03.15.08
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenDocument, Europe, Open XML, OpenOffice, VBA, FOSS at 4:13 am by Roy Schestowitz
Europe for OpenDocument format and open source software
Just a couple of days after Europe’s quiet announcements (praising Free software and standards) we find yet another. It’s about Bristol, in the United Kingdom. [via Glyn Moody]
UK: Major cost reduction result of Bristol’s switch to Open Standards
Bristol City Council’s switch to StarOffice in 2005 has led to a major reduction of IT costs, says Gavin Beckett, the council’s ICT Strategy manager.
StarOffice is Sun Microsystems’ proprietary suite of office applications, which is based on the Open Source OpenOffice. In 2006 Bristol took the further step of adopting the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF).
Speaking at a conference on ODF in the Netherlands last month, Beckett said that implementing StarOffice for 5,500 desktops in Bristol saved 1.1 million GBP (1.4 million euro) in comparison to the total cost of implementing Microsoft Office. “The licences for StarOffice cost us 186,000 GBP (243,000 euro), in comparison to 1.4 million GBP (1.8 million euro) for MS Office.”
These major savings were offset slightly by extra time needed for implementing StarOffice. Implementation cost the city council 484,000 GBP (632,000 euro), double the estimate for MS Office. This was due to document conversion and training, said the IT Strategy manager. Explaining and troubleshooting the new office applications took several months more than planned.
If there was any setback or difficulty, guess what it was? Microsoft’s deliberate incompatibilities (boosted by the network effect), which are a result of the ‘extensions’ Microsoft last bragged about only a few days ago. Here is noooxml.org’s response to it:
Microsoft New Zealand representative wants competitors to make reverse engineering over their products. Standardizing the whole format would not permit Microsoft to have a ‘competitive’ advantage.
[…]
Sorry, but the macros are stored in a file format, so not defining how to interpret this data will lead to a competitive advantage for the company of Redmond, and will be a killer for interoperability. I don’t want to buy a Windows license and an Intel PC just to be able to decode their crappy format.
In light of the new set of documents from the ODF Alliance, also consider the text about OOXML implementation being a ‘community’… of just one company.
Unless there are multiple, competing, full implementations of OOXML, citizens will be faced with a choice of one – and only one – office suite based on OOXML, Microsoft Office. Until OOXML moves beyond its current single-vendor status, National Bodies should vote “No” (disapprove).
It remains to be seen what gets decided after an utterly broken BRM [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend 
View as PDF
10.07.07
Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Office Suites, Mono, SUN, OpenOffice, VBA at 3:32 pm by Roy Schestowitz
An interesting update from Sun Microsystems has shed some light on a recent misfortunate development where Novell went its own way with OpenOffice.org. In case you have not followed this, Kohei wrote his solver code under the JCA, which is acceptable. Then he joined Novell and decided to withdraw from the project, which led to conflicts and had Michael Meeks, whom we criticised before, pretty much fork the project.
To sum up: the decision whether the “Kohei solver” or any other of the components Novell holds back will be contributed to OOo or not is a decision of Novell, not of anybody else. Alleging something different is at least a misapprehension. And for whatever Michael Meeks is fighting, if he takes the work of others as a hostage in his crusade against the JCA, he shouldn’t blame others for its suffering.
Novell is clearly not the ‘hero’ that will rescue the world from the ‘evil’ JCA, but that’s what they would have you believe. As indicated in a comment I’ve left in the cited blog item, this is not the first time Novell seeks to ‘extend’ OpenOffice.org its own way, potentially introducing components that are tied to Microsoft (time bomb/Trojan horse). Come to think of VBA macros, OOXML, Mono, and a Windows advantage for OpenOffice.org. Why? Because, according to Ron Hovsepian, Microsoft would not permit these to be used outside Windows.
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
02.22.07
Posted in Boycott Novell, Microsoft, Office Suites, Patents, OpenOffice, VBA at 10:43 pm by Roy Schestowitz
The following exchange of words suggests that Novel could get sued over OpenOffice macros and even put other companies at risk.
This has direct implications to the guys at Novell who are working on VBA integration with OpenOffice.org. Sure, with the new partnership between Microsoft and Novell, customers of Novell would not get sued, but the Novell team themselves and all other OpenOffice.org users are at risk here. So it’s imperative the Microsoft provides an answer if closely related technologies to MSOOXML are also covered in this covenant, so it is possible for third parties to develop solutions.
