Freitag Januar 11, 2008
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Erwin's StarOffice Tango Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing ... or why Open Competition matters |
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Erwin's StarOffice Tango Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing ... or why Open Competition matters |
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Alle
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Ballroom Dancing
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Bird Watching
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Creative Work
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Desktop
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General
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Hamburg
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Languages
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MBA
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Mozilla
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NetBeans
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Open Source
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OpenDocument
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OpenOffice.org
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OpenSolaris
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Salsa
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StarOffice
Freitag Januar 11, 2008 Dispelling Myths Around ODFRecent articles, reports and documents show that there are still a lot of misperceptions regarding ODF in the market. Apparently, many people are still not well informed about ODF even though they choose to write about ODF. Therefore, I thought it can't hurt trying to dispel a couple of myths around ODF. ODF is controlled by SunConsidering how actively a company like IBM is involved in the standardization process and the whole file format debate, I doubt that IBM would allow Sun to control ODF. Nevertheless, Sun is not in the position to control ODF.
ODF equals Open SourceODF's strongest benefit is that it has been designed for vendor, platform and application independence right from the beginning. As a consequence there is a long and growing list of applications that do implement and support ODF, both commercial and open source. A few prominent examples are:
Thus, ODF does not equal open source and therefore, ODF should not be confused with open source or one of its open source implementations like OpenOffice.org. However, the existence of solid (!!!) open source implementations is indeed a benefit because the open source implementations give minorities access to ODF. Good examples are the broad platform support for ODF including exotic platforms like FreeBSD and OS/2 as well as the broad language support including the 11 South African languages. In addition, open source implementations like OpenOffice.org and KOffice reduce the barriers of entry for new market entrants and thus help to increase customer choice and vendor independence. ODF is very closely related to OpenOffice.orgDavid Faure from KDE recently told me the following in an email exchange which he fortunately allowed me to quote and which nicely corrects the myth that ODF is very closely related to OpenOffice.org: “[Question by me:] In this context, what is your answer from a KOffice point of view if someone says that ODF is very closely related to OpenOffice.org and StarOffice the same way OOXML is closely related to Microsoft Office. Do you agree? Do you disagree? [Answer by David:] This is a misleading statement. ODF is very closely related to the OpenOffice.org original file format. OOXML is very closely related to the Microsoft Office implementation. This makes a huge difference. The OOo-1.0 file format was already designed to be as implementation-independent as possible. This is what I always liked about it, and this is the reason why it made perfect sense for it to be the base of the ODF format. It uses many existing standards (HTML, CSS, XSL-FO, SVG), and is rather well documented. On the other hand, OOXML is an "xml transcription" of the old binary formats, which themselves were simple memory dumps of MS Office's data structures. There is still a lot in OOXML which shows the legacy (VML, BIFF, OLE...) and that relies on the MSOffice implementation -- [...] [Comment by me] I need the answer for a request by someone who believes that ODF is just some kind of "rebranded" StarOffice file format. [David's answer] I always said: it would be, if I wasn't part of the TC and if KOffice hadn't switched to ODF as its native file format. Okay that's probably exaggerating my role since others have also contributed to the format of course, but still, KOffice implementing ODF (not as a (lossy) import/export, but as the native file format which therefore has to store all of KOffice's features), is the proof ODF isn't just OOo-1.0 rebranded. Because there were two real (and independent) implementations, (not just a converter or a viewer, but two real office suites using the format natively), we have a proof that the format is implementable, and that the spec is implementation-independent. If OpenOffice disappears (sorry, just hypothetical :) , people will still be able to read their files using KOffice (okay, after implementing a bunch of missing features, but the point is that the documents can be read as is). If Microsoft Office disappears... well, too bad, your OOXML documents are good for nothing, currently.” See also an earlier interview where David basically said the same: http://dot.kde.org/1097051569/ Customer care about features, not formatsThat customers increasingly care about formats and actually consider open standards support a key feature and requirement becomes for example evident in the Valoris study conducted by the European Commission in 2003 as well as the workshop about document exchange formats as part of the German EU presidency earlier this year. At the very least, government agencies around the world consider open standards support to be a key product feature just like spell checking or printing. ODF is not being adoptedThe recent ODF Report as well as the press release about the 1st International ODF Users Workshop by the ODF Alliance, the OpenOffice.org Market Share Analysis and the OpenOffice.org Solutions wiki page clearly show that there is a huge momentum around ODF. More and more governments are standardizing on ODF, and an increasing number of software vendors is adding ODF support to their solutions. In addition, a growing number of hardware vendors starts shipping desktop computers with ODF capable software pre-installed. The recent product announcements for the ASUSTeK Eee PC, the XO / OLPC as well as the gPC and Cloudbook by Everex - which are sold at Walmart