ODF vs. MSOOXML for beginners

[Hendrixski]

Many new users are confused as to why it is so important that we in the Linux community use ODF and are against Microsoft's new office standard. That is why I am posting this in the "Beginners Talk" section.

First off. ODF is an ISO standard, that means it is approved by the International Standards Organization as a medium of communicating documents. There were many companies that decided what the ODF format looks like, and anybody is entitled to use it. MSOOXML was designed by just one company and if you want to use it you have to pay them.

Second, if you use MS Office you are not allowed to save your documents in the internationally recognized standard format: ODF. This creates a situation known as "vendor lock-in" meaning that any company or user is tied to a particular vendor for all their needs, and cannot benefit from free-market competition. In this case you are tied to MSOOXML, and the Vista stack.

A stack is where certain levels of software cooperate to provide you with a set of related services. It's usually a good thing (like the LAMP stack, or JBOSS). The Vista stack is Microsofts response to competition from companies like Google, who are tying to bring about the "death of the desktop" by creating software that works through your web-browser. This is the key to "software as a service", and in order to compete Microsoft had to move it's key software operations higher up the stack, where Google & friends could not reach it. That is to say they moved it to sharepoint and Exchange which again work ONLY with MSOOXML. The layer on top of that is the MSN network, with internet services like MS Live. If your business wants to use these services it has to use MS Office. What is worse, is that if your business wants to use MS Office, it has to use only the internet services provided by Microsoft, because nobody else will be licensed to provide services with the medium of communication: MSOOXML

While it may not be such a bad thing if you consider that a few businesses will lose a lot of money because of this scheme, what worries many people is that GOVERNMENTS will lose a lot of money to this scheme. Your tax dollars will be paying for your government to be forced to buy services from only one company, and unable to shop around for better prices from competitors.

In a nutshell, THAT is what is what we are talking about when we discuss the importance of Open Office, and ODF standards. And why we are against MSOOXML becoming an ISO standard.

[Tyke91]

i must say, i knew microsoft had a semi monopoly, but i didn't know that governments could be so affected by it.

good job

[Hendrixski]

thanks tyke.

People are against monopolies for good reason. They hurt the economy, they stifle innovation, and as I pointed out above, they make your taxes go higher. A government is like any other business, and they are hurt by vendor-lock-in and monopolies. The only difference between your government and Google, is that if Google gets screwed by a monopoly it goes out of business. If your government is cornered by a monopoly, you pay for it with a percentage of the money you earned.

So that is why we are so active (and you should be too) with out local governments to try to get them to switch to international standards like ODF instead of Microsoft-only standards.

[por100pre1]

Originally Posted by Hendrixski thanks tyke. People are against monopolies for good reason. They hurt the economy, they stifle innovation, and as I pointed out above, they make your taxes go higher. A government is like any other business, and they are hurt by vendor-lock-in and monopolies. The only difference between your government and Google, is that if Google gets screwed by a monopoly it goes out of business. If your government is cornered by a monopoly, you pay for it with a percentage of the money you earned. So that is why we are so active (and you should be too) with out local governments to try to get them to switch to international standards like ODF instead of Microsoft-only standards.

That's only one of the reasons to use ODF. There are many more, for example, ODF is a format for now and the future. You can extract ODF files with any archiver and look the extracted files with text editors (give it a try). Many old Microsoft Office files can't even be opened with newer MS Office versions.

[Her Ghost]

thankyou - I am very grateful for that. Very succinctly put.

[BaffledMollusc]

Originally Posted by Hendrixski First off. ODF is an ISO standard, that means it is approved by the International Standards Organization as a medium of communicating documents. There were many companies that decided what the ODF format looks like, and anybody is entitled to use it. MSOOXML was designed by just one company and if you want to use it you have to pay them.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to pay Microsoft in order to use OOXML, or to create importers/exporters for it.

[dasunst3r]

Originally Posted by BaffledMollusc I'm pretty sure you don't have to pay Microsoft in order to use OOXML, or to create importers/exporters for it.

True, but you do have to comply by a 4,000 page specification that depends on some binary, proprietary files. The proprietary files is the thing that makes this standard defective. ISO stands to lose credibility if they were to approve OOXML.

[Steveway]

Originally Posted by BaffledMollusc I'm pretty sure you don't have to pay Microsoft in order to use OOXML, or to create importers/exporters for it.

No of course not, they only own a lot of patents on that.
And of course you can write converters, the documentation is so good it must be easy to write a converter.
6000 pages of technical details describing the format and don't forget things like:
"autoSpaceLikeWord95" or "optimizeForBrowser" or "useWord97LineBreakRules"
They are so easy to implement and convert.
NO! How in hell will you be able to convert such things? They are based on closed methods that only Microsoft can implement.
There are so many bugs in that format, too.
Like:
How many days did the Spanish War last, which started on 2nd May 1808 and ended on the 30th of October 1813?
Well, try to solve that with OOXML. You can't!
This is impossible to calculate, the specification does not support dates before 1900.
Here is a PDF pointing out some flaws that should be corrected:
http://www.standard.no/pronorm-3/dat...0_comments.pdf
And of course: www.noooxml.org

[st33med]

So, if Firefox made a plugin for there next version that decodes MSOOXML, and it is considers illicit by your Windows EULA, and they sued us, and they lost, and they fell...

Hopeful wishing, huh?

[Hendrixski]

Originally Posted by por100pre1 That's only one of the reasons to use ODF. There are many more, for example, ODF is a format for now and the future. You can extract ODF files with any archiver and look the extracted files with text editors (give it a try). Many old Microsoft Office files can't even be opened with newer MS Office versions.

That is a very good point that I probably could have covered better. If in the future, when none of the Office software that we have today is around anymore, and you want to open a .doc file from Office 2003 or earlier you can't because that format is largely a secret. The current MSOOXML standard is published however is not implemented *anywhere*. Even Office 2007 does not implement it according to specification, so if you try to create your own program to open the document you'll find some things won't work. Not only that, but as pointed out by others above, a lot of the specifications rely on proprietary libraries that only Microsoft has knowledge of, nobody in the future will care to remember them.

However if you try to open a .odt file in the post-Office-software future, then you will have no problem because OpenOffice, Koffice, Google Docs, Zoho, and more implement the ODT standard according to specification, and there are no parts of the specification that are secretive.

Thank you for reminding me, and I hope that this post continues to educate people.