Australia will probably go Yes with Comments. From the article: Microsoft has a well-organized PR push at these events, with the ever-present Rick Jelliffe and in this case a representative from CompTIA claiming its members want a Yes vote, which will not surprise you. But in this case, CompTIA apparently was called out by the IBM representative, who pointed out that IBM is a member of CompTIA and does *not* approve of OOXML. And if Jelliffe is going to be introduced an an "independent" expert, I suggest asking if he or his company receives money from Microsoft which is used to send him to all these OOXML meetings.
I asked Greg Stone about this and read out during the forum part of the promise namely “Microsoft Necessary Claims” are those claims of Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-controlled patents that are necessary to implement only the required portions of the Covered Specification that are described in detail and not merely referenced in such Specification.”
After the forum Microsoft gave me a Document from Baker & McKenzie titled Standardisation and Licensing of Microsoft's Office Open XML Reference Schema dated June 2006. They believe it should allay any fears about the Open Specification Promise.
What do Baker & McKenzie say about the OSP?
Nothing. They only discuss the CNS, a "slightly modified" version of SUN's patent covenant (cmp. the text!). Baker & McKenzie is no real legal study. Claims are not substantiated.
What is OSP?
A "promise" about the use of patents. Reportedly emerged when the CNS was criticised.
What is their conclusion:
It should be noted, however, that incorporation of the Schema into a product governed by the terms of the GNU LGPL, or any other intellectual property licence, will place restrictions on the rights of a user that the CNS itself does not. Any such restrictions will be determined by the development and licensing practices of the third-party developer, not by Microsoft; and this will be as true for applications developed under the ODF standard as it is for applications incorporating the Open XML Schema standard.
A Chewbacca derivate but they hint the CNS could be GNU GPL incompatible.
More
Err, I did not present myself as an "independent expert", I presented myself as someone who had been working with these standards groups on and off for more than a decade, either as Australian delegate or as invited expert or standards editor, and someone who runs a small software business that has nothing to do with MS and is based on standards (and open source). Standards Australia asked me to speak on the standards-related issues (not the technical issues) as I saw them.
B.t.w. I don't have any current or pending contracts to MS for teaching or speaking engagements, nor have I ever actively sought any. So at least Standards Australia thinks I have some knowledge, and I am not dependent on MS for income; whether that makes me an independent expert I don't know. I think for some people the definition of "independent" may mean "takes the opposite position to MS on all issues even if it involves flipflopping on everything you have said for the last decade" .
Rick Jelliffe
Rick, thanks for joining the forum here. I'm confused why someone who has worked with ISO for years would endorse what is going on. Do you believe that stuffing ISO committees with business partners is a good way to vote on standards? That money should beat technological analysis? That OOXML really is good enough for the ISO label?
Anyhow, "independent" means not getting money from someone to say what you say. I think your credentials are well established. Even if you believe and have always believed that a monopolist's standard is inevitable, when you take his money to say this, you are a paid yes-man, and in ISO meetings, it's unethical to not be clear about who paid you to be there and say what you say.
So you don't have any contracts for "teaching or speaking engagements". Would you like to clarify just what contracts you do have with Microsoft, directly or indirectly? Travel, consultancy? How much are you paid to turn up at these meetings?
Cheers
Pieter Hintjens
Rick said:
"I don't have any current or pending contracts to MS for teaching or speaking engagements, nor have I ever actively sought any."
We understand that Microsoft likes false flag operations. So who pays? An "SME" group known as CompTIA? Or the notorious ACT? It is nothing wrong about taking money.
My questions to you:
- What is the gain for the XML community when an existing premature standard ECMA-376 gets ISO approved?
- Don't you think that they proposed a bad business deal? That is to rename ECMA-376 to ISO 26500 without any additional offer?
So why should a XML specialist advocate to hand them over ISO approval for free and ignore/settle technical objections? Parties that like ECMA-376 as it is are free to implement the current ECMA-376 specification and may continue to do so. ISO standardisation "support" is no rational strategy unless you are compensated.
Anti-criticism
"I think for some people the definition of "independent" may mean "takes the opposite position to MS on all issues even if it involves flipflopping on everything you have said for the last decade" ."
A valid point as there was some debate about the <no>OOXML campaign. But both the community support and getting to the details confirmed all suspicions. We are not responsible for Microsoft's public affairs problems. Our media and most software professionals hate this company which we don't do. I don't believe in evil corporation per se but Microsoft has a history of misconduct and pays a prize fo this. Market does not trust Microsoft and the greater awareness contributes to more transparency about their actions. Everybody expects Microsoft to play evil, surprisingly they really do but they cannot get away with it. They just react to pressure or will offer you a broken deal. It is very easy to mount pressure, so professionals should do.
- Ecma-376 is a broken standard. It was not good enough. Yet, they fast-tracked it.
- OSP and CNS don't give us sufficient confidence.
Other business affiliations
Microsoft finances an ideological crusade for software patents in Europe. A foreign company, the only remaining business party that finances our "opponents" in Europe. And they advocate for broken definitions of open standards. That annoys us and takes a lot of our precious time.
