign object (either a binary or
OOXML).  But the ODF standard allows conforming applications to ignore
those embedded objects completely!  So for clients who really need
guaranteed full backward compatibility, OOXML will be the way to go.
(I suppose in fact the number who truly need it will be zero, but lots
will believe they need it. :-)

Of course merely preserving the data for another app to handle is the
only practical way to go *for the standard*.  And of course I expect
*implementations* of ODF (such as OOo) to do a good job (maybe even
perfect, eventually) of rendering or translating legacy Office
formats.  I just wish the good guys would stop behaving like
hysterical fanboy marketroids, and admit that all they are
guaranteeing is a promise of best effort.