Donnerstag August 23, 2007

Correcting false statements by Microsoft
I think it is important to correct the false - or maybe misquoted - statements by Vijay Kapoor, national technology officer of Microsoft India that I found in this interview under the question "Why does Microsoft want another standard, what's the rationale?". Microsoft starts the reply with "There are at least 4 good reasons why:" and then states the first reason.

Microsoft says: "ODF started out and was completed as an XML format, specifically supporting OpenOffice with a tight scope around that product."

As can be read in this white paper, the OpenOffice.org file format was designed as an application agnostic file format right from beginning. The goal of the OpenOffice.org file format, which later was chosen as the basis for the work on the ODF specification at OASIS, was to define a document file format that could be used by any vendor. Thus, instead of just dumping OpenOffice.org's internal in-memory document structures into an XML file format, generic representations were chosen. The strong reuse of existing open standards (e.g. Dublin Core, MathML, XForms, HTML, SVG, etc.) is a good proof point for that, i.e. accepted best practices for representing specific document elements were chosen instead of using proprietary elements or reinventing the wheel.

In addition, very early KOffice also decided to use ODF as the default file format. Thus, two completely independent open source office suites are using the same file format as the default, not just as one additional file format.

Finally, the initial charter said "The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.", i.e. the file format should be usable by any office application.

David Faure from KOffice said in October 2004 in an interview: "More than that, I made sure that this format would be a good base for KOffice :) That's what my job in the OASIS technical committee is: ensuring that the file format can be used to express everything that KOffice supports. But I definitely think the OpenOffice.org file format was a very good basis for the OASIS format, since it was designed, from the start, as a file format that should be as independent as possible from the design of the application. It reuses standards like XSL/FO, CSS, HTML etc. as much as possible, so the goal is to make the OASIS format another one of those formats, where the application used to edit the document doesn't matter."

Microsoft says: "It wasn't until 2005 that the spec was offered up as a general XML office document format and consequently renamed to ODF."

The work at the OASIS ODF TC started in 2002 and all OASIS discussions as well as draft documents are publicly accessible. Even before the technical committee at OASIS started the work on ODF, the OpenOffice.org file format was discussed and defined as part of the open, transparent and public XML project on OpenOffice.org. See also Michael Brauer's public welcome email from October 2000.

Draft versions of the specification were available long before the public review phase started in January 2005. A first draft carries a date of "7 February 2003". The first committee draft shows a date of "22 March 2004". Thus, useful specification drafts were available much earlier than 2005.

Microsoft says: "No opportunity existed for Microsoft to actually participate in this full process - given the original scope, the 6 months between the re-naming of the spec to ODF, and its subsequent approval by OASIS as a standard."

I'm not aware of any attempt by Microsoft to formally submit proposals as part of the ODF specification process at OASIS. AFAIK, Microsoft decided to just be an observer at OASIS all the time. Anyway, if Microsoft ever made a formal proposal, it should be visible in the publicly accessible OASIS email archives. However, if I did not overlook a posting from Microsoft, Microsoft never actively participated in the OASIS ODF TC and Microsoft never formally submitted a proposal.

However, every OASIS member including Microsoft was invited to join the OASIS ODF TC. Microsoft was in fact a board member when the official Call for Participation for the OASIS ODF TC was sent out to various OASIS mailing lists including the members list (members@lists.oasis-open.org)., and thus Microsoft could not possibly have been unaware of the formation of the group and was definitely aware it had the inalienable right to join at any time. Thus, Microsoft had the opportunity to fully participate in the OASIS ODF TC right from day one.

The Call for Participation says "The proposal, which includes a statement of purpose, list of deliverables, and proposed schedule, will constitute the TC's charter. The TC Process allows these items to be clarified (revised) by the TC members; such clarifications (revisions), as well as submissions of technology for consideration by the TC and the beginning of technical discussions, may occur no sooner than the TC's first meeting." Thus, Microsoft even had the chance to influence the wording of the charter.

Microsoft says: "The scope of the ODF spec never included even the basic requirements that Microsoft required to support a fully open format, and nor did the OASIS technical committee want to include these requirements."

It would be interesting to know how Microsoft defines a "fully open format". The current ODF charter can be found here and the first charter is included in the Call for Participation. The original charter says: "The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications." and "it must be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,". Thus, I don't see what "basic requirements" ODF does not try to address.

Thus, all in all, the arguments provided by Microsoft in the interview don't seem to be valid.
( Aug 23 2007, 01:50:07 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [4]