04.07.08

The Somewhat Overlooked Menaces of OOXML, Demonstrated by News

Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Deception, Office Suites, Bill Gates, Patents, Standard, OpenDocument, Antitrust, Open XML, FOSS, Africa, ISO at 4:55 am by Roy Schestowitz

OOXML is trouble to the IT industry and everyone knows it, even those who are close to Microsoft and therefore seek to capitalise on the anti-competitive nature of OOXML.

We already know about the lying, the cheating, the bullying and the bribes which this OOXML fiasco has involved. We have it all documented. This makes standards less important as a whole, but there are some implications that tend to escape people’s attention and we present some of them here, particularly in light of the news. Be warned that this very partial, but hopefully informative as far as the topics covered are concerned.

Preservation

We wrote quite a lot in the past about document formats and their relationship with digital preservation (or curation). The nature of lock-in is typically adverse to the notion of future access. You will find material of interest in:

• OpenXML is Really Funny (But It's a Joke That Can Cost Lives)
• Open Standards and the GPL in the United Kingdom
• Has OOXML 'Funny Business' Already Reached Australia and India?
• OpenDocument Format Wins in Malaysia
• Lobbying for Lockin, Courtesy of a Monopoly Abuser and Its New Partners
• Microsoft Still Not Interested in the ISO Standard, Unless Its Theirs
• Quick Mention: OpenDocument Format and the Digital Preservation Advantage
• OOXML: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
• Videos: Open Standards' Role in Enabling Access at Crucial Times
• Quick Mention: More OOXML Issues Named and Explained
• Lobbying by OOXML Proxies and Death by OOXML Binaries

Here comes a very timely April 2008 special from IEEE Spectrum. The referenced page speaks of death of digital media, which is related to the loss of digital access due to antiquated, unmaintained or poorly documented formats, such as OOXML.

A storage device can become obsolete in less than two years, as this timeline shows

Death of Digital Media: Jaz! Clik! Sparq! In no time, some of these storage devices leaped into oblivion. The media may survive, but will anyone be able to read them?

It’s a slideshow by the way. Worth watching. The new Abiword 2.6 already supports ODF, mind you, which Microsoft Office cannot (not properly anyway). What is Microsoft waiting for? OOXML is truly incapable of preservation information because nobody will ever implement it , not even Microsoft itself.

Software Patents

Another important issue developers mustn’t lose sight of is software patents. OOXML has heaps of them and this makes fertile ground for patents ambush, as stressed by the article “Buy, Cheat, Steal, and Lie: The OOXML Story”.

A 2007 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit may end up coming back to haunt Microsoft in their ongoing U.S. antitrust battle. The case revolved around claims by Broadcom that Qualcomm had deliberately included its patents in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System standard in order to create a monopoly for its products. The appeals court held that if a company acts deceptively to gain adoption of a standard that then results in a monopoly to their advantage, they can be held to have violated anti-trust laws, irrespective of their right to determine the use of their patents. Interestingly enough, the Court of Appeals ruling relies on a Federal Trade Commission ruling which in turn relied on — drumroll, please — United States v. Microsoft, the very case that put MS under supervision in the first place.

All we can say is, we hope that with this many available avenues, something is done to rectify the farce acted out over the last several months.

Microsoft was last caught lying about this anti-GPL OSP only over a week ago, just in time for the key decision. More examples of patent ambush (OOXML included) you can find in:

• Patent News: Fear, Trolling, Abuse, Threats, and Dismissal
• Patent FUD Has People Talking About Reform, But Talk is No Walk
• Intellectual Abuse and The Sad State of the Patent System
• Countries Worldwide Express Concern About OOXML Patents
• Software Patents and Patent Trolls on the Offensive
• Software Patents and Standards are Inherently Incompatible
• Microsoft's Brian Jones Assembles OOXML Patent Portfolio
• Quick Mention: ISO Receives Warning About Microsoft's OpenAmbush XML
• Microsoft's Latest: Want Olympics on Linux? Get Mono (and Pay 'Patent Tax')
• Proposed Patent Reform No Cure for Patent Trolls
• Microsoft's Software Patent Injection and Other Insanities

Web ‘Infection’

Bill Gates once spoke about adding proprietary Office extensions to the Web browser and the World Wide Web. Here is just one of the E-mails that show this. [PDF].

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 9:44 AM
To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky
Cc: Paul Mariz
Subject: Office rendering

One thing we have got to change is our strategy — allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by OTHER PEOPLES BROWSERS is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to to destroy Windows.

We showed several more examples here, all based on Microsoft’s own words, which were extracted from antitrust exhibits.

Now they can possibly add what Rob Weir called “Open HTML” the other day to their Web browser. They might call it an ‘open’ (ISO-approved) standard instead of a “proprietary extensions”. Since it is just a proprietary format with Windows dependencies and GPL incompatibilities in place, Microsoft can try to break the Web further while using the ISO that it bought as a shield against complaints.

Shall you complain about ‘Open HTML’-based sites (maybe even government-tied), Microsoft would point at ISO’s directions and so would the government, which was seen selling out for proprietary XAML before. That’s just what makes it so outrageous and dangerous.

Competition

OOXML harms real competition. It puts Microsoft at the centre of the document universe and has everyone else enslaved to it.

We recently included a video of Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who spoke about standards and competition. She realised that OOXML, much like software patents, is seriously anti-competitive. She urged against both.

We mentioned around the same time also a bad follow-up article where Microsoft, in response, threw some mud — so to speak — declaring or at least by implication characterising advocates of Free software as “anti-industry”, “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Microsoft”.

Professor Derek Keats, whom we mentioned many times before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], has published a letter to explain why this rebuttal was utterly deceiving, to say the very least.

Shuttleworth is of course part of the IT industry. His company, Canonical, is a business based on FOSS. Canonical’s revenue comes from implementing FOSS business models. There are many other companies, including fairly substantial multinationals, that use FOSS and hybrid FOSS/proprietary business models to gain revenue. Among them are Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, Red Hat and others.

[…]

The minister talked about the need for open standards. Who would implement such standards but the IT industry? The article presents the impression that the minister’s call for open standards is somehow against that very industry. The article clearly sets up the notion of FOSS and open standards as being anti-Microsoft, which is equally absurd. If the particular standard that is at the heart of current debate is accepted, Microsoft will obviously be one of its implementers because to do otherwise would be suicide.

It is a shame to see that Microsoft’s brainwash in the media even required such an obvious clarification. When will the company stop daemonising Free software? █

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