The Frigs and Frags around OpenDocument

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Today I’m in London attending the OpenSource Summit and listening to Bruce Perens. I landed yesterday evening in London under a violent storm that caused the plane to be very shaky (it will be interesting to fly back this evening).

Being shaken up and down and back and forth made me feel a little bit like OpenDocument Format could “feel” these days. Just try to imagine yourself how an ISO standard feels and let’s pretend we never had that conversation… Anyway.You read the news just like I did; a more or less complete press review is here, thanks to Sam Hiser. The least I can say is that I am disappointed by the OpenDocument Foundation, not because they’re switching to a different format, but because of the media effect their announcement unleashed. As a matter of fact, I think that I read pretty much every opinion in the press about it: the Foundation is a bunch of traitors, they could have a point and, wait a minute, aren’t they just three guys in a garage?

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My beef with the OpenDocument is that they really did hurt the Open Standards cause by coming out in public about their new orientation, and they indirectly helped the spreading of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by Microsoft and the press about ODF. That being said, I wish them good luck with their new endeavours (although I’m more than a bit skeptical about the “Compound Document Format” at this stage) and believe that as much as they and I disagree about several topics, they are in favor of Open Standards.

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But let’s take a closer look to the situation with ODF itself, and leave the Foundation’s claims aside for a moment. The Foundation may be gone, but ODF itself is doing quite well and is gaining new (mighty) contributors. Yes, Google is siding with ODF. So long for the odd and quite sad feast of business and technology merging happening between Novell and Microsoft. Microsoft keeps thundering and lenifying about patents at the same time, but Novell seems to be on the verge of no-return. Here and there, its engineers keep bragging about how great OOXML is, and its marketing message is all about merging and “interoperability”. Is that what the customers need? Customers need things like Samba, or virtualization, but they don’t need to have Microsoft selling them Linux. It’s precisely what they’re running away from.

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Back to the OASIS. We’re about to publish the 1.2 version of ODF, and this will be submitted first as an OASIS standard and then will take the way to the ISO. Speaking about which, I have heard here and there that the JTC-1’s SC 34 of the ISO (the group in charge of OOXML and ODF among other things) is being paralyzed by the number of new “P” countries that discovered they had a passion for OOXML but fell short of being competent on the other standard proposals. What I see coming though, because I witnessed this at the Afnor, is that Microsoft and its proxies will do anything in their power to stall ODF 1.2 at at the ISO and inside the national standards orgaizations. The reason is simple: If their objectives was to have two standards, ODF certainly could have led a life of its own and that would not have been a concern to Redmond. But now that the situation becomes trickier for OOXML, a vested interest in severely harming ODF seems to become more prominent.

Expect lots of surprizes, laughs, scandals, and dirty tricks in 2008. The spin doctors are already at work. Stay tuned…

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Stephane Rodriguez says:

November 9, 2007 at 3:08 pm

I have to say I am a bit disheartened by the OpenDocument Foundation. The first thing they should do now is take a different name, since they seem to not like the OpenDocument format.

As for the chance of success of the Compound Document Format, it’s exactly zero. Never in the past has a single file format solved all problems people had. Those guys are committing suicide.

I am not sure Microsoft cares that much about stalling ODF either. I think they don’t care at all. They need OOXML to pass ISO because it’s mandated by governments. Everything else is just a distraction to them. In fact, I think the biggest enemy is their own file formats. The next version of Microsoft Office is planned for fall 2009, just two years after Office 2007 shipped.

I think Microsoft’s OOXML has to be integrated in any Office suite out there, because Microsoft’s market forces dictates that OOXML will become massively used over time (it’s starting already to be seen). But vendors have an important decision to make : decide to make ODF or OOXML or some other pivot file format the master format. That is, the memory representation of the format used at run-time. If a vendor decides their pivot format is OOXML, then all they are doing is a clone of Microsoft Office and they’ll be forver chasing the tail light (Microsoft only discloses the file format once they are done, which gives them years of lead).

Charles says:

November 10, 2007 at 5:50 pm

Stephane,
Unfortunately, MS will attack ODF 1.2, just like it stalled ODF 1.0 to become a french standard at the Afnor.
All this may not have been the case, or might have been delayed if OOXML standardization had been effective and going smooth. It wasn’t the case.

I expect an ongoing battle after OOXML that will be on ODF 1.2, were it only for retaliation means.

Sam Hiser says:

November 11, 2007 at 3:16 am

Thank you for your thoughts, Charles.

ODF deserves its success and strong momentum.

If we helped to create FUD opportunities for the opposition, I regret that.

It is important for ODF to go from one success to the next on the desktop; and with that in view I hope your readers come to understand in coming days how we believe CDF can provide a complement at the server hub. They are very much complementary and inclusive concepts the way we see things — and not mutually exclusive.

I hope we can be successful over the next few weeks cutting through the distracting noise to explain with better effect how CDF as our Universal Document Format is intended to work on the server side to make ODF’s success on the desktop a big win.

What has gone unreported is that our CDF strategy is targeted as an open MS Sharepoint alternative.

November 13, 2007 at 8:36 am

“Unfortunately, MS will attack ODF 1.2, just like it stalled ODF 1.0 to become a french standard at the Afnor.”

Le sponsoring tout azimut de Microsoft auprès du gouvernement, de la mairie de Paris, et d’un certain nombre d’infrastructures de l’état est beaucoup plus inquiétant que la troupe de branquignolles qui se sont présentés à l’Afnor pour tenter de vendre pourquoi le format de Microsoft devait passer l’ISO.
L’influence provenant du sponsoring garantie à terme le non-choix en matière de logiciels.
C’est d’ailleurs pour moi l’expression visible du désengagement de l’état, la réduction des dépenses, en faisant rentrer comme dans un jeu de vases communiquants les grosses multinationales. A ce titre, la politique est cohérente.
On a le président qu’on mérite il parait…

The Frigs and Frags around OpenDocument

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