Summary: Just like a filmography-style mafia, Microsoft and its allies proceed from corrupting ISO to bashing ODF from the inside and trying to control it too
MICROSOFT MAY hope that people will forget what it did for OOXML, but the past returns to haunt as more abusive behaviour gets seen. In light of the i4i case for instance [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], Jomar Silva raises the point that Microsoft lied about patents in OOXML, with the assistance of its special friend Alex Brown [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21].
They also defined the coordinator of the BRM, Alex Brown (who also played a crucial role in the outcome of OpenXML, but that’s subject for another post, because I didn’t revealed yet all I saw in Geneva), and he publishes on his blog a FAQ with the rules of the BRM. This FAQ also circulated as an official ISO document, and can be found here.
Look what is written in this document:
4.1 Will IPR issues be discussed at the BRM?
No. IPR issues in this process are the exclusive preserve of the ITTF. IPR decisions have previously been delegated by all the ISO and IEC members (NBs) to the CEOs of IEC and ISO, and they in turn have examined them and found no outstanding problems. NBs seeking reassurance in such matters must pursue them through other avenues than the BRM.
In other words, the CEOs of ISO and IEC (the highest authorities of the two entities) had assessed the intellectual property issues on OpenXML and found nothing, so no committee around the world have to worry about the issue… I remember that I’ve asked about it few times, and the answer was always the same: “Kid, you are doubting the CEOs of ISO and IEC ?”… but what about the i4i litigation ?
[...]
Most of the ECMA delegates I know are Microsoft employees or business partners of the company. This staff can be anything but “uninformed” and therefore I can’t believe that ECMA didn’t know the litigation too.
So, I change the question asked by Groklaw almost two months ago for a more direct one: Who fooled who?
We all know that all NBs was fooled, that the countries have seen their names used in an unscrupulous way and that all delegates and competent technicians has been fooled too.
I really hope to hear something from the cited parties cited, and I believe that all International Society expect the same. We no longer live in a world where a nonsense fact like this can be accepted, and I’ll not stop until I find an answer (and I know I’m not alone in this quest).
I also would like to know from the ISO/IEC what they have to say about all this. They knew the i4i litigation ?
To finalize, I appeal again to CEOs of ISO and IEC: The G-20 is a reality, and it’s never too late to correct an injustice !
In the comments, the president of the FFII writes:
ISO should pull down the ISO29500 immediately.
No one can implement this specification safely.
ISO29500 should be withdrawn “Now”.
Georg C. F. Greve, the founder of the FSFE, writes about the above: “The first rule of the #OOXML club? Don’t talk about the legal problems!”
Rob Weir has more to say about the role of Alex Brown:
Curiously, NBs were asked to make their final decision without actually seeing the text of the standard they were being asked to approve. ISO leadership denied requests from several NBs, a formal SC34 resolution requesting this text, as well as NB appeals, all which asked to have access to the “final DIS” text that would eventually be published. The ISO chief, in his response to the NB appeals, called the final text of OOXML “irrelevant” (prophetic words, indeed!) and would only permit NBs to have access to a list of over 1,000 resolutions from the BRM, many of which gave great editing discretion to the Microsoft consultant who would eventually produce the final text of the specification.
I discussed why the lack of a final DIS text was a problem back in May 2008:
We are currently approaching a two month period where NB’s can lodge an appeal against OOXML. Ordinarily, one of the grounds for appeal would be if the Project Editor did not faithfully carry out the editing instructions approved at the BRM. For example, if he failed to make approved changes, made changes that were not authorized, or introduced new errors when applying the approved changes. But with no final DIS text, the NB’s are unable to make any appeals on those grounds. By delaying the release of the final DIS text, JTC1 is preventing NB’s from exercising their rights.
Would you make thousands of changes to code and then not allow anyone to test it, and then release it internationally? Of course not. Doing so would amount to professional malpractice. But that is essentially what ISO did with OOXML.
Weir is very careful not to mention names (personalising issues), but it’s obvious who’s who, not to mention the current role these people play in derailing ODF. We shall come to this in a moment. To say that ISO was “gamed” is an understatement. ISO was hijacked and a lot of people corrupted and bribed. There is extensive evidence to show this.
