Archive for the 'ODF' Category
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
OOXML: “Dead Format Walking”
Jason Brooks’ title sums it all up succinctly.
Since most Office users would be happy to continue using Microsoft’s old binary formats, and since those for whom open standards are important would probably prefer ODF or PDF formats anyhow, I won’t be surprised if OOXML quietly dies before that future Office iteration ever sees the light of day.
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
UK standards body taken to court over OOXML approval process
There’s some interesting backlash over OOXML’s approval in the UK.
The British Standards Institution has been taken to court by a group of Unix users in an attempt to get the standards body to recant its approval of Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format.
I find it ironic that there is not a single instance where anyone has really shown a love for OOXML or some sort of even small inclination that it was a good thing to approve as an international standard. Instead it seems the vote was PawnsPaidByMSFT vs PeopleWhoThinkForThemselves. Well now it’s in the UK courts.
Monday, April 21st, 2008
OOXML: A standard with no implementation
Even Microsoft cannot conform to its own OOXML standard…
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Happy Document Freedom Day 2008
In case you haven’t yet heard, today is apparently Document Freedom Day ;-)
http://documentfreedom.org/News/20080326
Monday, February 4th, 2008
IBM’s Bob Sutor responds to Microsoft’s… nonsense and whining
Saw this article over at Ars today:
We spoke to Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source for IBM, who responded to Microsoft’s recent claims regarding IBM’s involvement in the OOXML dispute. “IBM believes that there is a revolution occurring in the IT industry, and that smart people around the world are demanding truly open standards developed in a collaborative, democratic way for the betterment of all,” Sutor told Ars. “If ‘business as usual’ means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we’re proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Coverage on IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution with Ubuntu
Saw a few articles today on IBM’s OCCS announcement with Ubuntu.
Satyadas said IBM thinks that this year, it will happen. “All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”
It’s easy to overlook IBM’s announcement that its Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony suites will run on Ubuntu. I think this would be a mistake. IBM is not a dumb company. It’s not in the habit of wasting resources. For IBM to be partnering up with Ubuntu says something about the enterprise mindset on Ubuntu.
By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers “a proprietary desktop model.” IBM’s Linux efforts will “further address customer demands around choice,” said Inna Kuznetsova, an IBM executive with responsibility for Linux, in a statement.
Friday, January 4th, 2008
AP Interview with Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst
I like Jim already after reading this interview.
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
Monday, December 17th, 2007
Ulteo takes OpenOffice online with web delivery
Ars covered the news from Ulteo of an online version of OpenOffice.org. Did Google snatch up the wrong online editor startups and miss out on Ulteo? Who can know given none of the them are making wild gains in switching users. Anyway, you can try out Ulteo’s online desktop yourself here: http://www.ulteo.com/home/en/ooo?autolang=en
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
John Cherry covers latest announcements around collaboration and office suites
John Cherry summed up the recent “big” announcements around collaboration and offices suites over on his LF blog:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/cherry/2007/09/18/piling-on-office-and-collaboration/
Any of these announcements by themselves would be significant, but the combination of these is really sounding the starting pistol for competition in the multi-billion dollar office productivity race. And this time around, it is not a one horse race.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
IBM breaks open the Office lock on customers, offers a path to and open standard with new, no charge Lotus Symphony
Lots of news since I left for Europe. The trip was amazing (photos and maybe videos coming soon). But since I left, OOXML failed in ISO, the EU rejected Microsoft’s appeal, SCO filed for Chapter 11, and IBM joined OpenOffice.org as a significant contributor (35 developers).
Today, though, IBM also announced Lotus Symphony - a no charge set of office productivity editors (you may be familiar with Microsoft Office’s Excel, Powerpoint, and Word - they’re very similar). IBM’s Symphony suite, like OpenOffice allows users to also start transitioning to OpenDocument Format (ODF). The new suite is NO CHARGE (yes, the nice way of saying “free” without implying “cheap” or “dumbed down”). These are the real deal, the same editors that come bundled with Lotus Notes 8 and the work on Linux or Windows (although I prefer Linux). The URL to download them is here:
www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony
The interesting thing now is that Microsoft Office costs what… $X00 and you can get the IBM Symphony suite for $0. Symphony handles Word, ODF, and many other formats (including PDF output)… Microsoft Office… well… not so much. Symphony is even cheaper than StarOffice (unless you go through GooglePack)
Take Symphony for a test run - there’s no charge - and keep an eye out because I can absolutely feel OpenOffice and by proxy Symphony are going to see great advances in their evolution going forward.
