Archive for the 'ODF' Category
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.
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
SOG: Adobe PDF Q&A
High quality analysis of the Adobe PDF/ISO news (as I’ve come to expect):
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/01/30/iso_pdf/
The last paragraph reminded me that I too have harped on Adobe for being to controlling and not embracing an ‘open’ approach to their business model. Just like many others, I hope this is an indication of more to come in the future.
Thursday, January 18th, 2007
Contradictory Nature of OOXML
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070117145745854
An example of the mysterious ways things have evolved:
Starting with the somewhat silly, OOXML does not conform to ISO 8601:2004 “Representation of Dates and Times.” Instead, OOXML section 3.17.4.1, “Date Representation,” on page 3305, requires that implementations replicate a Microsoft bug that dictates that 1900 is a leap year, which in fact it isn’t. Similarly, in order to comply with OOXML, your product would be required to use the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function, and therefore assign incorrect dates to some days of the week, and also miscalculate the number of days between certain dates.
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
IBM votes No on OpenXML as an ECMA standard
Proud to be truly open, free standard and not an ‘open’ front end on a vendor-controlled spec for a proprietary product. I love this quote from Bob Sutor:
“ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past. We voted for the future.”
Friday, December 1st, 2006
ODF Standard is Published as Official ISO/IEC Standard
I just saw the news via Bob Sutor. Give a warm welcome to ISO/IEC 26300:2006.
Wednesday, November 15th, 2006
IBM’s Bob Sutor on Relationship between IP and Open Source
Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM, sat down with Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor to discuss the relationship between intellectual property and open source. The discussion ranged from how a company can balance open source and proprietary software development to what Novell and Microsoft are doing.
Saturday, November 4th, 2006
ODF Alliance Weighs In
There’s no question Microsoft hates ODF – so why ‘collaborate’ with Novell…
Friday, November 3rd, 2006
Microsoft – Novell: The Beginning
I unfortunately feel uncomfortable giving my own views in detail due to where/what I work on and my level of insight relative to the public at large. With that background, here are my few comments that I admit have little detail, but try to frame a view. The reality is it’s all grey area; nothing’s black and white; and in the end the extreme views/conclusions never happen (unless you’re in law school and get ‘that one example case of the extreme‘ that after further thought wasn’t so extreme really).
Cons:
First, this will take a long time to fully understand. I think most in the community have a (founded) distrust of Microsoft. If you follow closely the proceedings with ODF (very closely), you can see the foundation for that distrust in action live today. If you recall the Sun-Microsoft partnership – besides for some good press articles recounting McNealy’s jabs – there was never any real, tangible output. Have you noticed anything that’s better b/c of it? Will we ever notice something to come of this announcement? I’m highly skeptical.
Three things are certain: Microsoft does not generate revenue on Linux, Linux/ODF are clearly counter to Microsoft’s core Windows/Office strategy, and Microsoft has been for years planning/executing a strategy to counter Linux and open source. Microsoft considers open source in its non-commercial form a strategic threat rather than ‘embrace and profit’ from it as say Red Hat. This announcement seemed an attempt by Ballmer to make it Linux commercial – but it’s not; it’s hybrid. Now, if people think this announcement is Microsoft turning over a new leaf … it’s not April 1 and therefore not your day to shine.
Novell: TBD. There are so many details to understand.
Pros:
Linux Market: If Microsoft supporting/endorsing Linux doesn’t get people excited about where this market is heading, I don’t know what would. In that view, ignore the terms/details of this announcement, step back, and enjoy the glow of knowing a community cause a giant to change its course. I have a strong gut feel this will have a huge growth impact on the linux server AND DESKTOP market as we go forward. (I didn’t say this particular announcement is positive or negative but rather said I think it will cause ‘growth’).
