A Microsoft document format that may be adopted as an international standard this weekend is a ploy to lock in customers, who could lose control over their own data in a worst-case scenario, critics say.
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) is balloting its members on the issue in a vote that closes on Sunday.
Opponents of Open XML, which is the default file-saving format in Microsoft Office 2007, say there is no need for a rival standard to the widely used Open Document Format (ODF) that is already an international standard.
They argue its 6,000 pages of code, compared with ODF’s 860 pages, make it artificially complicated and untranslatable.
Open XML is unnecessarily bloated, partly because it packs in unrelated features that lead users to other Microsoft applications, Free Software Foundation Europe’s Georg Greve says.
“This is a classic vendor lock-in strategy,” he told Reuters. “It’s not that new, it’s not that ingenious but it’s quite effective.”
Yup.
It’s going to be a Microsoft fair voting process:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/08/28/1237255.shtml
Groklaw and CNET have a lot on it as well.
Trust MS? When pigs fly to the moon by flapping their ears.
Talk about The Big Lie!
Only Micro$oft could go to a meeting about setting an open source standard and propose their own closed source code as the new open source standard.
It just baffles my brains, especially if they get away with it because they casually and openly stacked the deck, probably denying they stacked the deck, just to be consistent.
People will still use ODF, in clear defiance of what M$ will do.
I almost forgot, ISO will approve it just because its bloated and everyone knows how much the ISO guys (and the occasional gal) love bloated processes.
#5, Angel,
It isn’t that ISO is a bloated organization. It is that they are built on consensus between all their members. In fact, it is a good example of the problems of a leaderless society.
ISO declined them once already, keep your fingers crossed that the fix isn’t in this time.
>>Microsoft and others point out that …. competition makes for
>>better products.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read all year. Maybe all decade. Can they really say this with a straight face?
>>Only Micro$oft could go to a meeting about setting an open source standard and propose their own closed source code as the new open source standard.
There’s no code (proprietary or otherwise) involved in OpenXML — it’s simply a spec for how to layout a directory structure for a ‘package’ of content of various types (primarily XML documents), which is then just ZIPped into one single library. It’s actually a pretty good standard if people could be bothered to take a look at it before bashing Microsoft, and it’s orders of magnitude better than the binary formats Office developers have had to deal with for years.
That’s not to say it’s any better than ODF, but ODF doesn’t cover a fraction of what Microsoft needs to do for Word/Excel/Powerpoint etc integration — which is the cornerstone of their Office story, so it’s no surprise they had to “embrace and extend” again.
There’s nothing stopping other productivity suite providers from implementing OpenXML.
[Let the flaming commence]
Avoiding way-too-technical arguments, best answer to W.Bradney’s post is that MS have intentionaly developed new “open source” standard that plays well with old MS formats but ignores (plays foul with) existing open source standards (W3C, OASIS). This would be fine if they just wanted to contribute another set of specifications, but MS is intensly attempting to make this an official standard, not “just another format”. If old MS formats were open source, this would be natural, but sorry, they were not . Long story short: first duty of a new open source standard is backward compatibility with previously existing open source standards, not with the any of the previous proprietary formats.
Another, more muddy problem I see is MS attempt to control various formats. Best example is their new (excellent) image file format. Open as in open specifications, closed as in you can’t legally develop anything with it without first getting “blessed” by and paying to the mighty MS. That is pure sneaky evil and I am afraid that they might have some similar back-stabbing idea with the OpenXML which is not obvious at this moment.
Again, what the hell is an “open source standard”. I know what “open source” is, and I know what an “open standard” is.
OpenXML, as far as I can tell, is not a software product and involves no “source code” that can be “held closed”, so it clearly isn’t even trying to be “open source”, and as far as I can tell OpenXML does fit the definition of an “open standard” quite well. It’s open (ECMA, soon ISO), in that anyone can implement it, and it’s a standard in the de facto sense since Office has about 95% market share. But we’re not talking about (the proprietary, closed-source software product) Office — we’re talking about the OpenXML standard. Just like when we talk about C# being an “open language” we’re not talking about the closed-source Visual Studio that is the most popular means for writing programs in that language.
I dislike Microsoft’s FUD campaigns as much as the next guy, but that’s no reason to bring our own FUD to the table.
