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Wizard of ODF: Interoperability barriers and the List Proposal Vote Deadline on Wednesday
marbux at his best.
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this TC does not have the final word
on what goes into the ODF 1.2 spec. There is still the OASIS vote, the
JTC-1 vote, and the ISO final ballot, with a few other stops along the
way. There is also the market's response to what this TC does. Given
that no one on this TC has objected to my considerable efforts to
raise public concerns with Microsoft's ISO submission and some on this
TC have lambasted Microsoft for creating interoperability barriers,
why should this TC's members consider themselves exempt from warnings
that they have just fallen into precisely the kind of behavior we
routinely criticize when it's Microsoft that creates the
interoperability barriers. Especially when it's the end users who will
pay the price of the non-interoperability?
Classes of Fidelity for Document Applications - Rick Jellife
Rick Jellife weighs in on the OpenOffice ODF- MSOffice OpenXML interop embroglio. His take is to focus on <i>Classes of Fidelity</i>, providing us with a comparative table of fidelity categories. I wonder though if this über document processing approach is anywhere near consistent with the common sense meaning of <i>interoperability</i> to average end-users? IMHO, end-users interpret "<i>interoperability"</i> to mean that compliant applications can exchange documents without loss of information.
<i>"..... In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come back with a bang with the release of Office 2007 SP2, and I'd like to give another pointer to it for readers who missed it first time around.... </i>
<i>"...... OASIS ODF TC has some kind of conformance and testing wing at work, but it is not at all clear that they will deliver anything in this kind of area. Without targetting these classes, ODF's breezy conformance requirements means that ODF conforment software can deliver vastly different kinds of fidelity, yet still accord to the letter of the law (and, indeed, to the spirit of the ODF spec, which allows so many holes) which will cause frustration all-around....."</i>
Ouch!
Developing a Universal Markup Solution For Web Content
KODAXIL To Replace XML?\n<br><br>\nFile this one under the Universal Interoperability label. Very interesting. Especially since XML document formats have proven to fall short on the two primary expectations of users: interoperability and Web ready. Like HTML+ :) Maybe KODAXIL will work?\n<br><br>
The recent Web 2.0 Conference was filled with new web services , portals and wiki efforts trying their best to mash data into document objects. iCloud, MindTouch, AppLogic, 3Tera, Caspio and Gazoodle all deserve attention. although each took a rather different approach towards solving the problem. MindTouch in particular was excellent.\n<br><br>
"A Montreal-based software and research development company has developed a markup solution and language-neutral asset-descriptor that when fully developed, could result in a universal computer language for representing information in databases, web and document contents and business objects."\n<br><br>\n"While still at a seminal stage of development, the company Gnoesis, aims to address the problem of data fragmentation caused by semantic differences between developers and users from different linguistic backgrounds."\n<br><br>\nGnoesis, the company that has developed the language called KODAXIL (Knowledge, Object, Data, Action, and eXtensible Interoperable Language), a data and information representation language, says the new language will replace the XML function of consolidating semantically identical data streams from different languages, by creating a common language to do this.\n<br><br>\nThe extensible semantic markup associated with this language will be understood worldwide and is three times shorter than XML.
Microsoft's Quest for Interoperability and Open Standards
Interesting article discussing the many ways Microsoft is using to improve the public perception that they are serious about interoperability and open formats, protocols and interfaces. Rocketman attended the recent ISO SC34 meeting in Prague and agrees that Microsoft has indeed put on a new public face filled with cooperation, compliance and unheard of sincerity.
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He also says, "Don't be fooled!!!"
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There is a big difference between participation in vendor consortia and government sponsored public standards efforts, and, actual implementation at the product level. Looking at how Microsoft products implement open standards, my take is that they have decided on a policy of end user choice. Their applications offer on the one hand the choice of aging, near irrelevant and often crippled open standards. And on the other, the option of very rich and feature filled but proprietary formats, protocols and interfaces that integrate across the entire Microsoft platform of desktop, devices and servers. For instance; IE8 supports 1998 HTML-CSS, but not the advanced ACiD-3 <i>"HTML+"</i> used by WebKit, Firefox, Opera and near every device or smartphone operating at the edge of the Web. (HTML+ = HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JS, JS Libs).
