Monday November 15, 2004 Ignoring the Elephant
The story over in the European Commission's interoperability activity, IDA has moved forward another notch today. For those of you not following the story so far, IDA commissioned a report on office productivity suite interoperability last year, and the report when it came out recommended that the EU promote interoperable rather than proprietary document formats, highlighted XML-based formats as the way forward (especially like the OASIS format supported by most open source productivity suites) and gave advice to the industry on how to get more open. It's all summed up on one page where today responses from Sun, Microsoft and IBM have been published.
- The Sun response accepts all the relevant IDA recommendations, including the idea of promoting the open XML file format pioneered by OpenOffice.org into an ISO standard and announcing that it will produce open source filters for Microsoft's formats. Microsoft "welcomes" this in their letter, pretending that because Sun engineers have been able to laboriously reverse-engineer their formats this somehow endorses their approach. Sorry, guys, just because someone else is fixing your failings that doesn't absolve you from responsibility.
- The Microsoft response is long and complex. They try really hard to sound positive and indeed make some significant concessions (such as admitting that the current WordML etc formats are, as the CCIA found, not actually interoperable, due to lack of documentation and due to the presence of binary embeds. They make it sound like these are graphics etc but actually we know they also include embeds from other office tools, a case where XML namespaces should be used). But overall, they studiously and intentionally miss the point, parroting glee-club party-lines endlessly and ignoring the request to join in with the OASIS standardisation effort.
- Which IBM are joining. The surprise news of the morning is that IBM are joining the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee, in support of their use of the format in a product. Microsoft are OASIS members, they have even visited the group (to drop off some oranges), and with IBM on the working group they are the last significant party absent. To my eyes, IBM's action leaves Microsoft swinging in the wind.
- Finally, there's a great report from Open Forum Europe that's worth a read.
The FT does a pretty good job of summing it all up.
A number of open source software programs - such as Sun Microsystem's OpenOffice.org - are moving towards this kind of standardisation. However, Microsoft has been more reluctant to modify its applications or submit code to international standards bodies.
I don't know how long Microsoft will go on ignoring the elephant in the kitchen, but their customers have spotted it and are flocking to the Open Trinity.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 15 2004, 05:44:35 AM PST )
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