A nice quote from Steve Mills with a relation back to Linux:
“IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. “The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways.”
Thursday, August 30th, 2007
PC World exposes Microsoft’s OOXML Sweden scam; Gerrit says “Microsoft has many tricks…”
I saw this PC World article through Bob Sutor’s blog. Interesting tactics - not sure how this gives ISO any credibility. I think it’s time for a re-vote… not only did Microsoft pay for votes, they also suggested the partners try and make it look legit by attending a couple meetings after as well… this is an international standards voting process by technical experts??
In an information e-mail that, according to Microsoft, was sent to “a few” partner companies, the software giant stated that its partners were expected to register to vote with SIS and “take part in the meeting on Aug. 27 to vote yes for Office Open XML.”
Microsoft’s partners were also requested to attend more meetings after the vote in order to prove “their sincere participation”.
Gerrit has an interesting post bringing together a number of really good links over at his blog.
It is interesting to watch as Microsoft tries different strategies in dealing with the open source community, open standards and interoperability. This interesting ballot box management trick with OOXML is clever (oh, and if it is so good, repeat it, over and over again). Basically, manage the voting populace to ensure that only your voters turn out for a vote.
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
Slashdot: “Microsoft Bought Sweden’s ISO Vote on OOXML?”
It’s not often that I point to /. as a source, but this seems warranted (see post below).
How long will the world allow this to happen? At what expense does this come for the integrity and viability of international standards organizations - especially the one named ISO?
What if Vanderbilt could have standardized railroad tracks according to his own, proprietary, patented rail size and shape - would the US have prospered as it did? Most people don’t really care about standards - it’s often like the legal world where people say, “Just let the experts fight it out and come back to me with your answer.” But that’s not what’s happening here - in this case it’s not experts debating the merits of a standard - you’re looking at one company trying to lock the world into a lifetime payment plan under the guise of an open standard.
It’s time to get loud.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/1237255
The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did … for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: ‘The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today’s meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM’s Swedish local representative Johan Westman.’”
Friday, August 24th, 2007
Forbes: “India Won’t Endorse Microsoft’s Office Standard”
India has become the latest country to reject Microsoft’s global bid to provide an alternative standard for electronic office documents. India will now vote against Microsoft’s proposal at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in Geneva, joining countries like China and Canada.
After a meeting of the Bureau of Indian Standards in New Delhi Thursday, its technical committee chairperson, Nita Verma, told the media: “We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML [Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language] with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO.”
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Google adds StarOffice to Google Pack - weird?
I wonder how much this choice has to do with Sun’s old agreement…
Nonetheless, a good step in the right direction for open document standards. I’m a bit surprised (or let down) that the Google option for editors seems lacking in “surprise”…. or web+offline app delivery mostly…
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Rob Weir criticizes sloppy OOXML formulas that made it through ECMA review
Rob Weir is getting some publicity for this very specific critique of the flaws that made it through the ECMA standards body without any real consideration of basic things such as units… oops…
As I’ve shown, in the rush to write a 6,000 page standard in less than a year, Ecma dropped the ball. OOXML’s spreadsheet formula is worse than missing. It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to this standard, would raise important health, safety and environmental concerns, aside from the obvious financial risks of a spreadsheet that calculates incorrect results. This standard is seriously messed up. Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.
Monday, July 2nd, 2007
Editing OpenDocument files with Ant
Found this via Bob Sutor and thought it was really cool. This is an early example of the power an open document format can bring to the table - imagine where you could take this with the intersection of XML based ODF and XML native database storage. Erwin’s particular example was implemented using Ant… in the future will we stop emailing documents and just send them directly from a build server? Probably not, but I think the concept will certainly be applied for real life situations.
