OOXML came out of Microsoft’s closed, monopoly-preserving oven in a hurry. Meanwhile, ODF was developed over a longer period of time, all along with an open source model (OO.o) to work from and which everyone has been free to study, take, use, extend, redistribute, etc during this whole time and moving into the future.

ODF leverages existing standards similarly developed in the open over time and which many already use. OTOH, OOXML introduces much overlap with these existing standards (even if we ignore ODF proper).. again, all of this rushed out of Microsoft’s closed, monopoly-preserving oven.

When you say that OOXML has a lot of potential, that is not a reason to support it. ODF has a lot of potential. Any omissions or weaknesses in ODF can and basically will be added. A text file has a lot of potential. XML has a lot of potential. What we should look at is what assets does OOXML bring and how does this compare with the liabilities also brought. Might it not be a much lower cost to consumers and to most vendors to instead change (or perhaps tweak) ODF if/as needed?

You are correct when you say ISO and Microsoft partners (and many others) are affected by profits. What some here and elsewhere call “bribes”, what others perhaps call illegal price differentiation from a monopolist (the USDOJ should be sued for selling us short), what are special limited insider access deals for chosen partners, what would be backing easily acquired from partners buried neck deep in MSware, what would fall under the “a favor for my friend Bill Gates” category, as well as other sorts of “favors” are in fact nothing more than seeking out profit (or preventing heavy losses), just as you said. So I agree about the profit motive, but I disagree that OOXML’s potential to lead to profits, outside of the Microsoft NDA deals, is what is driving the support for Microsoft. This “tremendous” market opportunity, barring the Microsoft factor, is only likely to be much more costly than the similar “tremendous” ODF market opportunity.

I wanted to clarify that Microsoft is the reason, not OOXML itself. Thus, it’s more than possible that a crummy standard be pushed forward because the driving factor was money by those exploiting the weak ISO voting rules and not technical quality or general benefits to the majority of consumers.

Microsoft only has to lose money on (eg) 200 partners/customers (some being small and others themselves very dependent on Microsoft for health) in order to be able to rape the many many other customers. ISO was vulnerable and Microsoft exploited it beyond anything that had been done before. That’s the Microsoft Modus Operandi TM.

If consumers had to vote. If ISO had better rules. If we had anticipated this issue earlier, OOXML would not have passed. That’s what the evidence seems to suggest.

But there is good news. OOXML is a garbage trap and is reflective of existing closed MS binary formats, and this was brought to light decently, if no where entirely, because of the ISO standardization effort. The uncleanliness of this situation and of OOXML will continue to mark OOXML, Microsoft, Microsoft’s existing binary formats, and even some of Microsoft’s accomplices. Microsoft still has much money to spend on OOXML to clean up the stains… and they’d still find it worthwhile because SO MUCH money and control is on the line. The Office Suite Cash Cow, monopoly levers, and serious existing investments within Redmond are on the line.

I’d love for all the customers that are poised to be screwed because of OOXML to move quickly to ODF. Sure, Microsoft will be there to screw ODF, too, but that’s preferable to UhOhXML because there will be many clean ODF options to MS’s ODFestation.

But What About.. #1: If OOXML was hurried up then maybe mistakes were made and MS’s existing closed formats don’t suffer from them?

That’s a possibility just like the moon might be made of cheese. Everything has errors. Not being able to see them and treat them on your terms or to be able to do proper risk management is a very real cost for closed source and closed formats. If you have any investments in these closed formats or closed source apps (MSOffice), you continue to be in that situation. The mappings to OOXML will have problems because Microsoft continuously changes their formats and is creating new software. [Complex software come with many new bugs and bugs on past bugs and fixes of past bugs which can lead to lost info.. again, because only Microsoft has access to (real control over) your material/files. They don't give you the source code snapshot of the software you bought. ... In practice, people learn to lose some information.. most of the time it's probably bearable.. of course, loss of privacy and other problems is another story.] OOXML and MS-ODFestation will come with closed extensions.

But What About.. #2: If many use MS, then perhaps OOXML is the “lower cost to society”?