The second in a series of events that will bring together implementors of OASIS OpenDocument Format/ISO 26300 to unilaterally test and discuss implementation issues of ODF with each other. All ODF implementors and/or those looking into the matter are invited to participate in this event on behalf of the Netherlands government and OpenDoc Society.
We wrote about those plugfests before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8910, 11, 12]. Microsoft (and its ecosystem) attended plugfests to throw some criticism at this standard, which it hates but at the same time must watch over. Alex Brown’s friend, who has always been hostile towards ODF, drops Microsoft’s talking points to be used against ODF while Microsoft’s Doug Mahugh makes fun of ODF as well. Those who are not employees of Microsoft often feed the company by insulting ODF “by proxy”, so to speak.
“Those who are not employees of Microsoft often feed the company by insulting ODF “by proxy”, so to speak.”In the latest example seen above, we are witnessing a familiar old pattern of deception. As our reader puts it, “Microsoft is able to spin it as Microsoft vs 1 company (either IBM or Sun depending on the circumstances) with amnesia about the rest. Via OASIS, 600 companies, universities and government agencies were behind the initial development of the first try at a universal office format. About two dozen were taking the lead in development.” This politicisation of the issue (courtesy of Microsoft) has gone on for years.
Microsoft is still striving to control ODF like it controls ISO and Weir must be polite. That’s probably why he also omits names and does not write about the OOXML scandals as much as he used to.
Microsoft’s hijack attempts affect not only the ODF TC. Watch who is involved in the Document Interoperability Initiative: Microsoft, Microsoft allies, and Microsoft-funded groups.
* I’ll be covering the Office 2010 extensions (as was covered by the Office program managers in last month’s DII workshop in Redmond). I will also present the latest news on how we’re working to improve ODF interoperability between Office and other popular applications, and talk about our plans for the future.
* Alex Brown will be covering present and future plans for the Office-o-tron validator project.
* Klaus-Peter Eckert of Fraunhofer FOKUS will present the latest status of the document test library project and other work Fraunhofer is doing to improve interoperability.
Microsoft attempts to control the whole thing, including so-called interoperability. We showed a lot of evidence before [1, 2, 3].
Even in Wikipedia, ODF-hostile content gets injected into the article about ODF by the Microsoft folks, as last shown some days ago. Some references to Microsoft blogs are now being removed, as well as the poison that they have injected.
A more detailed account of how Microsoft subverts Wikipedia (on ODF) can be found in, e.g.:
I suppose this [OOXML] is “global” in a sense, in the same way one could stage an “International Food Festival” and then have McDonalds show up and contribute a Big Mac from the U.S., a Big Mac from Germany, a Big Mac from the Ivory Coast, a Big Mac from Finland and another Big Mac from Brazil and so on. Certainly, you could claim this was “international”, but you would be laughed right out of the festival if you did.
[...]
Evidently there is no one capable of fixing this. ISO says that domination by a single corporation is not their responsibility, because only NBs vote and each NB determines its own participation rules. But individual NBs also don’t see a problem, because any single one of them only has one Microsoft employee at the meeting. So the NB itself is not necessary stuffed (although that does happens occasionally as well). So by placing Microsoft employees in many NB delegations and putting the overflow into the Ecma delegation, Microsoft can still dominate the ISO committee and not trigger a rule violation in ISO or in any NB.
This is essentially how Microsoft hacked ISO. Now that the flaw has been demonstrated, any large international corporation with sufficient funds and interest can exploit it as well. So long as the rules remain as they are, ISO is vulnerable. ISO defends this criticism by pointing out what good work they’ve done in the past, and how they rarely have problems of this kind before. But this shows little appreciation for the nature of the problem which have been demonstrated. It is like arguing that a newly discovered (though long latent) security flaw in an operating system is insignificant because you’ve never had an attack before now. Of course, this misses the point entirely. Once the vulnerability is known and publicly exploited, you’re living on borrowed time until you can secure the system. Today ISO is living on borrowed time and is very close to becoming a Microsoft-infested zombie server.