This is not yet definite, but Boycott Novell raised this as a possible legal risk in the past. Security aside.
Related:
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
01.25.07
Posted in Boycott Novell, VBA, Virtualization at 7:44 am by Roy Schestowitz
Paying for changes to Wikipedia content by proxy is one thing, whilst paying a third party to discredit or attack someone is another. The latter case seems more severe because its consequences are often irreversible.
Consider financial backings for litigious battles that put in jeopardy a person or a company. If done indirectly, this avoids customer backlash and alienation, as demonstarted by the mistake made by Ballmer when he openly spoke about “balance-sheet liability”. We have witnessed fierce attacks embodies the form of SCO, which while backed by Microsoft, targetted companies that use GNU/Linux. I suspect that Linux distributors other than Novell are bound to become the next victim. The dark clouds that are cast by tsunamis of FUD make them a victim already. But what happens when one goes deeper and targets an individual rather than a large company? I caught an interesting bit in a new interview with Dr Andrew S Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix.
[Andrew S Tanenbaum:] A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me, from Minix, and therefore the intellectual property rights are unclear and therefore companies shouldn’t use Linux because I might sue them.
It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this — and I defended Linus. I wrote on my Web site saying that this guy Brown came through, visited me and I gave him the [correct] story.
While the above may be no news to you, it is to me. And just recall the fact that Microsoft funded SCO’s lawsuit against companies that make use of the Linux kernel.
According to the Declaration, Richard Emerson was not the only Microsoft employee Goldfarb was dealing with in connection with the BayStar investment in SCO. He mentions by name two others, from two other departments.
Nothing but malice, unsurprisingly.
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
01.12.07
Posted in Formats, Law, Microsoft, Novell, Office Suites, Patents, OpenDocument, Interoperability, Open XML, IBM, VBA at 12:18 pm by Roy Schestowitz
A couple of days ago, Shane mentioned proprietary extensions which Microsoft embeds in its OpenXML implementation. That, as a spurious reminder, is the standard which Novell agreed to embrace. It is a standard which fits an application; not a case of applications being built to support a standard. The 6,000+ pages which describe this bizarre ’standard’ do not include any documentation of these ‘extensions’ and, to make matters worse, according to Sam Hiser, there are legal barriers as well.
In short, Microsoft promises not to sue you for using the Microsoft Office Open XML formats in your software. But this promise only applies to patents Microsoft may have in the explicit parts of the Microsoft Office Open XML specification and which are described in detail there. It would not cover those parts essential to implementation which are merely referenced in the specification and lying outside the specification. See the language, “only the required portions of the…specification”, emphasized below.
It is not surprising that two supporters who are willing to implement Open XML are already in Microsoft’s hands. Corel is one of them, Novell is another. Sun Microsystems has already criticised (even “slammed”) Open XML, as did IBM, among many more people. who comprehend the value and importance of standards.
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
01.11.07
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Apple, Novell, Deception, Office Suites, Standard, OpenDocument, Interoperability, Open XML, Ecma, VBA at 12:03 am by Shane Coyle
As you are likely aware, Excel 2007 includes a new file format for storing data, well actually it has a few new file formats apparently. And, none of them are OpenDocument, in case you were wondering.
Rob Weir takes Office 2007 for a spin, and has some interesting things to report regarding the file formats being used by Excel 2007.
In addition to the default Open XML file format (.xlsx) that has been added to Office 2007, there is also an additional format called the Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook (.xlsxm) which contains binary-only data not specified in the ECMA standard. There is also an all-new binary-only format (.xlsb), which Microsoft says provides "optimal performance and backward compatibility" (wasn’t that the point of Open XML?).
The “Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook” option saves as an “xlsxm” extension. It is OOXML plus proprietary Microsoft extensions. These extensions, in the form of binary blob called vbaProject.bin, represent the source code of the macros. This part of the format is not described in the OOXML specification. It does not appear to be a compiled version of the macro. I could reload the document in Excel and restore the original text of my macro, including whitespace and comments. So source code appears to be stored, but in an opaque format that defied my attempts at deciphering it.
