Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF

christian.einfeldt writes "Sun's Chairman Scott McNealy has asked the world's most populous nation to merge its Uniform Office Format with the Open Document Format. Tech lawyer Andy Updegrove thinks that McNealy would not have flown to China and taken this chance of rejection if McNealy didn't think that there was a good likelihood of success."

ODF is for niggers, anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Heil Hitler!

Re:Nobody in China will use either

[aussie_a]

I'm an Australian student in China at the moment via a program at my university and all I see is UOF, UOF, UOF with windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Re:Hopefully they go for it.

[aussie_a]

You DO realize we are talking about China here, the country that hasn't sold over 300 legit copies of Windows Vista yet, right?

They sound like a country full of smart people. I know a ton of people who are avoiding Vista like the plague, while in China they've got less then 300 stupid fucks (or less then 300 computer users. I somehow doubt the latter).

Re:Numbers game

[Anonymous Coward]

The post you're replying to didn't bring up this good/evil business. And ODF is better because it actually is open, regardless of who is pushing it. What other open alternatives are there?

So indeed, good luck to McNealy on this mission.

Re:Numbers game

[cduffy]

Waitaminute here -- why do you switch from talking about ODF to talking about OpenOffice? Unlike OpenXML, ODF was written based not on a single application's requirements (although that was used as a starting point), but by getting a bunch of interested parties (particularly, parties with an interest in long-term document archival and storage), and building to their requirements.

And ODF is absolutely the better standard. It leverages preexisting standards such as SVG and MathML instead of reinventing the wheel; it's structured to permit XSLT-style transformations; a complete implementation isn't required to have support for legacy bugs from MS Office. Version 1.2 of the standard will require that implementations preserve unknown attributes to allow support for lossless roundtripping to and from legacy formats; support for lossless roundtripping to and from Word is an early application for this, already available in prototype. The only serious deficiency I'm familiar with is that spreadsheet formulas are unspecified and left to the implementor -- and while that is unfortunate, it's not like there aren't de-facto standards to work from until it's resolved (also in OpenDocument 1.2).

I realize it's trendy to be jaded, and I have little love for many of Sun's actions -- but I'm pretty sure they're on the right side inasmuch as ODF is concerned.

Re:Numbers game

[Carewolf]

You do realize that already there are several office suites that implement ODF?

Sure the only open source ones are OpenOffice and KOffice, but many small 3rd party wordprocessors have changed to ODF. So at no point will we be trapped by Sun, we will have the option of buying any of a handfull of commercial implementations, and probably 1-2 two other open source ones.

Re:Numbers game

[CastrTroy]

How many times should this story repeat until slashdotters learn: all corporations are the same. Not soon after ODF takes over MS Office, we'll be running daily articles of the "but ... Sun promised to not be evil!" kind, just like we're doing with former favorites Google, Red Hat, Novell, Adobe etc. etc.

But Sun doesn't control the ODF Format. It doesn't matter if sun becomes evil because they don't control anything. That's where you seem to have it wrong. ODF is an OASIS standard agreed upon by many companies and no one company can just change it when they feel like it. I would like to know which specific deficiencies exist with ODF. Don't complain that it's slow, because that's an application problem, not a file format problem. Just because OO.o is slow, doesn't mean that all word processors that use ODF have to be slow. There are already few out there that are quite faster than OO.o. I think that it's always going to be slower than .Doc, but that's only because .Doc is a big memory dump, and is not made to be readable or understood by anything other than MS word.

Re:Lest we forget

[Tipa]

ODF has had this support since 2002.

See: http://opendocument.xml.org/milestones [xml.org]

2002 Definitions for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and complex text layout languages get added to the OpenOffice.org XML file format specification.

Re:No

[I'm Don Giovanni]

OOXML, OTOH, was rubber stamped by ECMA (that was one of the conditions of the submission)

Sorty, this is bullshit.
The ECMA process took over a year to complete, and there were many revisions and multiple drafts released during that time. The ratification vote wasn't guaranteed. IBM was on the committee and voted NO. All other members had the same opportunity to vote NO as well (though nobody else did, since they didn't have an pro-ODF agenda that IBM did; IBM lost 20-1). Those other members included Apple, Novell, government entities, etc.

If anything was "rubberstamped" by anyone, it was ODF being rubberstamped by ISO. ISO approved a standard that wasn't even complete. It doesn't even have a standard for saving spreadsheet formulae. Oh, and Microsoft was on that IDO committee that rubberstamped ODF and raised no objections (unlike IBM throwing a temper tantrum at the ECMA/OOXML vote).