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But they do offer advanced .NET-WPF proprietary alternative to Open Web HTML+. These include XAML, Silverlight, XPS, LINQ, Smart Tags, and OOXML. Very nice.
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<i>"When an open source advocate, open standards advocate, or, well, pretty much anyone that competes with Microsoft (news, site) sees an extended hand from the software giant toward better interoperability, they tend to look and see if the other hand's holding a spiked club.
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Even so, the Redmond, WA company continues to push the message that it has seen the light regarding open standards and interoperability...."</i><br><br>
Alex Brown on the ODF Zero Interop problem: The discussion to limit the use of Foreign elements and attributes
So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF
document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM
TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best
valueless and at worst positively misleading.
So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into
resolving this problem ... Alex Brown
What Alex fails to mention is that the "foreign elements and alien attributes" components in the ODF Section 1.5 "Compliance and Conformance" clause was originally put there in early 2003 to provide a compatibility layer for MSOffice binary documents. Without this clause, it would be impossible to convert the billions of legacy MSOffice binary documents to ODF without breaking the fidelity. Now th OASIS ODF TC wants to limit the use of the compatiblity clause. An action that would seriously cripple Microsoft's efforts to implement ODF in MSOffice 14.
No surprises here. It was only a matter of time until IBM and Sun ganged up on the newest TC member, Microsoft.
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Add Sticky NoteSo I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF
document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM
TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best
valueless and at worst positively misleading.
So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into
resolving this problem ...- bingo. kudos to marbux for catching this discussion. - on 2009-03-09
ongoing · What’s “Cloud Interop”?
The question that seems more important than all the rest is “Can I afford to switch vendors?” Let’s consider some examples.
When printers wear out, you can buy new printers from whoever with little concern for switching cost.
If you’re unhappy with your current servers, you can replace them with models from lots of vendors (Sun, Dell, HP, IBM, others) without worrying too much about compatibility (well, you may have some racking and cabling pain); the issues are price, performance, and support.
If you’re grouchy about your OS, you can move between *n*x flavors like Debian, SUSE, and Solaris pretty freely in most (granted, not all) cases; with maybe some deployment and sysadmin pain.
If you’re unhappy with your desktop environment, well too bad, you’re stuck. Your users are too deeply bought into some combination of Outlook calendaring and Excel macros and Sharepoint collab. The price of rebuilding the whole environment is simply too high for most businesses to consider.
If you’re unhappy with your Oracle licensing charges, you probably have to suck it up and deal with it. SQL is a good technology but a lousy standard, offering near-zero interoperability; the cost of re-tooling your apps so they’ll run on someone else’s database is probably unthinkable. Like they say, you date your systems vendor but you marry Larry Ellison.
An Interop Nightmare: The Northwest Progressive Institute Advocate Review of OpenOffice.org Writer surpasses Microsoft Word under the hood
Marbux at his best! Let's hope the OASIS ODF and OpenOffice.org groups get to work on real interop, and stop with the phony baloney. It can be done, bu tnothing is going to happen until people face up to the harsh reality that today there is zero interop between ODF compliant applications. This must change .... unless of course the world decides to move to the most interoperable but high performance format ever invented: HTML-CSS.
And maybe from there the world can move onto the WebKit sugarplum document model, and truly set the future of the Open Web. One thing obviously missing for the Open Web is an office suite of high performance editors capable of natively producing high end WebKit documents (or basic HTML-CSS for that matter!!!!!!!)
Good on marbux. Now, can you persuade OASIS and OpenOffice to change their application specific ways? Take on the desktop as well as the future of the Open Web?
Interoperability, more and less | Bob Sutor's Website and Blog
IBM'sl Bob Sutor defines interop in terms of formats, protocols and interfaces: "To be clear, I’m talking about software interoperability. That technically boils down to the formats used to exchange information, the protocols by which the formatted information is exchanged, and the application programming interfaces (APIs) that software implements to allow the interchange to concretely take place. Collectively I’ll call these interchange formats and methods".
MIcrosot's latest kiss of death: ODF
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
That's how Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) killed Netscape many moons ago. Embrace this newfangled "Web browser" market with a new product. Extend the existing Web standards with proprietary technologies like ActiveX. Extinguish the competition by denying them access to those fancy new features. When it works, this is a great way to build and maintain wide, alligator-filled business moats.
