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[News] Typical Microsoft Uninterested in Interoperability

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The Battle for ODF Interoperability

,----[ Quote ]
| Last year, when I was socializing the idea of creating the OASIS ODF 
| Interoperability and Conformance TC, I gave a presentation I called "ODF 
| Interoperability: The Price of Success". The observation was that standards 
| that fail never need to deal with interoperability. The creation of test 
| suites, convening of multi-vendor interoperability workshops and plugfests is 
| a sign of a successful standard, one which is implemented by many vendors, 
| one which is adopted by many users, one which has vendor-neutral venues for 
| testing implementations and iteratively refining the standard itself.       
| 
| [...]
| 
| The pretty words have been shown to be hollow words. Microsoft has not
enabled choice. Their implementation is not robust. They have, in effect, 
| taken your ODF document, written by you by your choice in an interoperable 
| format, with demonstrated interoperability among several implementations, and 
| corrupted it, without your knowledge or consent.   
`----

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/battle-for-odf-interoperability.html

Better ODF Support for MS Office

,----[ Quote ]
| While Microsoft Office 2007’s latest service pack purports ODF support, it’s 
| not complete, nor does it appear designed to provide usable interoperabilty 
| with other ODF-capable applications.  
| 
| For users of MS Office who need better compatibility, the solution is the Sun 
| ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office: 
| 
|     * The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Office 
|     Word, Excel and PowerPoint the ability to read, edit and save to the 
|     ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF).  
|     * The plugin works with Microsoft Office 2007 (Service Pack 1 or higher), 
|     Microsoft Office 2003, XP and Microsoft Office 2000. 
`----

http://www.solidoffice.com/archives/1150

ODF Continua Conquistando Suporte em Todo o Continente Sul Americano

http://www.dicas-l.com.br/broffice/broffice_20090513.php

OB Ude plädiert in Brüssel für offene Software-Standards 

http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/dir/limux/publ/233950/ude_in_bruessel.html


Recent:

MS forking ODF? They would love to.

,----[ Quote ]
| By the looks of it, I cannot but feel that MS has found a way to fork the ODF
| 1.1 to suite their world view of having their product as the only one out
| there. I have to agree with IBM's Rob Weir in this post.
`----

http://harishpillay.livejournal.com/158370.html


ODF interoperability event - Royal Library, The Hague - June 15/16 2009

http://www.openforumeurope.org/press-room/ofe-events/odf-interoperability-event-royal-library-the-hague-june-15-16-2009


ODF@WWW - An ODF Wiki

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI0AEJkotzM


,----[ Quote ]
| I received from the ODF Alliance the following response to my email:
|
|     That’s the plan for next week. A harder-hitting press release with Fact
|     Sheet. Stay tuned!
`----

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-154383/microsoft-now-attempts-to-sabotage-odf


A follow-up on Excel 2007 SP2's ODF support

,----[ Quote ]
| In other words, all of those Interoperability Directors and Interoperability
| Architects at Microsoft seem to have (hopefully temporarily) switched into
| Minimal Conformance Directors and Minimal Conformance Architects, and are
| gazing at their navels. I hope they did not suffer a reduction in salary
| commensurate with the reduction in their claimed responsibilities.
|
| [...]
|
| In any case, this comes down to why do you implement a standard. What are
| your goals? If your goal is be interoperable, then you perform
| interoperability testing and make those adjustments to your product necessary
| to make it be both conformant and interoperable. But if your goal is to
| simply fulfill a checkbox requirement without actually providing any tangible
| customer benefit, then you will do as little as needed. However, if your goal
| is to destroy a standard, then you will create a non-conformant,
| non-interoperable implementation, automatically download it to millions of
| users and sow confusion in the marketplace by flooding it with millions of
| incompatible documents. It all depends on your goals. Voluntary standards do
| not force, or prevent, one approach or another.
|
| To wrap this up, I stand on the table of interoperability results in the
| previous post. SP2 has reduced the level of interoperability among ODF
| spreadsheets, by failing to produce conforming ODF documents, and failing to
| take note of the spreadsheet formula conventions that had been adopted by all
| of the other vendors and which are working their way through OASIS as a
| standard.
`----

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/follow-up-on-excel-2007-sp2s-odf.html


Microsoft now attempts to sabotage ODF

,----[ Quote ]
| - Ask the ODF Alliance to publish a press release recommending not using
| the "Save as ODF" facility included MS Office SP2, due to the bad quality of
| the produced ODF files.
|
| [...]
|
| - Start a petition asking Microsoft to make MS Office SP2 unavailable until
| the design flaws in the product have been corrected.
|
| We must make it clear to Microsoft that their attitude is not acceptable, and
| force them to behave in a better way.
`----

