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Comments: 145 + - News: Study Says OOXML Unsuitable For Norwegian Government on Monday February 08 2010, @07:57PM
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angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML.)"
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Fredonia (Score:3, Funny)
The government of Fredonia chooses .txt, ASCII, with \n line endings.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The government of Fredonia chooses .txt, ASCII, with \n line endings.
Unfortunately, US-ASCII does not contain all characters that Fredonians use.
has a larger backstory (Score:4, Interesting)
The OOXML-standardization backstory is pretty convoluted, so I'm not sure I can give an accurate summary, but as far as I can tell this is basically another round in the ongoing fight that seems to have, for some reason, been more active in Norway than elsewhere. The article mentions that the main author of this report was involved in the controversy at the ISO, and there was also a related controversy [slashdot.org] in one of Norway's national standards bodies.
Re: (Score:2)
As much as I think OOXML is a joke (hell, most of the people I've seen using Office 2007 are setting their defaults back to 2003 document formats, and not using docx or xlsx at all), I don't think you're going to get a completely unbiased assessment on OOXML's suitability from a guy who has already made his mark as being opposed.
Despite all of that, OOXML is at least partially supported in OpenOffice, and hopefully in future versions support will be more complete. I think ODF is by far the superior standar
Re:has a larger backstory (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a phenomenon limited to the office software industry, either; in the electricity distribution industry, for example, many very large organisations are watching what's happening in Portugal and Spain and have stated they want to incorporate that experience before they launch their own programmes of change.
Why? Simply because they're doing it first. I guess it's because they're smaller and a bit more agile, I don't know. But it's much cheaper to watch someone else make mistakes and follow blind alleys rather than take the risk on yourself. Risk is expensive.
So, the electricity world watches Iberia. The bureaucracies of the world will be watching Norway, make no mistake.
Parent
What's in a name (Score:5, Funny)
Strange, that the name of the consultancy is Hypatia. She, after all, was a mathematician-philosopher who ascribed to Plotinus's ideal... that empirical research is inherently flawed, and only logic and mathematics can achieve truth.
I mean, there's a clear relationship here that I find very amusing. Microsoft's OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office, is not logically more interoperable due to the nature of what MS has done to the "open" standard.
Delicious allegory.
[1] DIFI is the Norwegian Agency responsible for the decision.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
MS OOXML: the white elephant on the menu (Score:3, Informative)
Correct.
MS' OOXML file format is different from the ISO/IEC 29500 OOXML file format that MS bought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooxml#Application_support [wikipedia.org]
MS will either have to change Office or buy yet another ISO standard to have a product that creates ISO compliant files!
For now, when you go for MS' lunch special, it's a white elephant on the menu.
Re:What's in a name (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't interoperability [wikipedia.org] mean ability to work with diverse systems?
If users of MS Office share documents, that's not interoperability since they all use the same software family. You have to look at users who transfer documents back and forth between diverse software systems, eg MS Office, Open Office, Lotus Symphony, AppleWorks, etc.
Interoperability is about making faithful conversions easy.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't interoperability mean ability to work with diverse systems?
Yes and no. The hiccup is the semantics of 'diverse'.
I could, for example, argue that a random sampling of end users computers make for a collection of 'diverse systems'.
The wikipedia article you linked for example contains this bit of doublespeak:
According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms, interoperability is defined as follows: "The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What's in a name (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, OOXML works with both Country and Western!
Parent
Re:What's in a name (Score:4, Informative)
To cut a long story short http://news.cnet.com/Office-2007-fails-OOXML-conformance-test/2100-7344_3-6237855.html [cnet.com], M$ Office fails it's own standards test, so as regards the monopoly office application the standard is obviously not standard to anything, even within it's own purpose designed program suite. I suppose for that you have to buy the next upgrade or even perhaps the one after that etc. etc..
For M$ to adhere to ODF is simply a choice, for others to adhere to OOXML represents high risk of patent infringement, licence fees, of the standard saying one thing whilst their program does another, ensuring all competitors will never end up being totally compatible and remain a bit buggy.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Every now and then I think perhaps I'm a pretender on slashdot, since it's been ages since I've done computer stuff as a hobby or profession. Sure, I use computers constantly, but only really as an end-user. At home, I spend more time on carpentry, or even painting, then I spend tinkering with my PCs or media server.
