What LibreOffice and TDF Get Right About Document Formats (and What They Get Wrong)
LibreOffice (The Document Foundation, TDF, its 'patron' of sorts) has gotten some praise or flak, depending on where one looks. Rather than dwell on who said what (it's documented in this page anyway), let's take a journey back in time to our "OOXML Abuse Index" (dated 2008).
The article from LibreOffice "makes the false claim that OOXML is in use though they do correctly call out Microsoft format for being proprietary," an associate has noted. He was there and he saw what happened.
OOXML is a phantom - it is something nobody implements, not even Microsoft!
Also, to be clear, "LibreOffice came from OpenOffice.org which had its origins in StarOffice which actually pre-dates MSO." (Microsoft Office)
The associate thinks this bit of history is critical because many consider StarOffice and every other office suite to be a copycat of Microsoft Office. The opposite is true. Microsoft Office was always a copycat of many things and most parts of Microsoft Office are just companies that Microsoft bought! The Windows monopoly and other factors helped make Microsoft Office "the standard" by the early 2000s and then in the mid-2000s there was a giant push for a real standard.
"So it is MSO which is the clone," the associate said. LibreOffice's Italo says: "Many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard the pillar of Digital Sovereignty was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile." "Important observation there," said the associate.
For those who have read us for nearly 20 years we needn't remind that we wrote relentlessly in support of ODF for several years. It's all still in our archives. We also published important leaks related to that and received threats.
"I was just corresponding with [anonymised] the other day about the ECMA scandals centered around ISO 25900 and the terrible mischief that Microsoft engaged it to even get it considered," the associate noted, "not to mention the shit that happened to force committed into approving it when ISO 26300 already was an established standard. Maybe it's time to bring up some of that old Groklaw material again in light of Italo's [of LibreOffice] observation above. That includes Microsoft googlebombing OO.o [OpenOffice.org] by naming the fake standard "Office Open XML". And, again, since it is so important to drive this home, no one not even Microsoft uses OOXML. It's simultaneously to complex and too incomplete to actually deploy."
"OOXML was *entirely* unnecessary and the standards body work completely inappropriate because ISO 26300 (ODF) was already complete, standardized, and approved by ISO."
As one technical person recalls it: "How could a 6,000-page document be fast-tracked? The first entry on ISO's FAQ about ISO 29500. The answer contains this memorable sentence: It should be noted that it is not unusual for IT standards to run to several hundred, or even several thousand pages. That may be true, but those don't get fast-tracked. Look at this graph by Rob Weir showing the lengths of ECMA fast-tracked standards. Can you spot the outlier? When an organization starts dishing out bullshit like this, you know that they know that they have lost all credibility."
And also recall Tim Bray's wife's business coming under attack for his work on ODF.
Some articles related to this whole travesty are still publicly available [1, 2] and "Japan, IIRC, was one of the few countries with standards bodies strong enough to reject the OOXML proposal."
"There were only a few." So said the associate, recalling (offhand) that "Finland approved it because they believed the lies about it - meaning that old, legacy MSO formats would remain readable. Norway's chair simple overrode multiple committees' rejection of OOXML [and] Sweden's Microsofters simply joined the standards body en masse to shove the spec down everyone's throat and then leave. NIST had its own scandal's as did each body which voted in favor of OOXML, ignoring the existence of the established, universal office format, ODF."
In Sweden, what Microsoft did was bribery. This was well documented and Groklaw worked extra-hard to ensure this would be well documented for decades to come (but Groklaw didn't last that long).
To quote the associate: "MSO *still* does not support ODF. So moving to ODF means abandoning MSO. ... no ifs, ands, or buts."
"Opening an ODF file with MSO means *lost* data, by original design. Recall all the arguments about "round-tripping" which Microsoft was so vehemently opposed to."
And Microsoft’s own products still don't conform to OOXML.
A slopfarm speaks of "OOXML default." But nobody implements OOXML, so this is misleading. They are just following Microsoft's footsteps, that's all they do at "Euro" [sic] Office. OMG! Ubuntu has said in the headline that "LibreOffice slams Euro-Office as ‘de facto ally of Microsoft’", citing the original. (Blocked by gratuitous JavaScript (still))
My personal view on that is that many office suites nowadays lie about being "Open Source" (openwashing at best, there are several types of deceptions they rely on) and many don't support ODF at all. Many have the word "Office" in their name, but the ones worthy of using are few and LibreOffice keeps trying to sell some enhanced "Edition/s" too (until there's some backlash, then come weak, reactionary, face-saving clarifications). There are also some inner disputes (infighting) between the parties - stakeholders and corporations - that develop it.
The bottom line is, any office suite that does not use real standards is irrelevant, even if it is Free software (or claims to be that). Portability of one's data is exceptionally important. █
Image source: Flexaret cameras made by Meopta