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-154383/microsoft-now-attempts-to-sabotage-odf


Engage, embrace, extinguish

,----[ Quote ]
| Today we have OpenOffice.org 3.1 gets released. In the meantime, the
| proprietary product from Redmond claims to be able to wirte ODF format, but
| fails. Pity. Money corrupts, but MS Tax Dollars corrupts absolutely.
`----

http://harishpillay.livejournal.com/157565.html


Microsoft now attempt to fragment ODF

,----[ Quote ]
| One of the first articles published about SP2 and for which I call the
| attention of everyone is from Rob Weir, chair of the OASIS ODF TC (group that
| develops the ODF, to which I belong). It is simply scary to see what Office
| 2007 does with existing ODF spreadsheets.
|
| The technical details are all on Rob’s blog, but in summary, when opening an
| ODF spreadsheet (.ods file) using Office 2007, it simply removes all existing
| formulas without telling anything to the user, leaving only the values in
| cells (results of formulas evaluation, previously stored in the document). If
| a user wants to test the ODF support in Office, and without giving due
| attention, save an existing spreadsheet, will overwrite the document removing
| all the formulas (as if you were writing a table). I saw absurdities in life,
| but nothing compared to this.
`----

http://homembit.com/2009/05/microsoft-now-attempt-to-fragment-odf.html


OpenDocument Format: The Standard for Office Documents

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/opendocument-format-standard-for-office.html


A Few Facts As Antidote Against Microsoft's anti-ODF FUD Campaign

,----[ Quote ]
| The best antidote against FUD is facts. FUD only works when people don't know
| any better. So, given some recent anti-ODF FUD in the air, I thought it would
| be useful to provide some facts.
|
| First, I'd like to show you who voted Yes to approve OpenDocument v1.1 as an
| OASIS Standard in January of 2007. ODF v1.2 is already being adopted by some
| now, of course, as development has continued, but Microsoft chose to stick
| with v1.1, so let's do the same. I think you'll find the list dispositive as
| to who is sincere in this picture. Next time you read some criticism of ODF,
| then, you can just take a look at the list and ask yourself what it tells
| you. And if you are a technical person, here's ODF v1.1, so you can compare
| any claims of deficiencies. Here's Groklaw's chronicle of the OOXML/ODF saga,
| where you can find many resources, including a chronology of events from 2005
| to the present.
`----

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009050712493241


Microsoft vs. ODF: arrogance on display

,----[ Quote ]
| Note to Microsoft: This is not how standards work. Frankly, if you don’t
| intend to support ODF properly, you may as well not support it at all. What
| your product writes isn’t ODF. When your product reads ODF, it silently
| discards important parts of the data. (Yes, the formulas in spreadsheets are
| important. That’s the whole purpose of a spreadsheet program! Otherwise we
| may as well be using pencil, paper, and calculators.)
`----

http://www.shawnkquinn.com/2009/05/microsoft-vs-odf-arrogance-on-display/


Should we waterboard Rob Weir? And other crucial questions…

,----[ Quote ]
| These are very interesting times for ODF and Open Standards. Microsoft’s
| latest outrage by Gray Knowlton does at least show that if there’s a company
| who practices the « Do as I say, not as I do », it’s Microsoft. Gray Knowlton
| is now calling for Rob Weir, chair of the ODF Technical Committee at the
| OASIS Consortium to resign. I understand Gray. Gray is the Product Manager of
| Microsoft Office at Microsoft. Which means he is ultimately to blame for the
| lousy job Microsoft engineers have done in implementing ODF inside Microsoft
| Office. Gray is in the front line, and you can bet he’s having to answer some
| tough calls from customers right now. Gray does not have to ride the smooth «
| try Seven after Vista » wave; he has to go through the clutter that
| Microsoft’s big heads have created by thinking: What if we had ODF wrecked
| inside Office and get the world to believe that it’s not our fault? That’s
| Gray’s problem. And this is how we come to the waterboarding of Rob. But I
| digress.
|
| [...]
|
| Bad, bad, evil Rob. Not only he didn’t go to your grand astroturfing party,
| but he apparently forgot to mention SP2 at the coffee machine ten times in a
| rowthe day you released it. That must be depressing. Anyway; talking about
| missing the chance to provide your input before things happen: How come
| Microsoft left the OASIS ODF TC in 2003?
`----

http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2009/05/08/should-we-waterboard-rob-weir-and-other-crucial-questions/
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