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- badassninja, on 10/10/2007, -11/+46It's sad that anyone would need a letter for this. As soon as I saw that MS was trying to push a open format, my first thoughts were, no thank you, I don't take trojan horses.
- radiofrequency, on 10/10/2007, -7/+30Microsoft is a dirty rat. Not only is the XML content basically an undocumented black-box binary format - but even Microsoft's naming of its proprietary standard, "OOXML", evokes Open Office - as in "Open Office XML".
Fairly typical nasty tricks from the Goons in Redmond. - Livingston, on 10/10/2007, -8/+24Nice info on the brokenness of OOXML:
http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/ - tm8992, on 10/10/2007, -4/+19I don't think he meant "trojan horse" as in computer virus.
I think he meant trojan horse, as in, get into the OSS community using OOXML as a "trojan horse"?
Embrace, extend, extinguish?
I don't see how OOXML can be an actual trojan horse, but perhaps metaphorically. - Fartag, on 10/10/2007, -1/+16Actions taken by an anti-competitive monopoly out of self-interest are hardly beneficial. It will incur a cost sooner (competition destruction) or later (mass migration, workarounds..). Pushing standards that make it difficult for competitors to implement it, on purpose, because they have the power to "force it through" should be a dead giveaway.
Standards we adopt should be the least convoluted, the easiest to implement, the most representationally capable, and other beneficial things. Not something that gives more power and control to a company without any comparative benefit. Microsoft traditionally misbehaves as much as the law allows and then some, don't be fooled each and every time they do something new when it turns out yet again to not be on the level. - mvent2, on 10/10/2007, -4/+18Rubbish. If they want it to be open then they need clear documentation on exact behaviour, so that anyone can implement it. But no, they compare it to closed-source quirks that only MS knows about. "Open" my ass.
- goblindegook, on 10/10/2007, -5/+17The OOXML proposal is massively flawed, and you can google around for practical examples, be it spreadsheet formula errors, the math and drawing markup which ignores W3C recommendations or the inclusion of deprecated, proprietary tags and dodgy binary content. I don't care who makes it, no way should we adopt a standard which is broken.
- Phocion55, on 10/10/2007, -11/+21Translation:
The Linux foundation and the FOSS community is wrong for encouraging people to not be bribed by Microsoft into making bad decisions. Even though ODF is already THE approved standard, OSS communities have no good ideas. They are wrongfully trying to stop a company with known abusive monopolistic business practices from implementing a second standard that was created for the sole purpose of maintaining market share of a proprietary piece of software (Office). - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -3/+13The "Free" in "Free Software" in the FOSS/Free Software Foundation/Richard Stallman type sense does not refer to a lack of cost, but a protection of four freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation. It's unclear from your comment whether or not you knew that, and many people understandably get confused by the same thing.
- mvent2, on 10/10/2007, -8/+18You can do that in ODF, except ODF is cleaner and has much, much better documentation. OOXML is designed to be ambiguous for a competitor to read, ODF isn't.
- n8glenn, on 10/10/2007, -6/+15ad hominem attacks against a corporation? get real, microsoft is running around bribing foreign countries to adopt ooxml, so that they can force people to fork over however many hundreds of dollars for their word processor instead of using the superior, and free, openoffice.org. But what you're saying is that the evil free software foundation is trying to force people to use "their" open, widely supported, free standard instead of allowing them the freedom to be forced to pay microsoft to use some proprietary closed standard that microsoft cooked up on their own? Nice logic...
- Tenoq, on 10/10/2007, -2/+10No, it's NOT an open format. An open format can't rely on proprietary formats & documentation that has not (and may never be) released publicly. OOXML has many references to other Microsoft documentation and 'standards' from their previous versions of Office - yet Microsoft does not provide open access to these documents (thus making it impossible for anyone but Microsoft to implement a solution based on OOXML).
At best, you can call it a proprietary open format, with clauses. :-p - mvent2, on 10/10/2007, -7/+15If its so open then why do they need a vague 6000-page documentation? "lineBreakLikeWord95" doesn't tell me exactly what I should be doing if I were writing a word processor.
- elipabst, on 10/10/2007, -4/+12That's pretty sad. You know that the clothing on women comes off, right?