by-the-way - are just a few very prominent examples. Finally, OpenOffice.org is being downloaded several hundred thousand times every week, and education ministries as well as universities are distributing open source tools to their students, like in Portugal and France. Oh, and not to forget the fact that the Google Pack includes StarOffice. Thus, ODF has become a very significant force in the market place! It is hard to overlook or ignore that! ODF has a very limited feature setFirst, I want to repeat what has already been said multiple times. ODF strongly reuses open standards and concepts instead of reinventing the wheel again and again. As a consequence, the ODF spec is very lean and developers can reuse existing knowledge about different standards from other domains. For example, some people believe or have been made believe that having a different table concept for each document type is an advantage. I, however, strongly believe that the opposite is true, i.e. that using one table concept for all document types is the better and cleaner approach. The following quotes from a Dr. Dobbs article provides a good example, why: "The ODF reuses concepts throughout the different document formats it supports. For example, the definition of a table in a spreadsheet is almost equivalent to a table embedded in a text document. ... In ODF the content of your office document is stored in the content.xml document. ... This query constructs an HTML document with all tables from the ODF text document, usedcars.odt. Figure 4 is an example of the result, usedcars.html. ... And by simply changing the container document you want to access, you can use the same function to query your ODF spreadsheet, usedcars.ods. Look similar?" If a developer has already written code to process tables in one document type, he or she can easily apply the same code to a table in a different document type. Thus, the learning curve is less steep and productivity increases significantly. A very annoying myth around ODF is that some people say, “ODF has only a limited feature set” or “ODF is simplistic”. Actually the exact opposite is true. Sure, ODF 1.0 was not 100% perfect. Like with any open standard, the more people start implementing and using a standard, the more potential areas of improvement are being identified. However, ODF is maturing rapidly with version 1.2 being on the horizon. ODF 1.2 will be a very mature standard with a very broad but standards-based feature coverage. Yes, ODF 1.0 did not specify a formula language but allowed arbitrary formula languages instead. This was recognized as an interoperability issue and is thus being addressed by ODF 1.2. However, many ODF 1.0 based products from different vendors even don't have an interoperability issue in the formula area because they are based on the same code base. It would have been fast and easy to define a formula language by simply documenting the formula language of one single application. However, ODF chose to specify formulas based on broad industry experience and best practices. The formula language in ODF 1.2 is based on the following applications:
And the key benefits of the ODF 1.2 formula language are:
Thus, the ODF 1.2 formula language covers all key areas without sacrificing vendor independence and openess. Another often heard criticism is that “ODF does not support custom schemas”. Statements like this seem to ignore the XForms support in ODF 1.0. In addition, ODF 1.2 adds W3C standards based metadata support for which the following scenarios were analyzed:
All these scenarios give a hint of what the metadata support in ODF 1.2 will be capable of. The key benefits of the metadata model are:
Finally, as chapter 11 “Database Front-end Document Content” of the current ODF 1.2 draft shows, ODF 1.2 will be leading the document format space by even adding database support. Thus, all in all, with version 1.2 of ODF it will be difficult to find feature areas of existing office productivity applications that are not covered yet. The Web makes ODF irrelevantSome people believe that the advent of Web 2.0 applications including web office tools like Google Docs and Spreadsheets will make ODF irrelevant. I believe, that at least for a long while the opposite will be true. It will take a couple of years or probably even decades until broadband Internet becomes ubiquitous. As a consequence people will use a mix of local desktop applications and web-based tools. However, in order to allow users to move back and forth between desktop and web applications, it is important that these applications agree on common open standards. Google Docs and Spreadsheets for example support ODF. Thus, users can easily upload and use documents created with OpenOffice.org or KOffice within Google's web tools and vice versa. In addition, since the web is strongly influenced and dominated by W3C standards, ODF has a huge advantage compared to other document file formats because ODF heavily reuses W3C standards like HTML, SVG, XForms, XSL-FO, XLink, MathML, XML Signature, RDF/XML, etc. The following diagram created by my Sun colleague and OASI ODF TC co-chair Michael Brauer illustrates this nicely: ODF is incompatible with Microsoft OfficeMany people also believe that ODF is incompatible with Microsoft Office or that Microsoft Office documents cannot be represented in ODF. As many people know, OpenOffice.org has a very high level of compatibility with Microsoft Office. Some users even use OpenOffice.org to “repair” Microsoft Office files that cannot be opened in Microsoft Office any more. Microsoft Office compability has been a key goal for OpenOffice.org for a very long time due to the current market situation. However, OpenOffice.org uses ODF as the default file format and therefore all features that currently can get imported by OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office files can be represented in ODF. As a consequence, even though Microsoft has not been participating in the ODF TC at OASIS, ODF can already represent close to all Microsoft Office features that someone typically uses for the creation of day-to-day documents. I hope the information above has helped to dispel a few myths around ODF and helps people reading articles, blog entries and analyst reports about ODF. From my point of view, ODF provides all an office suite user needs, and I'm sure that we will read a lot more great and encouraging news about ODF in 2008. ( Jan 11 2008, 05:38:01 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [4] Senden Sie einen Kommentar: Kommentare sind ausgeschaltet. |
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Nice job! It's very important to underscore that ODF is not the same as OpenOffice.org or free/open source, and that an open standard carries its own logic and logistics.
