____/ Linonut on Thursday 26 July 2007 12:46 : \____
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Roy Schestowitz belched out this bit o' wisdom:
>
>>> Game over for OpenDocument?
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | What's next for enterprise users who really want document
>>> | interoperability?
>>> `----
>>>
>>
http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/072307-opendocuments-grounded.html?fsrc=rss-linux-news
>>>
>>> F**k. Maybe it's just drama. Probably. Hopefully.
>>
>> Update:
>>
>> There are some funny things going on behind the scenes. I don't know if
>> these are fakers or 'funny business', but we might soon find out. There are
>> apparently imposters/buyouts. Maybe Microsoft is involved in this, but maybe
>> it is not. I'm using E-mail to verify this, but assume that the article
>> above could be a hoax or something very bizarre.
>
> One thing the article mentions is this:
>
> "The problem is that requirements differ at the enterprise level,
> which are heavily invested in fully automated business processes. In
> such situations there is no opportunity for manual inspection of
> documents for conversion artifacts. Flawless integration of
> applications is mandatory, and the existing inventory of enterprise
> documents is stored in Microsoft binary formats. The quality
> (fidelity) of document format conversions must be very, very high.
> Does it matter? Would you want your doctor to perform surgery on you
> while making decisions from an automatically generated history of
> laboratory testing results that contained errors due to data
> conversion corruption?"
>
> I don't think all of the above is completely true, but if it was, so
> what? An open document format is needed for /documents/.
>
> Get that going first, then handle the business processes later.
> And they will be easier to handle in an open format, since external
> tools can be more easily written to use the documents.
>
> Anyway, it sounds like Massachusetts is more committed to lock-in office
> processes than to open formats.
>
> The article also makes this claim about OpenOffice:
>
> The da Vinci plug-in could be released within a few weeks if the only
> goal was to add virtually perfect native ODF support to MS Word. But
> that is insufficient to establish interoperability with other ODF
> applications such as OpenOffice.org. That is because Sun
> Microsystems, which absolutely controls the OpenDocument standard
> development process, has programmed OpenOffice.org to destroy all but
> two of what section 1.5 of the ODF specification refers to as
> "foreign elements and attributes" and is busily making sure that the
> new RDF metadata features in ODF v. 1.2 will not be dependable for
> interoperability purposes.
>
> Just shows me more evidence that you can't trust government or
> corporations to do anything that is "open". You can only trust the
> community. No sooner do I write that then I see this in the article:
>
> But what is perhaps most remarkable about the situation is how
> thoroughly standardization organizations like Ecma, OASIS, and ISO
> have failed to protect software users' interests from big vendors'
> efforts to maintain separate office productivity software markets,
> divided by incompatible file formats. It's time for the Free and Open
> Source Software community to develop its own office document
> standard, along the lines of what Europe has demanded.
>
> . . .
>
> The big vendors had their chance and blew it. Now it's time for the
> demand side of the equation to pick up the pieces and go for the
> universal interoperability demanded by a real world convergence of
> information systems needing to perfect the high fidelity exchange of
> portable XML documents.
>
> Sad, isn't it?
>
> The authors are "president and director of legal affairs for the
> nonprofit OpenDocument Foundation, which is affiliated with the
> developers of the da Vinci plug-in discussed in this article."
I've spoken to some people (including an IBM VP) and I'm finding out a little
more. There's more to come. I'm just not sure what can be said in public at
this point.
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Linux: mint and self-contained 'out of the box'
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
run-level 2 2007-06-16 18:32 last=
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