2009-08-12: The ISO/IEC Working Group on OOXML Wants to Unfix the Leap-Year Bug and Related Date-and-Time Problems.
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What can be done?
Obviously, if you’re involved in your national mirror committee for ISO/IEC JTC1, you can seek to convince it or the relevant subcommittee that 29500-4 / DCOR 1 should be disapproved. The international deadline for this ballot is 2009-11-04; the national member bodies of ISO will generally have deadlines in October by when the concerned committees mus make their decisions. While you’re at it, you’ll also be able to argue for disapproval of 29500-4 / FPDAM 1 (for related but different reasons, I’ll explain about that in one of my next blog postings.)
If you’re working for a software company and it is not yet active in the appropriate national standardization organization, you should probably become active to make sure that the emerging body of international standards in the field of IT isn’t going to get in the way of your company’s business interests. This recommendation for getting involved applies even if your company is a small one, or if software development isn’t the firm’s main line of business.
While putting it in the way of the weasel, Microsoft is still pushing what amounts to a tax on users of Internet standards. It’s doing this through a definition of “open standards” that would mandate standards bodies to consider patented, protected, proprietary technology on a par with truly open source offerings, and encourage companies to pack standards bodies with paid employees.
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If we learned anything at all from the OOXML debate it should be that any Microsoft victory there was pyrrhic. ODF was able to deliver on its standard long before Microsoft could change its own proprietary scheme to match what the ISO approved.
If their idea was to bury ODF in the corporate user base, Microsoft failed, and at enormous cost, both to its own reputation and that of the ISO standards bodies.
At the same time, Microsoft is accumulating patents on XML. See for example:
It sounds like a joke. But, it’s real and it’s anything but a joke for Microsoft. Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has issued an injunction (PDF Link) that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.”
<http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/i4ivMS-412.pdf>. Some interesting and arrogant quotes from Microsoft emails about the XML editor market. Read from the last two lines of page 39 through the first line of page 41. Best quote is the one in parentheses that ends on page 41.
Can’t believe those guys actually thought they had a prayer of monopolizing the market for low to medium power XML editors, particularly with Word native file support XML read/write filters.
My prediction: Microsoft either wins a stay pending appeal in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit or it settles promptly thereafter. Don’t think Microsoft can just remove the code for custom XML schemas embedded in the Microsoft flavor of OOXML overnight. OOXML also serves as the communications protocol between Office and Sharepoint Server, and from there via a conversion to XAML to a bunch of other Microsoft server side Office apps. To boot, Microsoft did the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, a backport of the Office 2007 native file support APIs modularized with the old API’s replicated in the wrapper. That’s now running in Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2008 for the Mac. Interesting blog article here by a Softie describing what they did. Rick Shaut, Open XML Converters for Mac Office, Buggin’ My Life Away (7 December 2006), <http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2006/12/07/open-xml-converters-for-mac-office.aspx>.
So they’ve got this huge mass of apps that are interdependent and really can’t tweak just one of them. To boot, they’ve got institutional customers already dependent on custom XML schemas, not to mention a few developers who’ve created apps with custom XML
dependencies. See e.g., this article by Doug Mahugh describing the custom XML dependency of Mindjet’s round trip interop with MS Word. <http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/09/16/758090.aspx>.
Did I mention that Microsoft halting the sale of Word 2007 and 2003 in the U.S. is about as likely as the crack of dawn getting raped and thereby impregnated? Microsoft either wins that stay pending appeal or it settles.
When software patents cause so much trouble, it is made a lot easier to explain why they should be deprecated. █
MR. OLSON [For Microsoft]: The ’580 patent is a program, as I understand it, that’s married to a computer, has to be married to a computer in order to be patented.
JUSTICE SCALIA: You can’t patent, you know, on-off, on-off code in the abstract, can you?
MR. OLSON [For Microsoft]: That’s correct, Justice Scalia.
JUSTICE SCALIA: There needs to be a device.
MR. OLSON [For Microsoft]: An idea or a principle, two plus two equals four can’t be patented. It has to be put together with a machine and made into a usable device.