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/odf_conversion_with_ant
Friday, June 15th, 2007
Getting to ODF: Three stages of challenges
I found this blog post quite interesting. It’s quite extensive but covers much of the practical stages/issues migrating to ODF.
Monday, May 14th, 2007
Bill Hilf… misquoted or misinformed?
I saw this article today and have to wonder if Bill is either misquoted or just severely misinformed…
The Free Software movement is dead,” Hilf said, in a typical quip, as quoted in “The Bangkok Post.” “Linux doesn’t exist in 2007. Even [Linux creator] Linus [Torvalds] has a job today.”
I’m curious if he was just misquoted, but that does happen. Obviously that was a terribly poor judgment as the free software movement is most certainly alive and well, and there are more people working on Linux than just IBM, Oracle, and Canonical. Bill, take a look at who really contributed to the 2.6.20 kernel Bill - there are many contributors (nearly 2,000 had code accepted just into the 2.6.20 kernel). The free software ecosystem is actually growing further - and many of the participants are Microsoft’s own long time partners. And yes, many of them do make a living (it’s hard to code Linux kernel code while wandering and asking for money on the streets). That is actually Microsoft’s real problem - these guys (and gals) are making a living - it’s an economically self-sustaining model. Sure, they are not making $92M/day like others, but they make a living and enjoy what they do.
Maybe that’s what has Microsoft so afraid that they’re reverting to their usual tricks (e.g. not competing on technology). After all, there used to be a huge force of Wintel+Dell, but even that partnership has changed…
Consider this: Google, IBM, HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, SAP, Accenture, China, India, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Avnet, vast numbers of global and local resellers, consultants, ISVs, and system integrators are all making vast fortunes for their shareholders off of Linux. Will the industry just let FUD tricks stand in their way??? Heck no, this industry invented FUD and certainly knows how to defeat it.
The real problem is that the industry is already defeating it. The MS monopoly is under attack from all sides: ODF, Linux Desktop, Linux server, Adobe RIA, Eclipse RCP, etc, etc and I see these latest threats as last resort efforts from a company clearly concerned about its long term growth. That’s a natural response, but another way to compete is to just fix your products and deliver something your customers want.
Monday, April 9th, 2007
Web based OpenDocument ODF Validator
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/validator
“This is the Fellowship’s ODF Validation Service, a free service that checks OpenDocument files for conformance with the ODF specification.
…
ODF validator written by Alex Hudson as part of the Fellowship’s ODF Tools project. Web service provided by Cyclone3 and maintained by Roman Fordinal. Learn more about Cyclone3 ODFvalidator extension.”
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
Bob Sutor’s Testimony to the Texas House and Senate on open document formats
Well worth the time investment to read.
Good afternoon/evening, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. IBM supports this bill. This bill is about the future, increased competition and innovation, and about more choice for Texas. It is completely consistent with the technological and intellectual property directions of the software industry.
…
I personally like the following point very much. I actually can’t stand Star Trek (sorry, I don’t mean to offend). But, I will say - I never saw them run into a situation where one ship couldn’t contact/communicate with the other. They could also beam between ships - because of standards. Imagine if Captain Kirk couldn’t transport to another ship b/c one used Microsoft Windows and the other used a non-Microsoft supplier. It’s absurd… but why do we feel it’s ok for our documents as we build out global libraries of digital information?
I can assure you that the software we have in fifty years will work in radically different ways and will be supplied by completely different providers than we know today. We must leave our options open and, luckily, with ODF, we have an excellent choice compared with any alternative. Further, personally, I would rather bet on the “intelligence of the crowd,” the collective smarts of the IT industry who truly manage open standards to set us up for success in the next few years. Relying on one vendor to optimize things for his or her success is yesterday’s solution.
I can assure you that the software we have in fifty years will work in radically different ways and will be supplied by completely different providers than we know today. We must leave our options open and, luckily, with ODF, we have an excellent choice compared with any alternative. Further, personally, I would rather bet on the “intelligence of the crowd,” the collective smarts of the IT industry who truly manage open standards to set us up for success in the next few years. Relying on one vendor to optimize things for his or her success is yesterday’s solution.
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