-louis
Gesendet von 99.232.104.105 am Januar 12, 2008 at 08:33 PM CET #
Well, I think you did a pretty good job until the last point, "ODF is incompatible with Microsoft Office." That's where you brought in the confusion of ODF and OpenOffice.
Simply put, the Open Document Formats which are often denoted by their extensions for text [.ODT], spreadsheet [.ODS], presentation [.ODP], etc., are the equivalents of .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT formats. The former can be read and accurately displayed by a variety of programs, including but not limited to OpenOffice, Lotus, etc. The latter three can only be accurately be displayed by Microsoft's Office products – Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
Even then, there's sometimes questionable interpretation of the formatting of old documents that are displayed in newer versions of MS Office products. In fact, it's become apparent that a recent service pack for Microsoft Office has now blocked users from being able to read older documents which competing products still read. Given that virtually all of the non-Microsoft products are able to read and (reasonably) accurately interpret and display older, archived files AND save them in an internationally standardized format [ODF], that makes Microsoft Office the less advanced product.
Nevertheless, text documents saved as a .ODT file are not generally readable in Microsoft Word. But then, .XLS files and .PPT files are also not readable in Microsoft Word. In any of these cases, it does not make the data contained within the document any less valuable to a business or individual, but only unreadable by the product chosen to try to open the file. Microsoft's Word can open, read, and store files in their text format [.DOC] and their template format [.DOT] but knows as little about using Open Document Format files as it does about PDFs.
It is up to the user to choose a program which can be effective at creating new documents and reading, displaying, printing, changing, and saving older documents, whether those documents are in any of the Open Document Formats, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, Portable Document Format, JPEG, GIF, MP3, or any other format. Questioning whether ODF is incompatible with Microsoft Office is like asking if PDFs are incompatible with Microsoft Office – they are, but so what?
Gesendet von NoCaDrummer am Januar 13, 2008 at 09:32 PM CET #
Thanks for your information, Erwin, but what do you exactly mean with "TC accepted multiple proposals that are not implemented in OpenOffice.org"? Do you have examples for your statement? Do you mean "not YET implemented until OOo 3.0 with ODF 1.2 compliance" or "not implemented and will not in the (near) future"? If you mean the first one, then I think ODF IS (more or less) controlled by Sun resp. the OOo developers.
In the last 2 years there were some enhancement proposals in the TC from non-OOo developers that lost in the ballot against proposals from OOo developers (or never were picked up to open discussion). I remember a post of an OOo developer in the ODF mailinglist (i have to look for a link) last year who said after a ballot (an OOo dev proposal has won against a non-OOo dev proposal) that it would be too much work to implement the non-OOo proposal; he had already worked for months on the source code in comply with the OOo dev proposal ...
That's only a statement of one developer but I think it's characteristic for the OOo dev team at the ODF mailinglists. Haven't left some mailinglist members the ODF team at OASIS because of such dominance of Sun, especially some formerly ODF Foundation members?
No doubt, I am an OOo user and I prefer ODF over OOXML in technical and political manner. But it is appropriate to critism and question some things regarding ODF without FUD. Please, read my german article http://web.oesterchat.com/2007/08/21/interoperabilitaet-mit-opendocument/
Gesendet von Thomas am Januar 16, 2008 at 03:45 PM CET #
Here's a small marketing lesson.. Given that you're up against actively distributed misinformation, know that people remember headlines as facts (and please omit negatives - rephrase instead). This is a major flaw in most "myths" dissertations: state the fact instead.
Example: "ODF is incompatible with Microsoft Office" is a header people will remember as a statement - i.e. you would enforce an already incorrect impression. Instead, say "ODF is compatible with Microsoft Office" - this is the correct FACT to be remembered.
Gesendet von Peter am Januar 17, 2008 at 10:33 AM CET #