For a few years the Vole had been trying to create open standards derived from its own XML-based file formats, such as XPS and Office XML. True, much of its work was seen as an attempt to stop competing formats, such as the Open Document Format. However Microsoft did get some support for its cunning plan.
As one person put it, “Microsoft granted patent “..document stored in a single XML..” [http://is.gd/2a8y1]. ODF uses several xml files .. so are we in safe??”
Another individual writes: “Not “new usage” for patents: #Microsoft #patents #fud against #ODF: http://is.gd/29nmu”
There is a fairly new video at YouTube where Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall talks about OOXML and ODF. Have a look.
Although we are seeing more ODF software, Microsoft carries on with OOXML and in the process of putting an office suite on-line, Microsoft proves that it is hostile not only towards competition but also towards Web standards. Yesterday from The Register:
Microsoft’s web Office: No love for Chrome, Opera
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Apparently, Microsoft isn’t familiar with Google Chrome or Opera, or, for that matter, Internet Explorer 6 or the Windows version of Apple’s Safari. They’re not on the official list of supported browsers included in a recent blog posting by the Office Web Apps Team – a posting, ironically enough, entitled “The Office Web Apps Love Your Browser.”
Official support for the Office Web Apps limits that love to Internet Explorer 7 and 8; Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac, and Linux; and Safari 4 on Mac. And that’s it.
According to Mary-Jo Foley, Silver Lie (XAML) is making its way into this as well. This harms GNU/Linux users no matter which Web browser they use. It is time for regulators to impose open standards on Microsoft, and not proprietary formats that Microsoft pretends (and bribes) to be called “standards”. Microsoft’s ODF implementation is still deficient and harmful [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. █
The core of US Patent 7,571,169 which Microsoft was granted on August 4th refers to – “A word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML”.
OOXML is covered by Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise, under which Microsoft promised not prosecute those using, selling, or distributing its implementation of a technology or specification.
As we explained before, the Open Specification Promise is a useless promise, based on the analysis of the SFLC. The Microsoft Community Promise is equally bad.
Some days ago we mentioned how Microsoft was trying to sneak RAND into Free software [1, 2] and The Source has a posting about that too.
Recent statements on “Open” give an interesting insight into Microsoft constancy.
In a recent Computerworld UK blog entry, Glyn Moody takes Microsoft’s Jason Matusox to task for conflating “balance” with “open”. I won’t re-hash the points Mr. Moody makes so read his article too!
Basically, Mr. Matusox laments how Open standards are “overbalanced” in favor of standard implementors, and someone is insisting that standards must have “no IP restrictions”.
Yes, Microsoft wants more software patents in standards, and it wants them to be enforceable even in the EU.
Imagine that, Apple supported Microsoft’s Open XML standardisation. Last week’s Microsoft Office 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) release wasn’t so great for Mac Office users, a giant fail. You know, when you have a multibillion office applications business who would dare to test for crossplattform compatibility of file formats before you release the service pack? No one does, and Apple users of the Mac Office were absolutely outraged about Open XML.
In more positive news, the OpenOffice.org team says that version 3.1 of the software has already been downloaded over 20 million times (in 3 months), meaning that OpenOffice.org is downloaded over 6.6 million times per month. It is a staggering pace which does not take into account the exchange of CDs, including GNU/Linux CDs, which typically contain OpenOffice.org out of the box (and in the repositories). Heise has this new article about a collaboration plug-in for OpenOffice 3.1 users
Secure collaboration specialist TeamDrive has released its collaboration plug-in for OpenOffice 3.1 users. The freeware TeamDrive OpenOffice Plug-in allows users to create and share TeamDrive “SharedSpaces” (shared folders) and includes version control. Users can exchange files securely and view version comments or open previous versions of a document.
This ought to show the power of OpenOffice.org, which is often the target of heavy Microsoft FUD. OpenOffice.org — like Mozilla Firefox — thrives in a sea of extensions. █
Users went to Baidu for 75.7 percent of their online searches in China in the second quarter, a rise of 1.6 percentage points from the first three months of the year, according to iResearch, a Chinese Internet consultancy.