Then someone like you comes along and reaffirms my membership in the greater geek community.
Thanks.
Re:What's in a name (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What's in a name (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually that is not correct. Most Microsoft Office implementations found "in the wild" are *less* interoperable with the new MS Office than with Open Office.
Parent
Re:What's in a name (Score:4, Informative)
Incorrect. Section after section of the OOXML spec give insufficient information for implementation.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Lots of FUD there. Let's take one, truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6, and compare to how it is done in ODF.
Let's say you have a bunch of WP6 documents. You have reverse engineered the WP6 format. You have tools that take documents in that format and do interesting things with them, like typeset them for the magazine you publish.
You want to switch to using ODF in your workflow, and are writing a converter to convert WP6 documents to ODF. However, when you run across things in WP6 that just aren't representable in O
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In the context - file format standardization - your response makes absolutely no sense. Not in slightest.
Re:What's in a name (Score:5, Informative)
Check out http://noooxml.wdfiles.com/local--files/arguments/TheCaseAgainstOOXML.pdf [wdfiles.com] for an interesting breakdown of the problems with MS OOXML.
For example one setting is defined as "useWord97LineBreakRules"
The standard defines implementing this thusly:
“To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that
application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into
narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior,
they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications.”
I'll leave describing why this makes fully implementing the "standard" as an excercise to the reader!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Read both specs
As the OOXML 'spec' is over 6000 pages, I don't think anyone has. Definitely not the ISO standards body for sure :)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL. They had to give examples because what supposed to be mathematical and logical is ridden with decades of bugs.
ODF choose wisely to do it right way [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, this, you dummy:
Such a nicely chosen name for the standard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Such a nicely chosen name for the standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm 90% certain that OOXML/Open Office confusion is the basis for the name. I mean seriously, Office Open XML? Why not Word Open XML (WOX)? Microsoft Open XML Interchange (MOXI)? There's a million more marketable names than OOXML, that wouldn't cause any confusion with Open Office.
But then on the other hand, this is the company that brought us Bing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Try to start a movement to call it Microsoft's OOXML. Or MooXML :-)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's not just Bing. You have to say BING!!! Like it's a bell. BING!!!
Say it! Fuck you, you're fired!!!
Re:Such a nicely chosen name for the standard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but it combines "OO" and "XML", two of the most powerful buzzwords the computing industry has ever seen.
I'm not trying to be funny, either. You wouldn't believe the number of managers I've had to deal with who see those terms, and go apeshit crazy about how good something is. Tell them your technology is "object-oriented", and they're sold. Then tell them it involves "XML", and they absolutely can't resist it.
Mind you, these people tend to not know a thing about the technical aspects of software development. They don't know any programming languages, but are convinced that "object-oriented" is the ONLY way. They haven't got a clue what an XML document even looks like, but insist that it can do anything.
The only thing managers these days slurp up more than "OO" and "XML" are "Web Services". If Microsoft had named it OOXMLWebServices instead of just OOXML, ODF would've been destroyed years ago.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you AC for your post, for I feel I've now understood something deep about the universe.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
BOOBS also combines OO and BBS. Whats your point?
BOOBS are more popular that ODF and OOXML. That was the GP's point.
It isn't OOXML.. (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget, MS is not locked out (Score:4, Informative)
MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1] So, if ODF is chosen as the standard in Norway, the Norwegian government is still free to buy copies of Microsoft Office, as long as it can do a good job of reading and writing ODF files.
Of course, Microsoft will still view this as some kind of defeat, because they would prefer their own standard be adopted; OOXML will be just as much of a lockin trap as the older binary Microsoft formats. If OOXML is adopted, everyone has to buy Microsoft Office; if ODF is adopted, everyone can choose from among many alternatives, several of which are completely free.
It is obvious why Microsoft would prefer OOXML adoption for government (and everywhere else). It is less obvious why government should adopt OOXML instead of ODF.
[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972 [groklaw.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software [wikipedia.org]
steveha
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Remove one and unanimity is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this matter so much? Once one (now two) countries reject OOXML, it means it cannot become *the* international/European document standard for the public sector.
