ODF Alliance Warns Governments About Office 2007 ODF Support 312
omz writes "The ODF Alliance has prepared a Fact Sheet for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF. The report revealed 'serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the marketplace, especially governments, is demanding.'"
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:5, Informative)
If you can believe Microsoft, they're not the only ones. Lots of ODF implementations have interoperability issues.
Doug Mahugh at MSFT has been blogging about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/09/1-2-1.aspx [msdn.com]
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/13/tracked-changes.aspx [msdn.com]
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:1, Informative)
Uhh, because the source of Open Office is... open? And it's free to look at?
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much, yes. Bear in mind that Microsoft already has code that does handle the spreadsheet formulas correctly. The plug-in that Microsoft itself commissioned and that they own the code for not only preserves the formulas, it correctly parses and interprets them so that cells get recalculated properly as data changes and it correctly writes changed formulas back out. All Microsoft had to do was to not do all the work a second time. And even if they had re-done the work, the XML parser automatically populates the DOM with the formula strings and the internal implementation in Excel already can preserve arbitrary metadata from external formats even when it can't interpret it. All they'd've had to do is not touch things the user hadn't edited and the preservation would've happened automatically. I do this all the time when dealing with XML code, to the point where I have to make a deliberate effort not to write data-preserving code.
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:5, Informative)
The others are open source projects, and can look at each other's code. MS can't, or they'd have to open source their code.
This is a completely misleading statement and totally misses the point. Well done!
You don't need to look at the source code to see what other products do. You just need to look at the ODF files they produce. Indeed, given the licenses of the products that implement ODF, you can obtain the copies you need for testing FOR FREE.
Similarly, while your legal department might bar you from reading competitors code for fear of copyright co-mingling, there is nothing to stop you employing a third party to go look on your behalf and write a report on what was done. So you can have your cake and eat it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:2, Informative)
That the standards created for the ODF formats are no where near perfect.
This is indeed the case with the spreadsheet formulas. However, there's more. From TFA:
Microsoft Office 2007 does not support encryption (password-protection) in ODF files.
[...]
Encryption and password protection are fully specified in ODF 1.0/1.1 (item 17.3 of the
specification), so the failure to define this feature in ODF cannot be cited as a plausible
explanation.
Also,
Microsoft Office 2007 does not support tracked changes in ODF.
[...]
Tracked changes are specified in ODF 1.0/1.1 so the failure to define this feature in ODF cannot
be cited as a plausible explanation.
Furthermore, one could note that
Commitment to Support Future Versions of ODF
Microsoft has dragged its feet for over 3 years (ODF 1.0 was approved as an OASIS standard in
May 2005 and as an ISO standard in May 2006; ODF 1.1 by OASIS in Feb. 2007), despite
repeated calls by governments throughout Europe and elsewhere to implement support for ODF.
Implementing incompatible, down-level versions of open standards will break interoperability
on the desktop, especially considering Microsoft's potentially large ODF installed user base.
Microsoft has a rich history of implementing down-level versions of open standards;
e.g., Java in Internet Explorer, where Microsoft pre-installed an incompatible version
with proprietary extensions and then to let it languish, failing to update it as the Java technology evolved.
In other words, it's business as usual.
-AC
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:1, Informative)
At which point you'll still be apologizing for them and say we should wait till 1.3 to complain?
If the standard is strict like other open standards, and they still fail to be compatiable, I wouldn't "apologize" for them.
Yeah it was so vague every other company managed to implement it just fine, including Microsoft in the plug-in they hired someone to write and whose code is BSD licensed so they could have just copied and pasted, since it was already working with MSOffice as a plug in. I have this bridge you might be interested in Brooklyn.
Actually, if you read another comment on this article, you'd see that other applications actually didn't handle the standard all that well like you claim.
Bullshit! There are multiple reference implementations and free code available and even small hobbyist projects had no problem. Even MS is not that incompetent. Their failure to insure their product worked with all the other products out there that work fine is inexcusable and any judge who buys your crap is an idiot. This is clearly an antitrust violation. Hopefully MS won't be able to settle their way out of a conviction this time.
"Free code". You do realize that many of those "free" code samples are licensed that would require Microsoft to open source Office or portions of Office. This is about a standard that was weak and failed to state everything clearly. Asking any company to follow it is insane. Microsoft could of copied OpenOffice, but even OpenOffice wasn't perfect. Who do you follow, your competitor or the standard? I'd follow the standard.
This is a document for nerds ... (Score:4, Informative)
What do I mean ? It starts by assuming that you know what ODF is, giving it a name ''the OpenDocument Format'' doesn't really help -- the average Member of Parliament/Senate/Dictatorship/... will not have a clue what you are talking about. All sorts of other buzz words abound, there are names of unknown things like KSpread and Symphony -- who has heard of them ?
I am sympathetic to what they are doing - it is a great idea, unfortunately it won't get much legislator/bureaucrat/... eyeball time because it doesn't explain what it is all about. It needs to be prefixed by a page that explains it all in nice, friendly words that everyone can understand and say that the technical details are on the next pages -- which starts with page 1 of what they have produced.
Re:No, not at all (Score:5, Informative)
The whole reason they are doing the ODF thing is pressure from the EU with regards to anti-trust. Part of that pressure is that "You have to do it according to the standard."