In some recent articles which we cited, it came up that most surveys are heavily US-oriented, so when looking at it globally, Microsoft’s market share in search is apparently well less than 5%. Yes, it is a real uphill battle for a company that is falling downhill.
The first of the search results about the Microsoft Word question linked to a page about how expensive Manhattan is (Is Microsoft competing with Manhattan now?). The top responses to the “Is Microsoft Evil?” question were, get this, a link to a New York Times story about whether or not Google is considered evil, a link about proxy servers, and a link to a story about Microsoft being charitable. Wow.
As we showed before, GNU/Linux and ODF are victimised too and it’s not the only offense of Bing, which should be reported to the authorities for anti-competitive practices. Microsoft is seeding distrust on the Web.
Speaking of Microsoft’s harms to the Web, watch this IE6 boycott as it develops. This morning in The Inquirer:
DEVELOPERS ARE SHOUTING at everyone who will listen to kill off Internet Exploder 6.
A campaign has started, sparked by 40 Internet start-ups who want their users to ditch Microsoft’s eight year old web browser.
Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is most notorious for disobeying standards and making the Web far from secure.
Does Microsoft deserve a place on the Internet given its current behaviour? █
30 July 2009 OpenDocument v1.2 part 1 Committee Draft 03 has been approved.
It is worth noting that apart from Mary McRae (of OASIS), there are prominent SUN and IBM positions up there at the top — Michael Brauer and Robert Weir, respectively. More evidence of ODF prominence is appearing now that Serif PagePlus advertises ODF support.
Other key additions in PagePlus X4 include the ability to import MS Word documents and OpenOffice.org ODF (open document format) files. PagePlus X4 will also allow users to anchor objects in relation to specific text, columns, frames, margins or pages while editing them. Frames and borders can now be dragged-and-dropped into documents too.
To get an idea of how much easier it is to support ODF, see this new Twitter remark, which says: “ISO’s current defect report for ISO 29500 (OOXML) has 809 pages. That are 71 pages more than the full specification of ODF 1.1!”
Software major Microsoft on Monday clarified that its representative did not suggest ‘amendment on open standards’ but rather said, ‘There are fewer merits in mandating a single standard since it restricts choice for the customer, as well as reduce the incentive for competition and innovation by the industry’.
This is nonsense. Microsoft Malaysia used the same lies, essentially relying on people’s ignorance. In reality, choice is about multiple applications, not standards. For instance, the world’s population enjoys many Web browsers, but they are unified by one Internet, not many incompatible “versions of the Internet”.
“Microsoft corrupted many members of ISO in order to win approval for its phony ‘open’ document format, OOXML. This was so governments that keep their documents in a Microsoft-only format can pretend that they are using ‘open standards.’ The government of South Africa has filed an appeal against the decision, citing the irregularities in the process.”
Microsoft’s recently released Service Pack 2 for Office 2008 for Mac makes it impossible for many users to open Office files created on PCs.
“Yup, sounds like Microsoft to me,” adds Rasker. “And to think that Microsoft Office is actually their only reliable cash cow apart from Windows. One might expect a little better trial and testing before inconveniencing people like this, now mightn’t one?
“And to think that Microsoft Office is actually their only reliable cash cow apart from Windows.” –Richard Rasker“Anyway, I think I’ll stick with OpenOffice for the foreseeable future. It simply works, no strings attached. Not to mention the fact that those brainless ** from Redmond have failed to produce a viable version of Microsoft Office for Linux for what, the past decade? ‘Proves that they’re just **, deserving every bit of scorn loaded on their sorry backsides.”
The OpenOffice.org team has meanwhile come up with an interface prototype for future versions of the software, which will be released by Oracle. One of their engineers explains:
The prototyping phase, to create a new user interface for OpenOffice.org, has ended last week. See our monthly project Renaissance status presentation for July and try the prototype yourself (Java 6 required). It is not only about Impress, we are working on a UI for the entire OOo. You will be asked to give feedback when closing the prototype. Make use of it!
