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Political vs. Technical ArgumentsPolitical vs. Technical ArgumentsPosted Nov 26, 2007 10:23 UTC (Mon) by jdub (subscriber, #27)In reply to: Political vs. Technical Arguments by Felix.Braun Parent article: The GNOME Foundation on OOXML
Sorry to be nitpicking, but to me it seems that the pre-existance of another standard capable of representing essentially the same information is an eminently technical argument. As far as I understand, an introduction of a new standard only makes sense from a purely technical standpoint, if no competing standards exist. Possibly, but it has no bearing under the ISO rules. It's just not relevant. If OOXML contradicted ODF, then sure. It's dangerous for us to take the "one standard" argument, because if we wish to introduce a fully Free, unencumbered technology as an ISO standard after setting the precedent (not that it can be set, and not that it's relevant) that there should only be one standard for a particular purpose, we'd be screwed. Consider, for example, a fully Free, unencumbered video codec (such as the upcoming replacement for Theora) vs. MPEG4. An ISO standard already exists, and it's encumbered up the wazoo. Let's not make long term sacrifices for short term wins. Therefore, I took it that Microsoft was argueing that ODF was a technically inferior standard which could not be fixed to include all required information.Microsoft has defined OOXML as a standard for Microsoft Office document archival and interoperability, which cleverly allows them to suggest it is somehow different to ODF. We need to nuke OOXML in ISO purely on its technical merits -- and there's definitely a lot of room for that!
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Political vs. Technical Arguments Posted Nov 26, 2007 10:51 UTC (Mon) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]
Been there; done that. The irreconcilable technical deficiencies of MSOOXML have been thoroughly documented. The GNOME Foundation should cease apologizing for Microsoft's scandalous corruption of the ISO process, cease transferring blame for that corruption to the victims, and begin researching the historical record. I suggest Groklaw's ODF/MSOOXML page as a starting point. It provides a chronology of related news beginning in January 2005 as well as "Resources", "Objections" and "Blogs".
Political vs. Technical Arguments Posted Nov 26, 2007 10:57 UTC (Mon) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link] Been there; done that. The irreconcilable technical deficiencies of MSOOXML have been thoroughly documented.I know, and we're facing them down around the world. I'm involved in that process here in Australia. The GNOME Foundation should cease apologizing for Microsoft's scandalous corruption of the ISO process, cease transferring blame for that corruption to the victims, and begin researching the historical record.Excuse me? Read the statement! We are nowhere near apologising for Microsoft's scandalous corruption of the ISO process. We raised this issue explicitly in our statement.
Political vs. Technical Arguments Posted Nov 26, 2007 19:06 UTC (Mon) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]
You're excused. I did read the statement, including the bizarre bit about "FLOSS implementations of OOXML". (What makes this bizarre is the fact that the specification for MSOOXML is so non-specific; see, for example, WordProcessing ML -- unspecified application behavior). The 5th point in the "Position" section of the GNOME Foundation statement chastises "community" for the erosion of trust in the standards process and thereby transfers blame from the victimizer, Microsoft, to the victims. You are apologizing for Microsoft's corruption of the process and blaming those who exposed that corruption for the resultant erosion of trust. The process did not anticipate the calculated, deliberate attempts to subvert it which Microsoft used. To borrow the characterization from the GNOME statement, this most certainly is a "black and white" issue, or, more correctly, a good versus evil issue, in that a single vendor has and is attempting to subvert what is supposed to be a global consensus-building process into a means "to control and restrain" any who seek to extricate themselves or their data from utter dependency upon that single vendor. By seeking the impossible goal of "FLOSS implementations of [MS]OOXML" at a time when there is only one partial implementation of that format, very few documents existing with even that partial implementation, and no established dependency upon that partial implementation yet, GNOME is assisting in creating a dependency on that as-yet deviation from standards and thereby undermining global efforts to produce a document format by true consensus.
Political vs. Technical Arguments Posted Nov 26, 2007 19:13 UTC (Mon) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link] You are apologizing for Microsoft's corruption of the process and blaming those who exposed that corruption for the resultant erosion of trust. No, we pretty firmly blamed Microsoft, and also raised the danger of the community's adoption of similar behaviour, because this will fall straight into Microsoft's hands. The community does have a role to play in uniting our efforts and the demonisation of GNOME has not been productive in that regard. (Let alone the non-practitioners who don't understand how the politicisation of the process -- by either side -- is damaging to us.) I'm okay to agree to disagree here. There are clearly differing views on the topic.
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