False dichotomy
False dichotomy
Posted Oct 30, 2007 19:00 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)In reply to: False dichotomy by stevenj
Parent article: GNOME and OOXML
Unfortunately, OOXML standardization is not a technical process but a battle of influence right now and Microsoft is spinning every FLOSS actor contribution to the ECMA process to "prove" to good-willing but FLOSS-ignorant national standard bodies there is strong support for ISO OOXML standardization FLOSS-side. That includes spinning quotes from personalities very aware of this political game and eager to help (Miguel), and spinning quotes from people like Jody Goldberg that claim they want to ignore the political aspects of OOXML/ODF ands thus plays right into Microsoft hands (Microsoft just needs to get its numerous parters repeat and amplify the positive things written about OOXML and ignore the others, and no one's the wiser). Also: 1. Some people have no clue how ISO standardization will be used by vendors and feel that if the price to get Microsoft format documentation is to get it rubber-stamped at ISO that's something acceptable. 2. For someone involved in an application that needs to parse Microsoft formats there is this strong temptation to play along with Microsoft to get access to good documentation on its formats, while turning a blind eye to how Microsoft uses this involvement to lend credibility to its ISO target. 3. It's very difficult for a FLOSS hacker (even if this hacker worked for an editor like Novell) if he has not spend some time in a big corporation to understand how Microsoft is positioning OOXML. Microsoft is not asking to standardize a word processor or spreadsheat format. It's asking to standardize data containers that can talk to server apps, be consumed and generated by them (and yes the MS formats are woefully inadequate for the task but no that hasn't stopped people from doing it with .doc and .xls and now MS is asking ISO to bless OOXML for this). That's written black on white in the OOXML spec preamble. That's something Gnumeric never participated in. That's something Jody is woefully unprepared to evaluate. ODF is genuinely better than OOXML for this use case, and when Jody complains of ODF XML-isms it just shows he has not the slightest idea of what SUN, IBM & Microsoft are battling for. The money is not in the office suite. It's getting commodized. The money is in the expensive corporate server apps, and how the client can be used to force (Microsoft) or preserve (Sun, IBM) particular software stacks on the servers. Needless to say there is little room for FLOSS or Linux servers if they need to talk to rich office clients in OOXML-lingua, process Microsoft-dates, parse EMF schemas, etc. That's internet round 2: Microsoft missed the HTML boat, let Apache establish itself, now it wants Office not the browser to provide access to enterprise infrastructure, and root as many non-MS stuff server-side as possible in the process. Adding office components to the browser as activex was a failure. Now the game is adding browser/MUA aspects to office suites (and let them drown the W3C open bits). IBM plays the same game with its Notes+OpenOffice.org welding. And no one cares what non-enterprise users get as office suite or network client, as they don't pay any licenses anyway. Unfortunately entities like the GNOME Fundation seem not to have the slightest clue what the game is and what the costs of letting individuals create the impression of its support to OOXML will be. Delegating desktop people like Jody to evaluate OOXML when the prize is server-side, shows a profound lack of market understanding.