Microsoft is obviously nervous about OpenOffice.org because it mentions the "P" word. Microsoft is also very nervous about ODF, which it fought like fire (Microsoft still fights against ODF in more subtle ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]). Looking at the past 2 days alone, watch how unfamiliar people are stripping off remaining Microsoft criticism from the ODF article in Wikipedia [1, 2]. How familiar a sight. See for example:
The latest malicious edits in Wikipedia are pretending that it doesn’t matter what Microsoft does to Wikipedia and what the ODF Alliance says about Microsoft’s behaviour. It gets whitewashed and John Drinkwater reverses it thusly (by calling it “vandalism”). From the first correction:
Revision as of 19:47, 31 July 2009 (edit) (undo)
Johndrinkwater (talk | contribs)
m (Undid revision 305273577 by 200.156.24.98 (talk) revert vandalism)
Summary: Listing of some new OpenDocument milestones and warning about those who try to push a stick into wheels of standards
Malaysia’s latest update regarding ODF was highly encouraging and Yoon Kit adds that “ODF will be published on the SIRIM website within 2 months since its approval in June. Priority will be given over others in their backlog.” Over at the OpenDocument Web site, it is noted that another project — called TEA — finally supports ODF.
TEA is a Qt-based editor for Unix and Windows. Version 25 features better support for reading ODF text files (.odt)
The same site also posts a reminder about this year’s OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon). For those who do not know:
OOoCon is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve.
A lot has been achieved recently. OpenOffice.org was downloaded at a pace of 1.3 million copies per week around the beginning of 2007. At the beginning of this year it peaked at about 3 million downloads per week. Surely enough, the deep economic impact may have played a role in this. Microsoft Office is taking the toll [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], just like Windows is suffering from GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3]. It’s about margins, not just market share. Free software and open standards are eroding Microsoft’s profitability, which makes its business model a lot less sustainable.
“Free software and open standards are eroding Microsoft’s profitability, which makes its business model a lot less sustainable.”We have repeatedly warned and offered examples where ODF-hostile people were entering ODF mailing lists. They pretend to be friends of ODF in order to curse it and have credibility at the same time. Microsoft does this all the time while it’s harming ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and even Wikipedia became a battleground to the monopolist. The ODF Plugfest had injected to it some ODF hostility, courtesy of Microsoft folks. It is all part of the plan to subvert ODF from the inside; if you can’t beat them, divide them.
I get very angry to seeing at Wikipedia a message that stating that “appears to have a conflict of interest with its subject” about the contributions to the article … we are all in favor of ODF ? Or not ?
This is exactly what they want … confuse, deceive, hinder, delay … help to fail! And hope it serves as a lesson and prove (or a warning) to all those who think that everything is solved!
When I was preparing to write this post, I made a complete list with names, email addresses, blogs, sites, and in some cases companies of each of the “workers of the gray area” that I managed to identify. With the help of some confidence friends around the world, also prepared a compilation of information that show the questionable not-so-distant past of those folks.
It is important to be careful of Microsoft’s attempts to approach the ODF crowd; Microsoft is not ODF’s friends. The only reason it implemented something that resembles ODF (and is incompatible with all existing implementations) is to increase sales of Office and act as PR gesture that unjustifiably appeases regulators. █
Microsoft’s ATL problem is spreading. Many other software vendors are affected, among them Adobe and Cisco. The total number of vendors with vulnerable controls is currently unclear. In an interview with heise Security, Microsoft executive Andrew Cushman confirmed that it is not known how many ActiveX controls are affected. Cushman said this is the first time a Microsoft library has been affected by a security problem. According to the executive, Redmond appreciates that this patch not only affects corporate IT teams, but also requires action from software developers.
A highly effective solution would be to ban ActiveX controls, as some companies have been doing for years; ActiveX controls were arguably added for competitive reasons despite the obvious dangers. It helped Microsoft create an Internet Explorer monoculture in the late 90s. A relationship between vulnerability and monoculture was also mentioned in this new E-mail. It is about another proprietary stain on the Web: Flash.
This highlights an unfortunate instance of monoculture — nearly everyone on the internet uses Flash for nearly all the video they watch, so just about everyone in the world is using a binary module from a single vendor day in, day out.
The World Wide Web was built on standards, which were intended to be implemented independently by many capable vendors. Then came Microsoft. This potential departure from standards puts at great risk the entire Internet. █
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
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