So I as a partisan campaigner "take the opposite position to MS on all public affairs issues as their activities confirm every negative suspicions that were made for the last decade". But I also consider myself independent, even if money is provided.
It is all about warfare and standards are the oil of the 21 century. So a "specialist" who advocates to donate oil reserves to an oil company with nothing in return looks pretty foolish. I don't think you are a fool.
So I tell you that was not paid to attend the meeting and then still you say that I must have been. What is the use? You have backed yourself into a corner where you believe someone who disagrees with you must be doing so for corrupt motives.
It is like in New Zealand where I was over on an unrelated government job, and the local open source people asked me to talk, and someone reported this as if it were part of some orchestrated MS conspiracy. (I hadn't even mentioned it to anyone at MS.)
Is your argument so weak that you really have to bolster it with personal smears and conspiracy theories? The trouble is that the more I have "gotten into the details" the more less I find them coherent: edge-cases get promoted as vital issues, patently bogus statements (such as that XML is not a readable format, or that programs and schemas cannot use bitfields, or that standards cannot overlap) are parroted, and so on. It becomes clear that most of the "community support" comes from people who have never read a standard in their life, let alone Office Open XML (and who are largely relying on material published by a commercial rival who are trying to increase sales for their own closed source software products.)
In my industry, which is the industrial publishing industry, we have for years been calling for MS to open up their formats. We tried the route of adopting a fairly platform-neutral markup form in the early 1990s using the Rainbow DTD, from Davd Sklar then at EBT. It was certainly better than nothing, but still had too many bumps to be generally useful. Every year we have a conference (such as the SGML Open conferences which became the XML Open conferences which split into the Open Publish and OASIS Open Standards confernences) we would have multiple papers on ways to try to integate Word into a markup-based document flow. This year, for the first time, there were none of those papers; not because of ODF which gives us little that we didn't have 15 years ago with the Rainbow DTD, but because of OOXML, which finally provides us with a workable baseline format.
A baseline format is one where all the information from the original document is present, unmediated by any foreign level of abstraction; from a baseline format, we (the developers and integrators) decide which information we want to keep or throw away or workaround or base our processing decisions on.
Now it may be that we then decide to then take the OOXML and covert it to ODF and store that. That is fine. However, the availability of ODF or PDF or HTML does not change the utility of OOXML and the need for it to be standardized, because it does something useful that the others don't: it provides a full and workable baseline format. I think people must not realize there is this other industry going, apart from from vendors of desktop suites, who have their own particular stake int the game and who deserve the benefits of standardization just as much as any other constituency. In their utter ignorance or dismissiveness, they instead want to make this a manicheean struggle: I think it is the same black-and-white "axis of evil" mentality that had afflicted America so much recently: the need for "culture wars" etc.
So please don't give me that crap about Yes-men and so on. This is something we in the industrial publishing work have been pushing for for years. We are not saying "yes" to Microsoft, Microsoft is finally saying "yes" to us.
On the issue of software patents, with OOXML we have MS saying "we are giving up our rights to sue for licenses on these" and yet you are opposing that? Have you looked into the ramifications of the Dell case (and what happens if MS pulls out, see the Rambus case) for what happens to unraised IP licensablity when a company participates in the development of a standard: look at the info on the (anti-MS) site http://www.consortiuminfo.org/laws/ for an introduction.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
So I tell you that was not paid to attend the meeting and then still you say that I must have been. What is the use? You have backed yourself into a corner where you believe someone who disagrees with you must be doing so for corrupt motives.
Unlike others, I really don't believe it matters if you were paid by Microsoft or not. It's entirely possible to find people to support nearly any position of their own accord. Questioning the motives of a speaker is really just a form of shooting the messenger (unless his information is outright fraudulent, which I'm not really trying to address here). My personal feeling is that we should address the message rather than the messenger, because even if we discredit the messenger, another one can always be found.
Is your argument so weak that you really have to bolster it with personal smears and conspiracy theories? The trouble is that the more I have "gotten into the details" the more less I find them coherent: edge-cases get promoted as vital issues, patently bogus statements (such as that XML is not a readable format, […]
So if I invented some new science-fictional language and used the new words for element and attribute names in an XML document, you'd be able to read it? (And by "you", I don't mean some program you wrote on your computer, and by "read", I don't mean parse into a document tree.)
[…] or that programs and schemas cannot use bitfields, […]
The argument that I heard wasn't that the software couldn't parse bit fields, but that ordinary humans couldn't read them. The bottom line is whether you can create a mental picture of what the document is supposed to look like by reading the raw XML. This is important for implementors, since if they can't picture what a document will look like from reading the XML, they won't really know if they implemented the standard correctly.
or that standards cannot overlap) are parroted, and so on.
Standards that entirely overlap each other in functionality are a waste of resources for existing vendors and clients, and a barrier to entry for new vendors. Overlapping standards can exist, the that doesn't mean they SHOULD exist, and that's what Microsoft and other OOXML supporters have failed to address.
