On Nov 2, 2006, at 9:51 PM, Charles Curley wrote:
I find one thing disconcerting. According to the Open Letter
(http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/openletter.html):
# Office Open XML
* Novell engineers have been working for the last year
together with Microsoft engineers through the ECMA TC45
working group in producing a complete specification that
would allow for interoperability across office suites.
* Novell will develop the code necessary to bring support for
Office Open XML into OpenOffice, and we will contribute that
support back to the OpenOffice.org organization. We will
also distribute the Office Open XML plug-in in our own
edition of OpenOffice. In addition, we will participate in
the Open XML Translator open source project.
I just wrote an article on interoperability between MS Office and FOSS
for the Society for Technical Communications. Everyone except MS is
jumping on Open Document.
Who's 'Everyone except MS'? There are roughly one and maybe a
quarter viable options for an office suite for the world at large;
one is Microsoft Office, and the other quarter (if that) is Open
Office. OO's marketshare is miniscule, and only exists because 1) it
runs on Linux and 2) it does fairly well at interoperating with MS
Office files and 3) is available for free. What business case could
be made for Microsoft choosing the Open Document format over their
own format tailored to their needs?
MS is the major player in the ECMA standards
effort and Open XML (MS's XML document format for Office). There are
several efforts to provide Open Document plugins for Office.
Here we see Microsoft behaving very differently than in the past;
they are actively working to create published standards for the
technology they develop, presumably in the interest of enabling
interoperability. They are doing a LOT of this lately, across a lot
of their technologies. This, in my opinion, is a very good thing.
In short, we don't need Open XML. Yet here is Novell jumping on the
Betamax of office document formats. To whatever extent Novell lends
credibility to Open XML, it is divisive in both the open source
movement and in the office products market.
You must be looking at this through some weird, distorted Free
Software glasses or something. Clearly Open Document is Betamax and
Microsoft's new Open XML standard is VHS. Betamax vs. VHS was all
about market share, and in the real world, Microsoft is still king
there.
And whatever happened to variety and choice being good? Or is that
only true when Microsoft isn't creating the variety?
--Levi
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