- Nanobe, on 10/10/2007, -4/+12OOXML is a bad thing because it's almost as proprietary and secretive as the classic .doc format. Good luck implementing OOXML support in your application when the OOXML specification isn't any more specific than "word-wrap like Word 97". It's a largely proprietary format masquerading as an open standard. It isn't supported by much more than Office 2007 for Windows. Even Microsoft Office for the Mac doesn't support it yet.
- Stonekeeper, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9Most of the time I feel the war for truth is really just a war against ignorance. And oh, how people love to be ignorant...
- aaronm67, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7...businesses don't put money into FOSS software?
What the hell does Red Hat do with Fedora? How about Novell w/ OpenSuse? Or Sun or Mozilla?
There are plenty of very successful corporations that do exactly that...they release their code with the possibility that their competitors can take away their investment, but also with the possibility hundreds of developers can help them release patches and improve on that code. - Quix, on 10/10/2007, -5/+12"Accusations" that Microsoft isn't playing fair?? Isn't Microsoft "not playing fair" just a given?
How quickly history is forgotten... - nukem996, on 10/10/2007, -6/+12Let me start off by saying I am a full time GNU/Linux user and only use OpenOffice. I try to use odf as much as possible and in fact I only save as doc when I have to send it to someone but thats just the problem, I can't send odf to anyone. Sure theres people I know that can read it but the defacto standard is doc. MS knows that unless they add odf support builtin to MS Office odf has no chance and they control office documents.
- Stonekeeper, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6But that's the thing - you can't!!!
Google "self exploding spreadsheets ooxml" - Garfunkel, on 10/10/2007, -4/+10It's so sad that the people voting are either corrupt or can't see past a glass window.
- srg13, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6"But I can't implement ODF as well, so I guess ODF "Open" my ass too?"
Why not? The ODF specification is very clearly documented... - penguincentral, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7come on guys! stick it to Microsoft!
Microsoft = bad, let's face the reality here. Their .doc format has driven the majority of linux users mad, pushing against this will allow the opportunity to have one unified standard (ODF is the way to go) that ALL computers can read, and this way there will be no converting documents. A document should look the same regardless of what OS or word processing software that they are running on, and we don't see this currently.
Maybe I am being a little bit optimistic, but this is the only way to solve a problem that has plagued us FOSS people for years. And heck, ODF isn't all that bad, Microsoft Fanboys that are reading this.
And hold on a minute, Microsoft doing open source? I never thought that i would see the day... - afx1, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8i like the part where you don't know what you're talking about
- Stonekeeper, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5oops: seems like Livingston posted the link to the example i was refering to:
http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/ - dacheetah, on 10/10/2007, -4/+8I don't have the time to read "over 6,000 pages of documentation" that have a high level of "technical complexity", and Microsoft have a history of shady practices and horrible formats. (most HTML generated by MS products is almost bad enough to make people physically ill.)
- Stonekeeper, on 10/10/2007, -3/+7gcnaddict - you are ignorant. If you think it's so open, find me one, yes ONE, proven case of a 3rd party being able to implement this standard.
Thank you and goodnight. - srg13, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5"Oh, so we should just say "NO" to it without even reading or testing it?"
Have you read anything about this file format? The spec is terrible, and it is completely unsuitable as an ISO standard. For one thing, there is already an ISO standard document standard, which is completely open (ODF). Also, it uses it's own way of representing dates time etc, even though there are ISO standards for this. And it also contains many depreciated, proprietary and obsolete tags (like LineSpaceLikeWord95 or something (and many more)). I could give more examples, but you can find them if you want (they're everywhere)
It really fails as a format, and not even Microsoft's implementation in Office 2007 is completely compatible with the OOXML spec. If Microsoft really wanted to support open standards, they would have used ODF, and contributed improvements if they saw a need. - TetchyTony, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4If their Admin will let them, your ODF recipients can download "ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office 1.0" and that should mostly work. It's about 30mb, so probably too big to find a way of embedding.
- jpfed, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4There are more problems with OOXML than simply the rushed review process.