It seems to me that Mr. Softy is up to his old tricks again. The target this time is the OpenDocument standard, a free and open alternative to Microsoft's own Office formats for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
Apache POI - Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files
POI 3.5 beta 3, and Office Open XML Support (2008-07-18) now supported by Microsoft through the Document Interoperability Initiative Project (DII)
The Apache POI Project is currently working to support the new Office Open XML file formats, such as XLSX and PPTX, which were introduced in Office 2007.
The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format, and Office OpenXML format, using pure Java. In short, you can read and write MS Excel files using Java. In addition, you can read and write MS Word and MS PowerPoint files using Java. POI is your Java Excel solution (for Excel 97-2007). However, we have a complete API for porting other OLE 2 Compound Document formats and welcome others to participate.
OLE 2 Compound Document Format based files include most Microsoft Office files such as XLS and DOC as well as MFC serialization API based file formats.
Office OpenXML Format based files include the new (2007+) xml based file formats, including Microsoft office files such as XLSX, DOCX and PPTX.
Collaboration Is At The Heart Of Open Source Content Management -- Open Source Content Management
As the economy tanks, open source proponents reflexively point to the low capital costs of acquiring open source software. But big customers want more than a bargain. They also want better. Thus, collaboration is more than just staying true to the open source credo of community and cooperation. It's also a smart business move. Drupal and Alfresco show us why.
Can Cloud Computing Achieve Interoperable Platforms?
Response from Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo to the Tim Bray blog: Get in the Cloud. .. "When it comes to cloud computing platforms, you have all of the same problems described above and a few extra ones. The key wrinkle with cloud computing platforms is that there is no standardization of the APIs and platform technologies that underlie these services. The APIs provided by Amazon's cloud computing platform (EC2/S3/EBS/etc) are radically different from those provided by Google App Engine (Datastore API/Python runtime/Images API/etc). For zero lock-in to occur in this space, there need to be multiple providers of the same underlying APIs. Otherwise, migrating between cloud computing platforms will be more like switching your application from Ruby on Rails and MySQL to Django and PostgreSQL (i.e. a complete rewrite)...."
Although cloud computing vendors are not explicitly trying to lock-in customers to their platform, the fact is that today if a customer has heavily invested in either platform then there isn't a straightforward way for customers to extricate themselves from the platform and switch to another vendor. In addition there is not a competitive marketplace of vendors providing standard/interoperable platforms as there are with email hosting or Web hosting providers.
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Add Sticky Notethe fact is that today if a customer has heavily invested in either platform then there isn't a straightforward way for customers to extricate themselves from the platform and switch to another vendor. In addition there is not a competitive marketplace of vendors providing standard/interoperable platforms as there are with email hosting or Web hosting providers.
- Run Open Source apps in the Cloud, and write specific business process apps to WebKit - Chrome or Java. For interop with high end interactive graphic intensive apps, i would take Adobe AiR over Silverlight. - on 2008-11-06
Microsoft Unleashes Stream of Docs in the Name of Interoperability
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Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Version 1.0 technical documentation for Microsoft Office 2007, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 as an effort to drive greater interoperability and foster a stronger open relationship with their developer and partner communities. They also posted over 5000 pages of technical documentation on Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint binary file formats on the MSDN site royalty-free basis under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP).
EU's Kroes says further technology antitrust abuse cases pending UPDATE - Forbes.com
I wonder if the EU is aware that there is no such thing as ODF Interoperability? After more than five years of working side by side with Sun on the OASIS ODF TC, there is zero interop between KOffice ODF and OpenOffice ODF! How is it that Microsoft's joining the ODF TC somehow results in a level of application interop that has eluded and defied the efforts of two supposedly open source applications?
The truth is that OpenOffice-ODF and MSOffice-OOXMl are both based on an XML encoding of the application specific binary dump. The content layers are easily exchanged with other applications, but presentation continues to defy any kind of interop. Especially what the EU expects. Check out the quotes:
" The commission said that as part of its antitrust investigation into interoperability with Microsoft Office it will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.
"Kroes said on Tuesday that the commission keeps a close eye on interoperability and said the market should have the right balance of non-propriety and propriety standards.
'Standards are the foundation of interoperability'. 'Standards may, of course, be proprietary or non-proprietary. Much excellent technical development has been driven by non-proprietary standards - the internet is awash with acronyms for non-proprietary standards: HTTP, HTML and XML'.