As people weed through the details, bloggers dream up conspiracies, companies do their diligence, we’ll all know more. Throughout all the churn though, developers will develop, and code will be created and the community will innovate. It was a relief to watch the SystemTap dev mailing list yesterday. All this flurry of activity was going on around them, yet they were discussing architecture, patches, fixes, and how to make the code better. I IM’d a friend at the world’s largest search engine working on next gen storage architectures (and Linux/Python, etc) and he IM’d back “what announcement?”
I feel confident the open source development community will go on unphased. Open source started and has always been something different – and it will continue that way. So while the analysts, press, and IT voices all ponder, analyze, speculate, comment, and ‘throw up’, I’m optimistic, the developers will keep adding new features for me to use in Compiz, XGL, and Gnome.
Outlook:
I’m optimistic for the growth of Linux b/c of this move. There are certainly many angles and lenses to view this situation through. I’m sure we’ll end up with views from many extremes; hopefully a cautious, conservative, and experienced voice of the community wins out.
I started off planning a small, short entry that would say nothing… guess I failed.
Burning Question / Jab:
One last question though… does this mean we won’t see ‘Get the Facts’ ads anymore? The advertising industry may lose millions… maybe someone should analyze that impact.
Friday, October 6th, 2006
Pouvez vous dire “ODF”
All French publications should now be distributed and published in ODF format. This is even bigger than Mass.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/03/HNfrenchodf_1.html
And then they went even further than ODF:
“In the report, Carayon also recommended the government fund a research center dedicated to open-source software security, and set up a system to help national and local government agencies exchange information about best practice in the use of open-source software.”
(and if my French title is horribly translated, I do apologize… and blame Google)
Thursday, October 5th, 2006
ECMA Office Open XML Draft Set for Monday
I think this is a ridiculous attempt by Microsoft to seem legit. I had a property law professor who used to always retort “A duck is a duck. Would you let me call a duck an elephant – I think not” whenever a budding law student tried to create some scheme to get around a rule of law… Is OO XML an elephant? It’s funny to me that the acronym would be OO XML … when OOo… ooohh never mind.
Anyway, why not just use a truly open standard and please everyone with an open source implementation – or at least publish the spec, agree not to uphold all the relevant patents for it, I mean all, and let the community drive the real innovation in an open standards body.
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
Firefox ODF Plugin
Had a coworker ask today if there is a Firefox plugin for ODF. The answer is yes of course.
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
Ohio LinuxFest 2006: All Grown Up
This show has really really matured over the past few years. It’s a great event with a unique history and comes with less vendor-flavor as say LinuxWorld. There are some impressive speakers lined up as well – Chris DiBona, Jon “Maddog” Hall, and I’m seeing a listing for a “suprise guest”… hmm… I wonder who that will be. If it’s Katie Couric, you can bet that’s a sign this event is over-hyped. If it’s anyone else I’m sure it will be a crowd pleaser.
Thursday, July 6th, 2006
Microsoft Office to Support ODF – via an open source project via a partner
Monday, June 26th, 2006
Microsoft Fights ODF with… Free Office for Everyone… errr… just Massachusetts
It appears stopping ODF is worth at least $30M to Microsoft. Actually it’s far less b/c well.. another copy of Office costs Microsoft nothing – it’s just “lost opportunity”…
But this is relatively unfair – so MA goes towards ODF – and gets free software for its students… why don’t the other states get free software for their students? Will Microsoft replicate this tactics in other ODF states that may pop up? It would seem to me as governor you could save your state $30M in Office fees by supporting ODF. And if you don’t support ODF, you’re wasting $30M of your taxpayers dollars and are evil :)
So the real coup might be if Microsoft gets to write off any of that $30M… then the trick is really on taxpayers everywhere… and those poor students who will grow up only knowing Office and not the apps built on open standards and open source that all companies and governments will be using in less than 5 years…. (or 3 years ago if you believed Jonathan) .. ha… it _will_ take time… how much I don’t know.
It would be so ironic if MA mandated that it’s classrooms use Macs…
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