It becomes clear that most of the "community support" comes from people who have never read a standard in their life, let alone Office Open XML (and who are largely relying on material published by a commercial rival who are trying to increase sales for their own closed source software products.)
You'd think that people don't have the time to sit down an read a 6000 page specification, the lazy bastards! And it's not like they're saving any time reading ODF when you consider all the specs ODF is dependent on:
ODF 1.2 | 751 |
SVG 1.1 | 719 |
XForms 1.0 SE | 123 |
XPath 2.0 | 94 |
XLink 1.0 | 30 |
MathML 2.0 | 541 |
SMIL 2.1 | 400 |
ISO 8601:2004 | 40 |
ISO/IEC 10646:2003 (with charts) | 1435 |
Total: | 4133 |
Oh, wait, that's still less than 6000 pages. Well, I'm sure I'm forgetting a few standards…
(Note: You can shave off about a thousand pages by dropping the charts in ISO/IEC 10646:2003.)
What I observe is that the technical argument for OOXML is lost, so an emotional campaign gets started. Emotions plus brute force.
But bugs don't fade away just because you mount pressure to ignore them.
All that is needed is fair play. The OSP and the CNS for instance are not fair play but deceptive. Microsoft is able to clarify things but they don't.
It is a good cure to actually read the specification. It's awful. <No>OOxml recommends it to everyone as we were the first party that focussed on a political petition with strong points and we added a technical side by linking the specification and sample technical comments as found by many parties.
Here we take an educational approach to improve the quality of the debate.
The flaw of Rick's argument is simple: Nobody gains from an ISO approval except Microsoft. We can take the ECMA specification as it is and implement it. Microsoft offers nothing, no added value and uses brute force to push an immature specification through.
We advocate "<no>OOXML as an ISO-standard" but Microsoft would be still free to use it as it's future format and market can use the ECMA specification.
The debate indicates how important it is to improve:
- protection of standard setting bodies against hi-jacking
- technical input channels to standard bodies
- patent policies
@ Anonymous (70.147.81.16)
Nice troll! The concern is not 6000 pages but 6000 pages without substance, written by technical writers but not professionals.
add(water, wine).
On the issue of size. Of the over 6000 pages, about maybe 2000 are tutorial and "informative" not "normative". If we are comparing apples with apples, then probably they should be removed from consideration: ODF and the W3C material has very little non-normative material. (Indeed, I think the whole of Part 3 should be removed from the DIS 29500: useful for some, but better as a TR than an IS.)
Furthermore, in order to compare page sizes, you need to make sure they are all typeset the same way. When I moved part 4 to use 10pt (like ISO standards) it saved about 800 pages for example.
Furthermore, not every page is the same. There are 50 pages of examples of border art, and 50 IIRC pages of table styles and so on. There are duplicate schemas for the RELAX NG versions. These take up paper space, but don't particularly add to the general complexity the way that text does. And even in the text, type definitions and boilerplate text are repeated regularly. Again, this adds pages but not technical complexity.
On the ODF side, you are right that it is more than just the simple ODF spec. But IIRC (it was months ago when I checked this), in quite a few cases the ODF spec gives a good general description of the functionality of the element in a different namespace without requiring you to go outside to the mother spec. So even though your list doesn't include XSLFO, I think the raw page count for expanded ODF would be as big as you say, effectively.
A general problem with DIS29500 is that it does not state its references to standards adequately. This has caused unnecessary agitation and confusion: for example, the documentation on the <sig> element does not mention ISO Open Font, without which the locale list for font-mapping makes little sense (spurring people to complain that the standard country list was not being used, when in fact a different list used in fonts was being used.)
I would actually accept OOXML as a duplicate standard IF it was good and
well written. The fact that MS has finally opened up one of the full-featured
file formats of their flagship Office product suite is commendable. However,
the specification is so full of flaws, errors, inconsistencies, contradictions,
incomplete descriptions and loose ends that I see no way to produce a correct
implementation from it. It is an ECMA standard, and I think that is more than
enough given its current status, with hundreds of unresolved technical
issues. To promote it to an ISO standard without significant improvements
to the specification and to the quality of its description would be a mistake.
If the standard is rewritten to address at least the more prominent technical
issues, I could support it as an ISO standard, even though I think duplicate
standards is generally a bad idea. As it is, OOXML is not even worthy of
consideration by ISO.
Yes, I did read the spec, all 6000+ pages of it. It IS crap. Pure and utter crap,
thrown together too hastily without proper attention and care, and obviously
passed without proper technical review by ECMA.
The ODF standard, with problems of its own, is a sublime work of art in comparison.
Why can't the supporters of OOXML admit that the standard is flawed and needs
considerable reworking before it is fit for ISO acceptance? You did read it, right?
Politics aside, let's at least work on the technical stuff. There are a number of
perfectly valid technical objections to OOXML, and it will only hurt OOXML advocates
to ignore them or pretend they are minor, unimportant details. ECMA 376 is simply
nowhere near the quality of what should be expected of an ISO standard document.
How depressing once again my country is on the wrong side of history