@10, 11:
“It’s actually a pretty good standard if people could be bothered to take a look at it before bashing Microsoft”
The problem is that MS hasn’t released the full spec, so people can’t look at it. It includes (in the MS implementation) tons of undocumented attributed and tags for throughly obscure functions which can only be understood by Microsoft’s proprietary and closed software. Thus…
“There’s no code (proprietary or otherwise) involved in OpenXML”
…there is proprietary code involed: the one that creates and interprets the OOXML files. Only MS has access to full capabilities of this creation and interpretation process through their own software.
Also, read the piece “OOXML is defective by design.”
Wayne Bradney: M$ has established a pattern of deceit. I don’t need to give them a fair hearing and I don’t have the time. Assuming they’re out to get me saves me a lot of time and I’ll be right anyway, if I’m wrong I simply don’t care. “They have no body to incarcerate and no soul to save.”
Speaking of ISO…Many companies use their certification ISO 9001:2000 Quality System as a mark of High Quality because that is what people thinks it means. Bullshit! The only thing ISO 9001:2000 Quality System certification means is there is a paper trail in place for the manufacturing process which the company itself writes.
I am not defending Microsoft but they are doing exactly what you would be doing if you had a business. Businesses must make money and the money they make depends on how well the business is managed.
Addle is the same, they will do what ever it takes to increase their profitability. But remember Addle is into selling hardware not software as Microsoft does.
Cheers
And people still ask me to this day why I switched to apple. I guess I should have them surf the net on Microsofts great progress. Sorry everyone, nothing against Windows, but c’mon, shouldnt the consumer have a chance to win sometime?
Whereas repeated use of the term “Open source standard” only makes the above commenter seem ignorant, Microsoft’s “Open” XML is nothing of the sort. It is “more” open than the old closed binary formats that seemed to changed with every Office release, but that doesn’t make it “open”.
“It’s actually a pretty good standard if people could be bothered to take a look at it before bashing Microsoft”.
What, people who can’t be bothered to track down and download the 6000-page spec are just not trying? A common complaint by world standards bodies voting on the ISO in the proposed fast-track process of MS XML is that 6 months is not enough time to analyse this huge spec. Wayne Bradley above obviously haven’t read it either from his comments, so how would he know it’s a “pretty good standard”? He doesn’t even seem certain it’s not a software product.
Microsoft is a member of the OASIS group which developed the ODF standard, and as such had every opportunity to participate and ensure compatibility with its products. They chose not to. Instead they took what they learnt from the development and instead made their own non-compatible proprietary and patented standard which make continual references to how their closed binary documents are rendered (eg the property autoSpaceLikeWord95), without saying what that means, and ignoring the ISO convention of using existing ISO standards for things like timestamps, math markup, image formats etc and use their own inconsistent and not fully documented formats supposedly to retain “backwards compatibility”. It even clashes with existing standards. A large part of the XML examples in the Spec is invalid XML. All this proprietary bloat is why their spec is a massive 6000 pages long, and why the ODF spec is only a few hundred pages; ODF use existing standards where it can. While the Ms XML patent clause gives blanket legal immunity to Government organisations, other organisations, businesses or individuals are not so fortunate. It is specifically incompatible with GPL software, so MS can stifle its adoption in some opensource software, such as on Linux.
Getting ECMA approval was pretty much a certainty, considering it’s an industry organisation of businesses who get together to agree on mutually-convenient standards for their businesses. It’s the most expedient route towards becoming eligible for consideration by the ISO, since it is so easy to become an ECMA standard. The ISO is different, as it is formed by international standards bodies of each member country, not private organisations. But as you may have read in the press, some standards organisations are prone to stacking, and Microsoft has been busy doing just that, both in the US and overseas, using Microsoft partners who join en masse at the last moment just to vote for it. I’m certain MS would have paid the membership fees for them, too, along with assurances of more business. According to the press, in Sweden “Microsoft offered extra ‘market subsidies’ to partners that participated in the Monday vote about the Open XML format”. If MS XML was good enough to stand on its own, they wouldn’t have to resort to fraud. They see the international push for an office format standard, and ODF becoming an ISO standard is a real threat in the Government sector globally especially (large bureaucracies with a lot of computers). Hence the fraud of “open” XML and the push to become an ISO standard to neutralise ODF by stacking standards bodies around the world.
For Microsoft, the motive is obvious: Greed. MS Office makes up half their annual profit, over 60 BILLION dollars in fact. More than the gross national product of some countries.
Formatting, fonts, and embedded code in documents are the price we pay for spam:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6970368.stm