The author, Rob Weir, is already being heckled by Microsoft employees and their MVPs, who try to change the topic of discussion because defending corruption is so much more difficult. Sadly, Weir is perhaps too shy to admit that he is not happy with the company that attacked ODF so viciously and now forks it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] sitting on the ODF table.
To repeat an old analogical expression, Microsoft wants to stick its finger in all the pies, including Linux and Free software (or “open source”) where it is doing the same type of routine.
Microsoft and its army of partners have their limits though. They did not manage to stuff OSI like they did stuff ISO, so they created their own separate entity [1, 2, 3, 4], akin to OOXML. Jason Brooks, writing on the subject in his latest column, thinks that this could lead to flames.
For its part, the FSF has spent the summer alternately blasting individuals and groups for and warning them against using or adopting technologies distributed or even invented by Microsoft. For instance, the FSF this summer launched a Website devoted to cataloging the “sins” of Windows 7 and has weighed in on multiple occasions as to why, despite what Microsoft promises, no open-source developer should code in Microsoft’s C#.
As Groklaw showed a few days ago, Novell is a big part of this problem [1, 2]. Groklaw received flak for saying so. The Mono-Nono Web site adds:
For one thing, PJ has a bit of experience dealing with such nastiness. The irony of course is that she gained it while investigating SCOs attacks on Linux, and will probably be using it for Team Mono and Friends attacks on Freedom now! There’s a certain symmetry to that, I think.
Another thing is that I’ve noticed that the pro-Mono attacks are looking a bit faded lately.
I guess that’s what happens when you keep attacking honest people truly interested in Freedom and your basic weapons are ad hominem and disinformation.
Microsoft is no different from any other proprietary vendor in this regard. The like sof IBM and Oracle and SAP have all had to find their own ways of coexisting with FOSS.
This is not so accurate. Microsoft is unique for the reason shown below (which still applies). █
“Microsoft is unique among proprietary software companies: they are the only ones who have actively tried to kill Open Source and Free Software. It’s not often someone wants to be your friend after trying to kill you for ten years, but such change is cause for suspicion.”
Summary: The SC34 Bellevue Plenary Report is leaked to reveal what ISO had in mind when hosting a meeting in Microsoft’s own turf
ON SATURDAY we wrote about how Microsoft had put ODF under more control outside OASIS. Trips to Seattle tend to have this effect. Someone has just leaked to us the official SC34 Bellevue Plenary Report (there is also Seattle in there), which ought to have been public information had ISO actually been as transparent as it should be. Maybe it is already available somewhere, but we failed to find it.
ISO’s take on software patents is different from that of OASIS, so the report is passed around with this observation:
OPEN ISSUE: What is the IP status of Defect Reports and other communications submitted to OASIS via the TC liaison member? OASIS generally operates a slightly different IP policy to JTC 1. (Rob Weir to report back)
Microsoft has XML patents that are land mines and weapons of FUD. We wrote about this in:
NB experts will be encouraged to participate in the responsible SC 34 WG, and to bring their ideas for amendment/revision to the WG, so that these can be discussed with the OASIS ODF TC and any agreed technical work can then be initiated in the ODF TC and worked on jointly by ODF TC and SC 34 experts, including the NB experts.
But SC34 is already a Microsoft-stuffed panel [1, 2]. They should be kept away from ODF. This group is given too much control over ODF, e.g.:
4. That SC 34 request OASIS to forward to SC 34 all necessary contributions to enable a subdivision of the project to align with ODF v1.1.
There is also this:
Recommendation to SC 34 Plenary
1. That SC 34 establish a new Working Group as follows:
Title: OpenDocument Format
Scope and Terms of reference: All SC 34 projects and activities relating to the maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format.
Collaboration with the OASIS ODF TC in the maintenance of and other work exclusively related to ISO/IEC 26300, in accordance with the joint maintenance principles and procedures agreed by OASIS and JTC 1 (documents N 1148 and N 1149). This includes all projects and activities related to ISO/IEC 26300 previously carried out by WG 1 and Ad Hoc Group 3.
