Sun Asks China to Merge its Doc Format With ODF 114
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."
Numbers game (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can't wait (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a perception that people NEED office to function, getting ODF widely accepted would be a huge blow to Microsoft.
Re:Numbers game (Score:5, Insightful)
If Scott brings the correct carrot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Numbers game (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Numbers game (Score:3, Insightful)
When the greedy are playing dirty politics, and decent people still care about their reputations, there's no such thing as game over. Well, not for the good, anyway.
china and open standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong:
A merger would not cost anything to China, but allow them to share development cost with others and compete on a broader market than their own.
It would seem China can only benefit from a wider adoption of open standards. At least for now. In a couple decades they may be able to impose their own on the rest of the world.
Re:Numbers game (Score:5, Insightful)
Office is an application suite. ODF is a document format. They're apples and oranges. With appropriate plugins, Office will interoperate with ODF documents -- just as any number of other applications will.
Claiming that OOXML is better than ODF because MS Office is better than OpenOffice is disingenuous; there's no reason MS Office and ODF can't be used together, and quite a bit of money and development time is being poured into making that an effective solution (thanks in no small part to
No (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It's a battle between ODF and OOXML.
ODF was approved over a long drawn out process that took the input from various companies and can be implemented by multiple companies and open source projects. It reuses existing standards wherever possible. ODF is open to criticism and has already included revisions to include support for disabilities and generally specified formulas. Hopefully, it'll absorb China's format too. The official version of ODF is what's specified in the standard (regardless what OpenOffice implements), so you can be sure of a level playing field.
OOXML, OTOH, was rubber stamped by ECMA (that was one of the conditions of the submission) and fastracked to the ISO despite the objections of a record number of countries. It reinvents stands wherever possible, forces the implementation of bugs in the standards (i.e. implement the Y2K bug), has references to external specifications that are not being standardized, and has cute phrases like "Do this the way Word95 did it" without specifying what that means. The official version of OOXML is what Microsoft implements (regardless what ISO specifies), so you can be sure of an uneven playing field with Microsoft being 2 steps ahead of everyone else.
Given these two document formats, ODF clearly deserves to win.
Re:Nobody in China will use either (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Numbers game (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting that you advance the argument that having a standardized final format is adequate and folks can use whatever source formats they please while slamming me for naiveté. Applications where the ability to send documents which can be edited and transformed between parties in different organizations is critical abound, so using a view-only destination format for external communication is clearly inadequate. Preserving presentation is fine in a significant number of cases -- but if I'm standardizing on the document format used for communicating site surveys (which may be parsed and used to automatically configure servers) between my company (where the engineering department does not run Windows), its support and sales staff and VAR force (which largely do), I need documents which are editable, archivable into a database server and queryable at each stage (the latter being something XForms is quite useful for; I understand that Microsoft's InfoPath may provide some comparable functionality).
Re:Numbers game (Score:5, Insightful)
We need ODF so that we can have more than one office suite available to choose from, and still be able to exchange documents accurately. It's the same reason we have standards for anything, computers or otherwise.
OpenXML on the other hand can not be accurately implemented by anybody other than Microsoft and is controlled by nobody other than Microsoft. On top of that, it's a badly written format that even requires that implementors perform miscalculations so that Microsoft doesn't have to actually fix their own product.
Even more compelling is this list of ODF implementors:
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice
KOffice
Abiword
Gnumeric
Lotus Notes
Google's Documents
Apple's TextEdit (in Leopard)
Corel WordPerfect (mid-2007)
Microsoft Office XP/2003/2007
As opposed to the list of Office OpenXML implementors:
Microsoft Office 2007
Corel WordPerfect (mid-2007)
So if you want to use anything other than Windows, ODF is your only choice.
Re:I can't wait (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the relative merits of MSOffice and OpenOffice depend a lot upon what you do with it. MSOffice loses on the following points:
Because of the above list, I take issue with your assertion that MS Office wins across the board. I simply is not so. MS Office does win in a lot of ways, although I almost completely avoid it these days despite having a licensed copy installed. Mostly that is because it is not as functional or fast as other applications I use to perform the same tasks. Claiming that the buggy and bloated MS Office is "awesome" however, makes my head hurt. It crashes, it messes up, it's expensive, it's intentionally limited in some ways. For many people it is the best option, but a lot of that has more to do with the current install base than to do with concrete qualities of the programs themselves. That is why I'm such a strong supporter of ODF. I think if everyone can access the same data with any application, we'll actually see competition again and that will mean both MS Office and OpenOffice and all the other alternatives will get a lot better as they try to win customers. And let me tell you, they all need to get a lot better.
Re:Lest we forget (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Numbers game (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Numbers game (Score:1, Insightful)
Remember English took the international language title from French due to the importance of *selling* to the English speaking market - particularly the US. When - in 10 years - China is the biggest market, they'll begin to take that title.
Re:Numbers game (Score:2, Insightful)
More likely IMO is that China would continue to use ODF for all its internal documentation, which constitutes the vast majority of paperwork produced by any organization. This way they are guaranteed access to their own documents into the future, without being trapped into having to deal with a company to access certain closed formats.
Re:Numbers game (Score:3, Insightful)