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, Interesting)
Already done, spreadsheet formulas are being specifically addressed in ODF 1.2. But in 1.1 there was already a set of conventions for handling formulas, and Microsoft were the only ones out of all the ODF 1.1-using applications that couldn't follow those conventions. In fact their implementation even specifically violated one of the bits that was in the ODF 1.1 spec: the spec calls for cell names to be enclosed in square brackets, while Microsoft's implementation omits the brackets. Then you have just plain malicious stuff like actively removing formula information that's present. Even if you can't parse the formulas, XML makes it easy to preserve what was there. Every other implementation behaves that way: if they can't understand the formulas at least they leave them intact for applications that do understand them. Microsoft's is the only implementation that deliberately removes formulas from the spreadsheet.
What annoys me most about Microsoft's pseudo-support is that it had to be deliberate. They had to actually expend additional effort to be this incompatible. If they'd simply been lazy and taken the easiest way out, they would've been far more compatible with everybody else than they ended up being.
Re:Microsoft, in turn, should warn governments (Score:2, Interesting)
Mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a very insightful, proactive suggestion. Why bitch about the usual MS attitudes if you can provide a constructive path ahead, right?
Actually, it shouldn't be all that hard (but, it may well be tedious work) to put together a document that includes samples of *all* features of the spreadsheet / text editor / drawing / presentation document.
Providing verification is probably a bigger challenge. I wonder if it could be done as macros in any of the ODF-supporting suites, or if that's akin to an SOD violation?
Re:Wahwahwah (Score:5, Interesting)
If anyone is interested in specifically what is "broken"(read: incompatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0)... which I doubt... here is some very good information detailing which decisions were made in implementing ODF and why they were made:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/default.aspx [msdn.com]
The last couple blog posts should be what everyone is looking for.
Beyond this, Microsoft is simply implementing ODF 1.1 because ODF 1.2 is not done yet. If Microsoft is going to support a standard, they will support the standard not the most popular implementation's interpretation of the standard.
Re:So, which is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wahwahwah (Score:3, Interesting)
ODF 1.1 was a very simple standard to follow. It was only one page. In fact, it's only one sentence: "Do whatever OpenOffice does." Is that your idea of a "reference implementation"?
If that was the case, sure since OO is open source and well documented code. That isn't that case though. It's much better to simply code to the standards and look at one of the several interoperable open source implementations when there is question about what to do. And, or course, when you have a working version you should test it for interoperability with the existing implementations, or at least the working implementation for your program, already in use, which you helped to fund.
So, when MS Office SP2 implements ODF 1.1 with MathML to the letter and OpenOffice cannot read it because of a bug in OpenOffice, who is to blame?
If it is a bug in OpenOffice they are to blame, assuming MS tested and tried to be compliant and interoperable. If, however, OO is compliant and MS is complaint and MS manages to create a compliant solution which does not work with all the other existing implementations, which all work with one another... yeah that's MS's fault.
Oh, right, you think that MS should have followed OpenOffice's bug, not the ODF spec.
Are you trying to imply that MS had to break the standard to work with OO and all the other implementations?
How about all of the implementation bugs between OpenOffice and other non-MS ODF suites?
There is only one of those that I know of, which is a problem with OO writing files using the 1.2 version of ODF by default and the program in question not handling it gracefully enough. MS, on the other hand is incompatible with every other implementation.
Fix your fucking spec or shut the fuck up.
If you're going to be profane at least have some guts worm. Anonymous coward indeed.
no, they'll do more than that (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch what happens if openoffice makes any kind of real dent in office's market share. It'll be just like the RIAA going after downloaders...
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or, to do it perfectly, clean-room it. Have one team create an internal ODF spec based on the OpenOffice source. Give that spec along with the OpenOffice source to the lawyers, have them approve it. Give the spec to your Office devs.
But, that assumes that they WANT compatibility.
Re:Let the market work it out (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, they didn't comply with the letter of the spec, both failing to implement it properly and going out of their way to not implement features they already had working code for and ignoring both reference implementations.
That's the problem - the spec is too vague to be implemented properly. Because the spec doesn't spell things out in a specific way, it's impossible to implement in a consistent way - it's open to interpretation. The problem isn't Microsoft, the problem is the spec. ODF 1.2 should fix this.
Re:It's already been stated... (Score:1, Interesting)
Wait. So we have tons of open source apps that, somehow, have great compatibility except for minor nits. Then we have Microsoft which removes all the XML it doesn't understand, destroying documents (rather than just leaving it the hell alone).
And you blame the ODF standard for this?
Maybe you should read some of the Comes v. Microsoft [boycottnovell.com] documents. It's not the ODF folks. It's just the way Microsoft works.