The rest is in the 25-page document[PDF], which shows how the regrettable decision came about. █
It sure sounds like that dreaded attempt of ISO/Microsoft to take control of ODF, at the expense of OASIS. SC34 is already stuffed with Microsoft people [1, 2], most of whom have their interests disguised. It’s worth remembering that this is an SC34 meeting near Microsoft which is responsible for everything and it’s Microsoft employees who seem most pleased. Henrion from FFII is rightly angry, arguing that one should “Scrap ISO. They have a stupid system of physical meetings around the planet. I don´t have the money to travel to such meetings.”
This SC34 meeting at Microsoft sure seems to have served as a stepping stone in the hijack of ODF, which Groklaw warned about one year ago. Simon Phipps from Sun is seemingly unhappy. He asks Brown (Microsoft mole and OOXML convenor): “What responsibility does SC34 have for ODF beyond forwarding mail to OASIS?” Later he tells a Microsoft employee: “SC34’s role in ODF maintenance probably matches the Linux Foundation’s role in Windows maintenance following your kernel code drop”
Phipps is referring to this incident, which we last mentioned here. Rob Weir just posts this Q&A, leaving no clear indication of how he feels about this development, into which he could as well be pressured. “Rob Weir tells more than we probably want to know,” argues Glyn Moody.
Question: So who owns ODF maintenance?
Rob: The OASIS ODF TC owns the maintenance of the OASIS ODF standard, and WG6 will own this activity for the equivalent ISO/IEC text. However, neither committee has absolute freedom of action, both being governed by applicable procedural rules of their parent organizations, as well as various joint agreements between OASIS and JTC1.
Given the corruption at ISO [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], is this a safe bet? How did it come about and whose proposal was it?
NZOSS has also just reminded the world of XML and OOXML patents from Microsoft. This is a subject that we wrote about in:
Charles from the OpenOffice.org community had this to say:
I remember that a while ago, as I was attending a heated debate on the (in)famous standardization of OOXML. As we were arguing with Microsoft on some specification details, I happened to state all aloud that when it came to this level of security (the topic at hand was security), I had my concerns about the encryption algorithms used by the specification but that in a general sense, security relied much more on the application using the format and the underlying operating system’s level of security. I went on to say that for the specific portion of the draft we were studying, it was perhaps not necessary to waste time in fruitless discussion topics including the behavior of OOXML documents in a computer undergoing a nuclear attack and being stored on a computer facing a zero-day exploit at the same time.
The response from one of the Microsoft spokesperson (I’m coining the term spokesperson, because that’s what most of them were) was a mix of surprise and sarcasm: “Everything happens, today you agreed with us!”. And indeed, I agreed that we should continue to parse the 6000 pages-long draft.
[...]
First, one has to realize that what happened with Novell was a serious attack against free and open source software, but although it was serious, it never really had any major impact on the community itself. What I mean by this is not that it did not have any real and damageable impact on IT companies or OEMs that ended up signing phony IPR deals with Microsoft. I mean by this that when you step back, you end up realizing that even the divide it caused inside the community is not that big. There is no one “Novell Community” and one “FSF Community”. That simply never existed except perhaps in the mind of some Mono architects. Even the Ximian bunch is very much on its own; influential because of monthly salaries, and time to devout to their pet projects and an historical ties to Gnome. But aside this, the impact of the Novell agreement with Microsoft did not create the “grand schism” many feared or wished at that time.
[...]
That is, I believe, the essence of the Codeplex foundation that is described here. Forget the code for a moment, and you might come to the conclusion that either Microsoft wants to impose its views on patents and copyrights, or it genuinely wants to have a fruitful conversation with the free and open source software community. The former is only surprising as it shows a different approach, but if that’s what they’re looking to achieve I am afraid that unless this foundation comes out with the most radically innovative ideas in the field of IPR, it will fail, for the first reason I outlined much above: Nobody will follow them, except people and constituencies who have an economic incentive to do that. What is left, then, if not the latter hypothesis? Interesting times are ahead of us in this case.
Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation is still seen as undesirable by the Free software community. It’s a subject we covered in:
The next few posts will carry on along the same theme. Microsoft’s bear hugs are merely attempts to take control of its very own opposition, thus diffusing it. █
Summary: New ODF Alliance member, more vendor support, and another, more positive way to view the i4i ruling
EARLIER in the week we wrote about a Fraunhofer study which seemed rather biased. As Glyn Moody put it, there “seems there’s some kind of Microsoft involvement.”
This study addressed and even defended the existence of multiple standards that achieve more or less the same things; one is based on the proprietary format (and platform) of a company that bribed people and corrupted an international standards body in order to call it a “standard”, whereas the other is created and backed by many organisations, universities, and governments. Needless to say, the former is Microsoft’s OOXML and the latter is ODF.
There is news right now about the ODF Alliance growing even larger thanks to the addition of Spotlight Cameroun. In its formal announcement, Spotlight Cameroun states:
OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the only open standard for office applications, and it is completely vendor neutral.
Malaysia and Brazil are among the prominent supporters of ODF (at a national level) and over in Brazil we now find more evidence of this. In addition, IDG News Service reveals that TextEdit has ODF support, which is wonderful news. It has been the case for quite some time, but we’ve just learned that TextEdit will soon support saving as ODF, which is important progress.
The most recent version of TextEdit, included with OS X Leopard, can open and edit files in rich text format (.rtf), Microsoft’s old and new Word formats (.doc and .docx), and the OpenDocument format (.odt) used by OpenOffice.
TextEdit is quite widely used, so it’s another notable win for ODF.
In previous posts about i4i [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] we mentioned the fact that ODF FUD had arrived from the Burton and Gartner groups, both of which work with Microsoft. Sadly enough, even afterBurton and Gartner were proven wrong, a few people are adding harmful noise via Twitter by linking to Asay’s misinformed post and adding remarks like this: “Of course i4i says ODF doesn’t infringe, they have no money..”
No, it’s because it’s technically not infringing. Such remarks are worth correcting as they only encourage uncertainty and doubt. The real patent danger to ODF is Microsoft, not i4i. See for example:
“We saw [i4i's products] some time ago, and met its creators,” said Sawicki in the Jan. 23, 2003, e-mail. “Word 11 will make it obsolete. It looks great for XP though.” Word 11 was the in-development code name for what was eventually dubbed Word 2003.
Specifically, Microsoft must refrain from “selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the United States any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM file (containing custom XML),” the injunction states.
Microsoft Word, though popular, is not the exclusive word-processing software of the federal government. For example, the Joint Forces Command is using OpenOffice for a small experimental project, said Kathleen Jabs, a spokeswoman at the command.
The i4i case is another massive opportunity for ODF (and ODF-compliant software) to gain dominance. It is good news to open standards, not just to Free software, to which ODF is a prerequisite but not the other way around. █
“Microsoft sees what’s coming. Things like Word and Excel sort of like a drug now getting ready to go generic.”
2009-08-12: The ISO/IEC Working Group on OOXML Wants to Unfix the Leap-Year Bug and Related Date-and-Time Problems.
[...]
What can be done?
Obviously, if you’re involved in your national mirror committee for ISO/IEC JTC1, you can seek to convince it or the relevant subcommittee that 29500-4 / DCOR 1 should be disapproved. The international deadline for this ballot is 2009-11-04; the national member bodies of ISO will generally have deadlines in October by when the concerned committees mus make their decisions. While you’re at it, you’ll also be able to argue for disapproval of 29500-4 / FPDAM 1 (for related but different reasons, I’ll explain about that in one of my next blog postings.)
If you’re working for a software company and it is not yet active in the appropriate national standardization organization, you should probably become active to make sure that the emerging body of international standards in the field of IT isn’t going to get in the way of your company’s business interests. This recommendation for getting involved applies even if your company is a small one, or if software development isn’t the firm’s main line of business.
While putting it in the way of the weasel, Microsoft is still pushing what amounts to a tax on users of Internet standards. It’s doing this through a definition of “open standards” that would mandate standards bodies to consider patented, protected, proprietary technology on a par with truly open source offerings, and encourage companies to pack standards bodies with paid employees.
[...]