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The commission said that as part of its antitrust investigation into interoperability with Microsoft Office it will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.
Kroes said on Tuesday that the commission keeps a close eye on interoperability and said the market should have the right balance of non-propriety and propriety standards.
'Standards are the foundation of interoperability'. 'Standards may, of course, be proprietary or non-proprietary. Much excellent technical development has been driven by non-proprietary standards - the internet is awash with acronyms for non-proprietary standards: HTTP, HTML and XML'.
Three myths Microsoft tells Russia | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs
OSS Innovation and MS IPR :: OSS Interop vs. MS Interop :: OSS Profit vs. MS Profit
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Even so, we interoperate with Microsoft products, anyway, even without Microsoft's blessing. As just one example, which content collaboration/management system integrates most seamlessly with Microsoft Office? If you said, "Sharepoint," you would be wrong. The answer is Alfresco. Who has seamlessly integrated the Microsoft CIFS interface into a Java-based CMS? If you said, "Sharepoint," you would again be wrong. The answer, again, is "Alfresco."
OOXML: The next step - Interop at the International Standards legal level | Marbux - Weir - Ian [odf-discuss]
Marbux at his best! Here he responds to Rob Weir's ODF v 1.2 arguments with a legal dissertation on International Standards, ISO, the WTO, and the key issue of interoperability and what it must mean. Excellent!
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Both ODF and OOXML are only one WTO Dispute Resolution Process complaint
away from losing their international standard, national technical
regulation, and government procurement specification status. They do not
meet the minimum requirements of international law. Both are unnecessary
obstacles to international trade; neither specify a uniform and
substitutable product. That does not sound like a sound business plan to me.
So I return to my question posed in an earlier post: Will ODF v. 1.2 under
your leadership attempt to "clearly and unambiguously specify that
conformance requirements essential to achieve the interoperability" and will
the standards-based interoperability between *different* IT systems be
"demonstrable," as required by JTC 1 Directives?
That is not a complicated question and it requires no deep dive into
international law to answer. International law requires what the quoted JTC
1 Directives require in this regard, but for purposes of the point under
discussion we need go no further than the Directives' plain language.
One either adheres to the rules or one forfeits the moral high ground to
complain when others ignore the rules. Where does Rob Weir stand on
complying with the rules?
OOXML and ODF: The next step | [odf-discuss] Marbux Responds!
Excellent legal argument by the legendary marbux concerning OOXML and ODF itneroperability. Covers ISO Interop Requirements and the demands of International Trade Agreements. Key to this thread is ODF v 1.2 and what must be done to bring ODF into legal compliance with International demands.
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The issue we were discussing -- and what I believe the ODEF conference was
very much concerned with -- was whether ODF plus vendor-specific extensions
will be classified as conformant ODF. The market requirement is for
"Exchange Formats" and document-level interoperability.
I could repose my question as whether ODF v. 1.2 will "clearly and
unambiguously specify interoperability requirements essential to achieve the
interoperability," as required by JTC 1 Directives. As you noted in an
earlier post in this thread, you can't do interoperability if you use vendor
extensions.
> I see a standard as providing a shared vocabulary for buyers and sellers
> to express their requirements.
You are in error. This is a matter controlled by law rather than by personal
opinion. Standards are all about the substitutability of goods, weights, and
measures. A standard specifies all characteristics of a product, weight, or
measure in mandatory terms so there is uniformity. Standards are the
antithesis of product differentiation. Their very purpose is to eliminate
product differentiation.
Matusow's Blog : More Protocol Documentation - Interop Principles Commitment
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More Protocol Documentation - Interop Principles Commitment
Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary' - marbux - ge comments | ZDNet UK
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Google's technical analysis of the OOXML specification — which notoriously runs to 6,000 pages of code, compared with ODF's 860 pages — has led the company to believe that "OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office", Bhorat claimed.
- 1 more annotations...
ODF and OOXML are standards in name only - Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary' - Talkback at ZDNet UK
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Both ODF and OOXML flunk that test badly. Their interoperable implementation neither has nor can be demonstrated. Both are designed for the waging of feature wars, not for interoperability. Both attempt to legitimize market-leading companies embracing and extending their own formats. They are standards in name only. What we are watching is a contest to decide which big vendor formats will be allowed to undeservedly claim the title of "international standard."
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