Well, closed source is always a high cost. If a real open option exists, that’s a lower cost path long term and maybe even short term. Short term, there are yearly savings on licenses, but there could be costs for retraining or for re-coding (maybe small maybe not). Long term, you have the accrued yearly savings, and the one-time overhead costs have been accounted for. Even better, the free/Free FOSS relies much more on the sorts of standards ODF uses vs OOXML. Why lock yourself out of the best FOSS has to offer by going with the Monopoly Controlled Formats?

The entrance of MS into FOSS is where we have to be vigilant. MS is a consumer, not a producer. Its influence is nothing short of viral. Just ’cause they donate a bit of polluted code doesn’t mean they’ve changed their way of doing things. Trying to redefine “OPEN” their way as compared to FOSS’s way is semantic trickery.

Just as ISO is becoming less relevant, MS will follow the same path. People are starting to wake up and are becoming quite vociferous about choice – while at the same time are being vilified as deranged sycophants. Why would I want to give up my freedom of choice for monetary comfort?

In the three comments I made about ISO, I said each time that they were responding to commercial pressure. Commercial pressure, businesses wanting to make profit, call it what you will, I’m not in any disagreement with you about that at all.

My only point about ISO is that this isn’t any different to how they usually operate; *everything* they do is driven by commercial pressure. As I said before, they are not arbiters of technical good taste, nor are they creating standards just for the common good of man.

All I’m saying is that it is a relatively self-selecting group of people who had any expectation that ISO would refuse OOXML.

If we blind ourselves to the areas where free software is weaker than proprietary alternatives, it’s never going to succeed.

By saying that I understand why other businesses want OOXML, I’m not denigrating ODF (although you’re wrong to say ODF already existed: it didn’t). ODF is the better standard for the most part (there are areas OOXML is better: spreadsheets, for example). But it’s not ODF vs. OOXML for other people.

However, I’m also not stupid, and there was never any realistic likelihood that ISO wouldn’t standardise it based on the simple numbers of businesses and commercial interests who want such a standard. I’m not going to waste my time hand-wringing about it.

You might not like ISO’s decision – neither do I particularly – but they’re not some arbiter of technical merit. At the end of the day, the various nations voted for ISO. You can argue fairly that they did so on commercial pressure, but it’s their vote.

Having ISO status is going to make very little difference. What is key is what happens in the future, and how ODF and OOXML are merged.

I think you have to accept, though, that one can be an active supporter and contributor to OpenDocument whilst still having interest in other formats.

If you look at what happened in Office 2003, there was an XML format which in theory would have made conversion of documents to and from Office extremely easy. In practice, OpenOffice.org’s support for that format stinks: I never saw an Office XML document which didn’t crash OpenOffice.org. Contrast that with OOXML, even with the XSLT conversion, and it’s actually suddenly usable. With Sun’s work on the “native” OOXML code in OpenOffice.org, it’s going to be nearly as good as .doc support.

Novell are helping people move from Office. Their work on interop: not just OOXML, but VBA, graphs, solvers, etc. is all invaluable, because they enable more people to use OpenOffice.org.

You can castigate them for helping to improve OOXML, but at the end of the day it’s a. necessary and b. a smaller financial commitment than Sun have invested in it, by some way.

Thanks for the retraction: you were basically repeating bad facts from the Ken Brown / Alexis de Tocqueville Institution report on Linux’s origins, which is why I was very surprised

You could say that Mono takes up a decent proportion of Novell’s time, but it’s nothing like the majority.

You can say that they’re the ones “encouraging people to use OOXML” – but there is zero evidence for that. When I say they spent two weeks integrating the XSLT system, I mean literally two weeks. They spent very little time on it. Sun has dedicated a number of engineers for a while now to OOXML.

And I don’t understand why you give Sun kudos for improving OpenOffice.org, when Novell are the second biggest contributor to that software doing some extremely important work on it – yes, _including_ interop, but no, not mainly OOXML by any measure – and you see that as Sun competing with Microsoft, Novell helping Microsoft.

It was also time for me to move on. Every so often, it can be interesting and a good idea to change distros (under the right circumstance, I’d be trying distros left and right, but that hasn’t happened for me yet). I looked towards Xandros when I was trying to find something that others might like and ended up polluting the hard drive with “usage” so ended up staying longer than I would have wanted to anyway.