If we learned anything at all from the OOXML debate it should be that any Microsoft victory there was pyrrhic. ODF was able to deliver on its standard long before Microsoft could change its own proprietary scheme to match what the ISO approved.
If their idea was to bury ODF in the corporate user base, Microsoft failed, and at enormous cost, both to its own reputation and that of the ISO standards bodies.
At the same time, Microsoft is accumulating patents on XML. See for example:
It sounds like a joke. But, it’s real and it’s anything but a joke for Microsoft. Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has issued an injunction (PDF Link) that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.”
<http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/i4ivMS-412.pdf>. Some interesting and arrogant quotes from Microsoft emails about the XML editor market. Read from the last two lines of page 39 through the first line of page 41. Best quote is the one in parentheses that ends on page 41.
Can’t believe those guys actually thought they had a prayer of monopolizing the market for low to medium power XML editors, particularly with Word native file support XML read/write filters.
My prediction: Microsoft either wins a stay pending appeal in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit or it settles promptly thereafter. Don’t think Microsoft can just remove the code for custom XML schemas embedded in the Microsoft flavor of OOXML overnight. OOXML also serves as the communications protocol between Office and Sharepoint Server, and from there via a conversion to XAML to a bunch of other Microsoft server side Office apps. To boot, Microsoft did the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, a backport of the Office 2007 native file support APIs modularized with the old API’s replicated in the wrapper. That’s now running in Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2008 for the Mac. Interesting blog article here by a Softie describing what they did. Rick Shaut, Open XML Converters for Mac Office, Buggin’ My Life Away (7 December 2006), <http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2006/12/07/open-xml-converters-for-mac-office.aspx>.
So they’ve got this huge mass of apps that are interdependent and really can’t tweak just one of them. To boot, they’ve got institutional customers already dependent on custom XML schemas, not to mention a few developers who’ve created apps with custom XML
dependencies. See e.g., this article by Doug Mahugh describing the custom XML dependency of Mindjet’s round trip interop with MS Word. <http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/09/16/758090.aspx>.
Did I mention that Microsoft halting the sale of Word 2007 and 2003 in the U.S. is about as likely as the crack of dawn getting raped and thereby impregnated? Microsoft either wins that stay pending appeal or it settles.
When software patents cause so much trouble, it is made a lot easier to explain why they should be deprecated. █
MR. OLSON [For Microsoft]: The ‘580 patent is a program, as I understand it, that’s married to a computer, has to be married to a computer in order to be patented.
JUSTICE SCALIA: You can’t patent, you know, on-off, on-off code in the abstract, can you?
MR. OLSON [For Microsoft]: That’s correct, Justice Scalia.
JUSTICE SCALIA: There needs to be a device.
MR. OLSON [For Microsoft]: An idea or a principle, two plus two equals four can’t be patented. It has to be put together with a machine and made into a usable device.
The core of US Patent 7,571,169 which Microsoft was granted on August 4th refers to – “A word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML”.
OOXML is covered by Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise, under which Microsoft promised not prosecute those using, selling, or distributing its implementation of a technology or specification.
As we explained before, the Open Specification Promise is a useless promise, based on the analysis of the SFLC. The Microsoft Community Promise is equally bad.
Some days ago we mentioned how Microsoft was trying to sneak RAND into Free software [1, 2] and The Source has a posting about that too.
Recent statements on “Open” give an interesting insight into Microsoft constancy.
In a recent Computerworld UK blog entry, Glyn Moody takes Microsoft’s Jason Matusox to task for conflating “balance” with “open”. I won’t re-hash the points Mr. Moody makes so read his article too!
Basically, Mr. Matusox laments how Open standards are “overbalanced” in favor of standard implementors, and someone is insisting that standards must have “no IP restrictions”.
Yes, Microsoft wants more software patents in standards, and it wants them to be enforceable even in the EU.
Imagine that, Apple supported Microsoft’s Open XML standardisation. Last week’s Microsoft Office 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) release wasn’t so great for Mac Office users, a giant fail. You know, when you have a multibillion office applications business who would dare to test for crossplattform compatibility of file formats before you release the service pack? No one does, and Apple users of the Mac Office were absolutely outraged about Open XML.
