Microsoft's Open XML is not as bad as it has been made out to be, while the Open Document Format (ODF) has many "misleading" claims, according to an open standards activist.
Rick Jelliffe, an Australian, debunked various myths surrounding the ODF and the Microsoft-supported format when he was in Bangkok recently to attend a Microsoft-hosted event.
While everyone agrees that open standards and interoperability are a good thing, there is a lot of controversy over how "open" is open and, in particular, the recent standards war between the ODF and Open XML, he pointed out.
Speaking to a room full of public sector CIOs, Jelliffe said that there are three areas where open standards are necessary--concern for the past in preserving and archiving; present day fidelity and interchange; and future-proofing investments in systems that can now be built without fearing lack of interoperability.
However, today there are two competing open standards, the Microsoft initiated Open XML which is part of Office 2007 and the Sun initiated ODF, used primarily in Open Office.
"There's been an awful lot of controversy over Open XML becoming an ISO standard, claims that Open XML was developed to stop ODF, that open XML is not an open standard, that the ISO process is too fast to allow adequate review, that open XML contradicts other ISO standards and that ISO officials have been bribed and pressurized. I have never seen a technology with so many strong claims which are so misleading," he said.
Jelliffe ran through those accusations one by one.
On whether Open XML was started to stop ODF, he pointed out that Microsoft had started work on developing an XML data format back in Office 2000, work that predates some of the ODF work.
On the accusation that ECMA is a second rate organization, Jelliffe said that it was a different kind of organization than W3C and Oasis, aimed at standardizing contributed technology. It is not a standards invention organization.
This is not different from ODF, the first version of which is based on Sun's Star Office. He says that the initial version of any standard is always developed from a contributed standard.
Some have suggested the Open XML standard, at 6,000 pages, is too long and impossible to properly read and review. However, Jelliffe said that it grew to that size because during the review process at ECMA, non-Microsoft people demanded more complete documentation and thus it grew to that length because of its openness.
He said that accusations that Open XML contradicts other ISO standards can be explained and are not significant. One case is that Open XML stores dates as numbers, as has been the case in Microsoft Office all along. The other is how drawing routines use a grid format.
ISO is an organization where each country has one vote. "I have been accused of selling my vote at ISO. I don't have a vote at ISO so I can't be bribed for that," he said.
"It's very good for Microsoft to be involved in standards again. For many years, the large companies have not been very engaged in the standards world. Being pro-Open XML doesn't make you anti-ODF. They have been developed for different purposes. If you want something for interchange and if it is platform neutral, then I'd tend to ODF. However, if I wanted to make sure that all the data in the document opens up the same way, then I'd go for Open XML," he said.
He went on to criticize ODF for referring to many non-ISO standards.
"ODF 1.10 has 760 pages. However, it refers to a lot of standards such as SVG, MathML, Open Formula, xlink, zip. These are not ISO standards, these are from the W3C. Once you add them, they are quite comparable in size," he said.
He also noted that other components of the ODF standard were based on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), in his words a curious organization that nobody knows if it is based on countries or organizations. "I'm trying to figure out who runs it," he said.
Finally, he said that many people were worsening the situation by confusing the ISO's health and safety standards, which are often enforced by member countries as law, and technical specifications such as Open XML.
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I wonder how much Microsoft paid him to present their case. Its not like there is no conflict of interest in all this is it? Its just so obvious to anyone with an IQ > 100 that this is simple propaganda.
Posted by Ian Lynch on Friday, June 15 2007 07:26 PM