Parent
Re:Remove one and unanimity is impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't say the EU - he said Europe. Norway remains a part of Europe regardless of whether it decides to join the EU or not.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Norway is in the European Economic Area [wikipedia.org], so is more important than Canada, at least on economic issues.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't the same be said for ODF if any countries choose it instead? But won't the top office suites just end up supporting both anyway?
They already do. You just have to worry about inconsistent behavior between the suites. And stupid crap like Office telling you you're a horrible person for not using the latest Microsoft document format.
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Norwegian government likely spends somewhere between some hundreds of thousands and some millions on software that must interpret their chosen document format(ie. actual copies of an office suite, server-side components that generate documents in response to web input, data archive widgetry that needs to be able to read inside the files it stores, etc.) Those who must exchange documents with the Norwegian government presumably spend some millions more.
If that money is being spent on ODF-supporting software, the cost of ODF-supporting software goes down for everybody(or, more precisely, if they chose to build on OSS foundations, the cost for everybody stays the same, and the amount and quality available rises. If they end up going with something commercial, that commercial offering now has more customers across the same roughly fixed cost of development).
It isn't so much that Norway is a vital source of Microsoft revenue, as they likely aren't. It's that their future software demand is going to subsidize improvements to Microsoft's competitors, rather than being high-margin purchases of licences to code that Microsoft has already developed.
Parent
Re:And? (Score:5, Interesting)
Amusing little story:
"Norwegian" is split into two languages. "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk". Directly translated one is Book-language and New Norwegian.
Bokmål is based on danish with norwegian pronunciation (overly simplified of course).
Nynorsk is based on a multitude of dialects from a large area of Norway.
Microsoft used to only support office for Bokmål. They were told as long as it wasnt available as Nynorsk it could not be used in the public sector. They quickly produced a localized version in Nynorsk.
So the market has to be of -some- importance.
Parent
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough. All governments and organizations believing, or pretending to believe, that OOXML is a standard now know they're fools, and/or not fooling anyone.
Plus hopefully the Norwegian government has produced a document explaining their position, that will be quotable for reference.
Parent
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many parts of the OOXML 'standard' which refer to documents not available to the public, or which say something along the lines of 'do this the way office 97 does it'. A standard must contain all the information necessary to implement it, or else it is incomplete and thus not a standard.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except that not even Microsoft was able to write an OOXML-spec document writer. So no, it does not have everything necessary to implement it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the core principles behind a standard I think is that it is immutable. It is a fixed, a priori known way of doing things. So that as long as you write a document following the standard, everyone can read and lay-out that document correctly by just following that same standard. Even if the document is from 10 years ago, or longer. Such as the standard with which a CD is recorded.
But obviously not so for Microsoft:
"It's natural in the development of standards that the standards evolve. That's the nature of standards,"
says a MS representative as quoted in TFA. This as reaction to the allegation by the No
Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)
Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings when voting for OOXML as a "standard"? Not only that, but it doesn't pass any kind of rigorous review as a standard... it is all but an XML representation of the original .doc format, just re-jiggered around, and is so convoluted that nobody but Microsoft has a hope of actually interoperating with it properly. And by the time someone might do so, they've got the next version out.
Seriously, just google around a bit:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/norwegian-standards-body-implodes-over-ooxml-controversy.ars [arstechnica.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
because it is used by the most popular office application out there
Really?! At the time OOXML was approved as a "standard", no conforming implementation existed. Microsoft expressed an intention of implementing it at some point in the future, but AFAIK they haven't yet done so. They also announced that they'd be supporting import/export of ODF before they supported OOXML. Have they changed this?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It means something to those who care less about Microsoft's failure than they do about free formats' success.
Re:And? (Score:4, Interesting)
And the Norweigan government matters, why? They're probably a drop in the bucket for Microsoft's revenue.
Then why do Microsoft pursue any dissent in their corporate customers so strongly? And no.. I'm not going to cite examples. We have all heard of the crack sales teams descending on companies and governments who dare to leave the MS embrace, armed with the authority to practically give the MS products away rather than lose an influential customer. You are absolutely correct. A government switching away from Office is trivial. But only if you are counting licenses. If you count influence, then MS are in for a decidedly nasty future. And another government rejecting MS file formats is a bad thing for MS. Even a city local government is enough to make MS bring in the heavy negotiators. If the file format goes from essential to optional, then so does Office. Right.. Said my piece. Astroturf away.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)