06.08.08
Trojan Horses Made of Lucid Glass
Watching like a hawk, preying on binary ‘gifts’
Some recent entries about OpenDocument format and OOXML warned that attempts were made to change the story (Microsoft-induced embellishments). One has to be extremely careful when listening to those who claim to be involved. In fact, just under a couple of days ago, the following pointer served a reminder of our chance to exploit transparency, correct disinformation, and prevent manipulation. As Rob Weir said a long time ago, with ODF he lives in a glass house.
Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) Technical Committee. The new TC would provide a means for software implementors and service providers to create applications that adhere to the ODF specification and are able to interoperate. Proposers include representatives from Ars Aperta, IBM, and Novell; Rob Weir of IBM is designated as the discussion leader.
Groklaw saw this pointer and asked readers to keep an eye on what goes on.
I can tell you that from what I know, and I know a fair amount, that X marks the spot where a lot of eyeballs are needed. I have no doubt that Microsoft wishes to use ODF for its own purposes, and I know for a fact that some kind of liaison is what some who seem to me to be happily doing whatever Microsoft wants have been hoping for, namely some mechanism for ODF to coordinate with SC34 in ISO that would operate a bit like the relationship between the Unicode Consortium and JTC 1/SC 2, who jointly maintain the Unicode standard.
[...]
This is the moment to pay full attention, if this is something you care about and you wish to avoid the Microsoft EEE. Stay polite at all times, of course, if you say anything, and you needn’t say anything, but do follow along and please keep us posted on anything you see that sounds peculiar. I’ll try to do the same.
For more information about Microsoft’s possible motives (and potentially devious intentions) inside the ODF committee, consider reading [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Even Dana Blankenhorn has already weighed in on a related concern.
If Microsoft wants its standard to stand on equal footing with the ODF, it needs to stop embedding closed binary objects in the Office format, and stop treating it as proprietary.
It’s quite likely that Microsoft will (at least try to) do to ODF what it once did to HTML. That’s what makes vigilance ever so important. █
“We’re disheartened because Microsoft helped W3C develop the very standards that they’ve failed to implement in their browser. We’re also dismayed to see Microsoft continue adding proprietary extensions to these standards when support for the essentials remains unfinished.”
–George Olsen, Web Standards Project
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