(What’s so hard about storing a macro, guys? It’s frickin’ text. How could you you[sic] screw it up? )
This has some interesting consequences. It is effectively a container for source code that not only requires Office to run it, but requires Office to even read it. So you could have your intellectual property in the form of extensive macros that you have written, and if Microsoft one day decides that your copy of Office is not “genuine” you could effectively be locked out of your own source code.
There is also a method to add in additional file formats for saving to, including PDF and Microsoft’s XPS, but there is no native ODF support yet.
Overall, Rob’s experience was a bit buggy, and there was an incident where trying to save to Open XML prompted a message about incompatible features (so much for backward compatibility, hey try the new binary-only format…).
I wonder how Novell OpenOffice.org’s VBA support is going to handle the new binary information in the macro-enabled workbook? Still better than the next MS Office for Mac, I suppose.
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
12.27.06
Posted in Boycott Novell, Formats, Red Hat, Microsoft, Windows, GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, FUD, Deals, Office Suites, Servers, NetWare, Intellectual Property, Patents, Fork, GPL, OpenDocument, Patent Covenant, Interoperability, Open XML, IBM, OpenOffice, VBA, LGPL, Virtualization, FOSS at 5:26 pm by Shane Coyle
Here, finally, is the transcript of Stafford Masie’s presentation at the CITI forum, as posted on tectonic.co.za. I only transcribe as well as I hear, so there may be small errors, but I am confident this is ‘very’ accurate. Please point out any errors or questions and I will investigate.
Related Posts: Stafford Masie’s Q&A at CITI Forum Transcript
Stafford Masie:
This whole Novell thing, the whole Microsoft thing, is an interesting thing. so, let me just start off by saying… thanks for making the time, thanks for making the time to see me. Pete was supposed to be up here this morning, and I decided to come,…
Really what I want the premise of the discussion to be is really a discussion about, I think the big thing thats gonna come up here as I go through all the…the material that I want to present initially is the patent stuff, y’know software patents and what they mean, etc I think professor Keats and I have gone back and forth online enough now.
We… we… we definitely like the fact that we have an open source community… we’re learning more and more as a proprietary vendor, traditional proprietary vendor, to participate in this community. and there are certain things that we do and there are certain things that we may not do that are good or that are bad, and y’know, really, this is what we want to do, this is what we want to do, is stir debate.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
12.17.06
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Deals, Office Suites, Intellectual Property, Fork, Standard, OpenDocument, Patent Covenant, Interoperability, Open XML, OpenOffice, VBA at 9:30 pm by Shane Coyle
Stafford Masie, Novell South Africa country manager, speaking at the recent CITI forum in South Africa, was talking about document format compatibility between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, when he mentioned that Novell is expecting Microsoft to include native ODF support in their Office product:
So, just in terms of document format compatibility, we’re not forking it, the code’s up there… hopefully that code will be incorporated into the next derivative of, of the OpenOffice release, as part of the code… we’ve done quite a few things there, there’s the translator engine, the VB macro support, where you can import Excel macros into OpenOffice now and it will open up execute, etc there’s quite a few things that we’ve done there,
Also we’ve licensed in some fonts… and we worked with AGFA we put some truetype fonts in there, it’s similar to Microsoft’s true-type fonts in the OpenOffice product, and its for free, its there, we’ve published that up.
So, again, enterprise customers want this, they want to see the product more interoperable, they want to see openoffice having the capability to open up office 2007 documents and backwards.
Now, its good to do open xml because open xml is being supported back in Microsoft all the way to Office 95 or Office 97, one of those, I think its Office 97, they’re supporting open xml so, essentially, you’ll be able to open up all, up to office 97 documents that come from Microsoft with Office and in turn, we are also working with Microsoft to ensure that they put native ODF support within Microsoft Office.
Ok, that’s key, the fact that it will now open up our documents that we natively store in OpenOffice… inside there.
There was also a point when Masie acknowledged that there are many who have concerns about Microsoft’s Open XML format itself and their dubious Patent Covenant associated with the "standard", but he passed that off as a problem for ‘everyone’, but it would not be a problem for anyone who eschews Novell’s Danaergeschenk of Open XML.
Permalink
Send this to a friend View as PDF
« Previous entries ·
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.