Its specification is more than 6000 pages long, because it respecifies entities like dates, times, and mathematical formulas (that are already covered by ISO standards) in its own way. Making a competing implementation of this standard- that gets all 6000 pages of details right- would be very difficult.
It also includes tags for emulating the behavior of previous Microsoft products for which the source code is not available. It would not be possible for a competitor to make an implementation that was both 100% correct and 100% legal.
Since no one else will be able to, on either a practical or legal level, make a correct competing implementation, this is not an "open standard". Sure, Microsoft can use it as a file format if that's what it wants to do, and individual entities can go ahead and use it if they are content to just use MS products. But the question here is whether people are going to get suckered into thinking that it's an open standard, and end up locked into using MS products when they thought they were going to use something that would afford them more flexibility than that. - Randinn, on 10/10/2007, -6/+9Tell me 7, just how long have you worked at Microsoft?
- HalFTW, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I also only use OpenOffice. When I need to send stuff to people I often send the file in both ODF and doc, and perhaps PDF.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2 hey,don't insult rats by comparing them to Microsoft!
- nukem996, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3OpenOffice can view and save Office 2003 and below currently in the next version OOXML will be supported but that wasn't my point. My point was even if I want to use odf exclusively I can't because most people will only accept doc. The only exception I've found is pdf.
- elpirla, on 10/10/2007, -5/+7I wonder how many of you ever used Office XP. I switched to OOo because of that thing.
- srg13, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Do these people need to edit the files? I wouldn't ever send anyone a .doc if they didn't - PDF is the way to go (preserving fonts, formatting etc., and being universally readable)
- mossblaser, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Dugg for the pun
- Hungryhaney, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2Emotion? Like throwing chairs or jumping around on stage like a ...?
The FOSS community is responding in likewise force. While this may not be the highest road they could have taken, the sleazy, underhanded tactics Microsoft is taking to push their standard through the ISO process, in my opinion, warrants such a response. - rhodydog, on 10/10/2007, -3/+4Although the FOSS community may be behaving in a similar way to MS there is one significant difference, Unlike the early days when the FOSS community was a positive force and stood for freedom of expression, something I think we could all relate to and agree with, it has, it seems, in recent years become more driven by hate. MS on the other hand is just in it for the money, something which I can understand and accept being a card carrying capitalist. An organization becomes dangerous however when it is driven by emotion, this can lead in turn to completely irrational decisions and behaviors.
- HonoredMule, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1...and it's a very clean format with no application-specific rules, content, or relationships. That's the benefit it gained from being designed in isolation from scratch, even making a clean break from the original star office formats.
ODF: good, open, clear, independent, builds on previous open standards whenever possible.
OOXML: sloppy, deceptive, obfuscated, vendor-specific relationships and tie-in, reinvents the wheel with an arbitrarily designed hub whenever possible.
And on top of all that...ODF: ALREADY STANDARDIZED - FKnight, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1How DARE you bring FACTS into this.
- CarzorStelatis, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I wonder how many of the people on here have ever used Office 2007. I switched /back/ to Office /from/ OpenOffice (after using the latter for ~18 months) because of that thing.
- hplasm, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Stay in your tree, monkey. Your days are drawing to a close. Clown.
- srg13, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm
Have a look for yourself if you want. It really is a terrible format... - CarzorStelatis, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1So when Microsoft lobbies countries to vote the way it wants, they 'aren't playing fair', but when the Linux Foundation lobbies countries to vote the way it wants, it's all OK? I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but double standards like this are not the way to win people over (plus you're up against probably Microsoft's best product - unlike Windows and IE, Office is markedly better than its competitors).
- FKnight, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Most anti-Microsoft people haven't touched anything out of Microsoft for close to 10 years, yet they claim they know all about it.
- FKnight, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I'm curious to know how OpenOffice will be able to support OOXML in the next version if only Microsoft can implement it.
- FKnight, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1There's about a billion people on Earth who don't find Word as complicated or confusing as you apparently do.
- CarzorStelatis, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1If it's so difficult then why have Apple done it in their budget iWork package?
- goblindegook, on 10/10/2007, -3/+4Yeah, digg down the bad man, it doesn't change the fact that OOXML. Formulas. Are. Broken.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html -
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