So you're arguing that MS's lawyers are completely incompetent and didn't know that being incompatible was a violation of antirust law and that antitrust law doesn't mention anything about standards compliance? I think that's a naive.
All the other ODF stuff I've seen is open source. As with most open source, they borrow heavily form other open source projects. In the case of ODF, the modus operandi seems to be "Do what Open Office does." Ok that's great, but again not an option for MS. They can't take OOs code...
They already own BSD licensed code that works on MS Office. Next argument please!
Basically the ODF spec isn't clear and precise.
But it's clear an precise enough that it worked for everyone else and there are multiple working open source implementations, one of which they can literally copy and paste from and which they helped fund the creation of and probably have full rights to it even if it wasn't BSD licensed. Sorry, that argument doesn't fly either.
Then there are cases where the popular ODF implementations aren't compliant with the spec.
Example please.
More or less it looks like the ODF alliance needs to shut up, and write a better standard.
They already did. MS doesn't want a standard for interoperability. They are simply looking for any way they can be compliant but still be incompatible.
Everything has to be specified precisely.
Not really, that's what reference implementations are for. If you have any doubt about how to handle this, see the reference implementations and do it that way.
The only argument you made that has any legs is the first one regarding compliance with the spec, but only if you assume ignorance of the law (I assume you perhaps aren't that familiar with antitrust law). I assure you, while it may at times appear that all of MS's lawyers have never heard of antitrust law, that is not the case in reality.
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:2, Informative)
Not true: looking at GPL code and then coding your own thing is NOT a gpl violation. Taking the written code into your software is.
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:3, Informative)
Plenty: google doc, koffice and another MSOffice plugin.
The lead of odf posted an interoperability table: ONLY MSOFFICE is completely incompatible to ALL of the other implementations.
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:5, Informative)
There's a lot more than 2 implementations. Besides OpenOffice and MS Office there's AbiWord, KOffice, Google Docs, WordPerfect Office X4, IBM's Lotus Symphony, the Sun ODF plug-in for MS Word and the BSD-licensed ODF plug-in for Word that Microsoft funded and hosted on SourceForge. That last is important, BTW. Not only is Office 2007's implementation of ODF incompatible with OpenOffice, it's incompatible with Microsoft's own other implementation of ODF.
Re:No, not at all (Score:5, Informative)
No, it just means that there are other implementations that behave similarly to OpenOffice.org.
Demanding that Microsoft implements the ambiguous / not standard parts of OO.o's ODF in the same way that OO.o does is sort of like demanding that Mozilla implements all the ambiguous / not standard parts of MS's HTML/CSS rendering implementation. Or demanding that Apple modify OS X's kernel so it implements the same syscalls as Linux instead of implementing POSIX, because Linux is the most popular operating system used to run programs that target POSIX.
Of course, with ODF, 1+2=1 [msdn.com]. ODF 1.1 is broken, and there is nothing that can be done to make a fully standards-compliant ODF 1.1 implementation without filling in the gaps somehow. Apparently [wikipedia.org], OO.o 1-2 uses a nonstandard forumla implementation and OO.o 3 writes to the not yet finished ODF 1.2 standard.
Read before you judge (Score:5, Informative)
Before you judge on this issue, it helps to read comments by various involved parts - those raising the issue to attention, MS people who have implemented ODF, and informed commenters outside this dispute. So, here's a bunch of links to start with.
First of all, a series of blog post by OASIS' Rob Weir (who's criticizing MSOffice) and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh (who's defending it) that evolved into a kind of a public discussion on the issue. Here they are in chronological / meaningful reading order:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html [robweir.com]
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/05/odf-spreadsheet-interoperability.aspx [msdn.com]
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html [robweir.com]
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2009/05/09/1-2-1.aspx [msdn.com]
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/battle-for-odf-interoperability.html [robweir.com]
Then there's some outside commentary. I've taken the following links from comments in Doug's blog posts, and they tend to either be neutral or side with MS on this, so it may not be a representative sample. If you have any representing informed argument for the other side (e.g. by members of ODF committee, or ODF implementers - in general, people who know the ins and outs of the spec, and can accurately judge on its wording and intent - not random blogosphere FUD from either side), please mention them in replies.
http://ajg.math.concordia.ab.ca/?p=4 [concordia.ab.ca]
http://adjb.net/post/Notes-on-Document-Conformance-and-Portability-4.aspx [adjb.net]
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/odf-11-formula-support-in-office-sp2.html [oreilly.com]
Re:No, not at all (Score:5, Informative)
You are missing one ENORMOUS detail: the formulas ARE defined, they are defined by Open Office and every other ODF user as "do what Excel does" (to be pendantic they are "do what Excel does when set to a locale that uses commas as the decimal point").
Microsoft is in the BEST position to do this, better than anybody else including OpenOffice! I believe they have the most accurate implementation of Excel. Or are you going to claim otherwise?
Complicated wording and excuses from Mr Dave Mahugh just show that he is a truly sick and moralless individual. It is blatently obvious how to do the formulas. He is purposly writing stuff he knows as absolute bullshit in order to satisfy his paymasters. A bug in OpenOffice does not mean "don't write any ODF formulas" which is basically what he is claiming. WRONG.