[Discuss] ODF is now an ISO standard

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-05-03 13:53-0700 Paul Nienaber wrote:

> But Microsoft has what attempts to be a non-conforming C implementation.

That's their tried and true "embrace and extend" technique.

> Watch them do the same, much like how there are Office variants that 
> theoretically use the same file formats, but aren't forwards-compatible.

Actually, MS is not using that "embrace and extend" tactic in this case.
Instead they are trying to go with their own completely different
"standard", and I think that is going to hurt them badly.

>From the article:

"Microsoft's Open XML specification, also headed for consideration by
ISO/IEC, is still in process within Ecma.  Upon completion, it would be
submitted to the same voting process."

I presume this is a standard for the skeleton of how MS Office documents
will be stored, but the details will be missing (hidden in binary objects)
which will make it difficult for non-MS products or MS products with the
wrong version number to read and understand the document.

So MS will claim it stores its Office documents using a standard (which will
be technically true), but the ODF movement (which is growing very rapidly
with essentially all major software companies signed on except for MS) will
rightly claim in reply that this does not give perpetual access like ODF
does.

Perpetual access is a powerful argument.  Government's want to keep their
documents in electronic form, but they cannot do it so long as they are tied
to an incompletely documented format that only a specific version of MS
Office software can understand.  Historians and archivists of the 22nd
century will be able to completely understand electronic documents saved in
ODF form from this era since a complete public specification is known for
that format while they won't be able to understand documents written in any
of the MS Office formats since no public specification is known for those
formats, and the specific version of MS Office required to understand them
will be long gone.

> What we need is a big push of things like OOo *now* so that Microsoft will 
> appear to be the one with the broken product, not vice-versa.

Agreed.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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