In more positive news, the OpenOffice.org team says that version 3.1 of the software has already been downloaded over 20 million times (in 3 months), meaning that OpenOffice.org is downloaded over 6.6 million times per month. It is a staggering pace which does not take into account the exchange of CDs, including GNU/Linux CDs, which typically contain OpenOffice.org out of the box (and in the repositories). Heise has this new article about a collaboration plug-in for OpenOffice 3.1 users
Secure collaboration specialist TeamDrive has released its collaboration plug-in for OpenOffice 3.1 users. The freeware TeamDrive OpenOffice Plug-in allows users to create and share TeamDrive “SharedSpaces” (shared folders) and includes version control. Users can exchange files securely and view version comments or open previous versions of a document.
This ought to show the power of OpenOffice.org, which is often the target of heavy Microsoft FUD. OpenOffice.org — like Mozilla Firefox — thrives in a sea of extensions. █
Summary: Behind the scenes, Microsoft is trying to promote RAND (for standards) while acquiring more XML patents
YESTERDAY we made the front page of Slashdot, which wrote about Microsoft’s XML patents. Sadly, the editor did not link directly to any of our recent writings that specifically tackle the patent issue, e.g.:
Microsoft tries to redefine “open” (again) such that it's inclusive of RAND clauses, i.e. software patents and royalties. The latest attempt from Matusow has not escaped the attention of Glyn Moody, who dissected it and wrote:
The logic here seems to be that there would be an “imbalance” in open standards if it were insisted that patents were excluded – because balance obviously means having standards with and without patents. While it’s true that creates a “balance”, it’s a purely linguistic one; the fact is that patent-encumbered standards requiring licensing fees cannot, by definition, be open. That’s because they do not create level playing fields: there is always one or more players who occupy a privileged position. So the balance is entirely specious.
[...]
Against that background of a standardisation process being bent to breaking point, complaints about the *balance* of open standards ring rather hollow.
800 pages of defect for OOXML, here it is. ISO is such a transparent organisation that they are afraid of the web, and the public light of the blogosphere. Here is the leak for you.
Microsoft has resorted to a new methodology of justifying the existence of this highly-defective proprietary format. Apart from Microsoft spinners like Paul Thurrott, coverage came from IDG, which points out that:
Microsoft did not spell out how the file format “ballot” will appear to users, or what choices, other than ODF (Open Document Format), the open-source word processing, spreadsheet and presentation document standard, will be shown.
The above articles say absolutely nothing about Microsoft’s ODF implementation being defective in the sense that it is not interoperable [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
These days a number of organizations and ODF implementors are working together to organize a second ODF Plugfest in parallel with the upcoming OpenOffice.org Con 2009, that will take place in Orvieto (Italy) in November.
Casper also took the plunge on loading and quite quickly got stuff up and working, and with the commit he did right before I left his apartment, most of the features here should now be loading correctly from ODF.
Whatever your choice, there’s a fair chance you’ll be able to enjoy cross-office, cross-platform integration with a high level of accuracy, saving lots of time and trouble in getting the files to open and look the right way. Instead of working hard, you now have a set of tools that will toil for you.
So what options are available for UNIX/Linux systems? I have found there are six common office/productivity solutions for these platforms with which most of us are already familiar.
I have recently been in touch with Novell, the Open Document Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), and some of our local Legislators to find out what kind of movement we have here in the state of Utah and if an Open Standard is possible because ideally I would like to see state agencies step away from the proprietary formats used by Microsoft and Corel and use open formats. Many of our state agencies have been restricted from funding for expensive Microsoft products in support of Open Office. I long for a change that will require State and Local Government to use Open standards, but I realize that a change of this magnitude will take time and patience.
Microsoft is still trying to slow down ODF, to the degree that it can get away with. Microsoft is not a friend of ODF. █
“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!“
Summary: The SC34 Bellevue Plenary Report is leaked to reveal what ISO had in mind when hosting a meeting in Microsoft’s own turf
It sure sounds like that dreaded attempt of ISO/Microsoft to take control of ODF, at the expense of OASIS. SC34 is already stuffed with Microsoft people [
