de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard"

you-bet-it's-not-out-of-context writes "A blogger on KDE Developer's Journal has found an interesting post by Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Mono, in a Google group dedicated to the discussion of his blog entries. Six days ago Miguel stated that 'OOXML is a superb standard and yet, it has been FUDed so badly by its competitors that serious people believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with it.' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), i's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'"

Good morning, people.

The developers had a conference on the Brain Slug Planet. Miguel liked it so much he decided to stay of his own free will.

Secretly Working Where?

Was that before or after he started secretly working at SCO?

Actually, he really did get the gig at MS -- he just told the rest of us otherwise. ;-)

Sounds like he's sold out

I wonder how much Microsoft paid Miguel to say this.

Always been a MS Shill

I wonder how much Microsoft paid Miguel to say this.

You're obviously new here. He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets. Pretty sad, really.

Re:Always been a MS Shill

> He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets.

Not only that, he has yet to encounter a Microsoft technology he didn't like so much he wanted to clone it into the Free Software world and make us all dependent on it.

For years the joke was GNOME was cloned Microsoft internals with a goofy (vaguely MAc inspired treat the user as an idiot motif but without the consistency or polish of the Mac UI to make up for it) UI while KDE was cloned Microsoft UI with goofy Trolltech internals. Then Miguel hell head over heels in love with .NET and was all setto rewrite GNOME using that patenttrap. Thankfully saner heads have prevailed.... so far.

The sooner we all write off Miguel and Novell the better off we will all be. Taking any code from that camp is just inviting a lawsuit. Sooner or later, BOOM!

Re:Always been a MS Shill

I dunno. I figure Miguel is a smart fellow who is managing to do well for himself and support free software simultaneously.
When the time and market is right, Redmond will push a .Net-ified version of MS Office, with obscured assemblies the run fine on Mono.
Project vomit while you may, if it keeps gives Redmond life beyond Vesta [wikipedia.org], then Miguel may be doing us all a little favor.

Re:Always been a MS Shill

> He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets.

Not only that, he has yet to encounter a Microsoft technology he didn't like so much he wanted to clone it into the Free Software world and make us all dependent on it. ... Taking any code from that camp is just inviting a lawsuit. Sooner or later, BOOM!

All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard. It's probably been in the works for quite some time before we ever heard about it, and Microsoft does employ some of the brightest minds in software. The problem is that Microsoft's grubby hands at the wheel of a standard for file format will mean that their "reference implementation" (Office) will embody a set of defacto addenda to the standard, and no one will be able to produce a truly compatible implementation.

That leaves us not far from where we are today.
 

Re:Always been a MS Shill

All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard.

In theory, OOXML is not a bad standard. In implementation, MS has chosen to tie OOXML to Microsoft products as close as possible. Two major criticism brought out by those who have reviewed it are that (in a standard) OOXML must replicate MS idiosyncracies to work (Spreadsheets must replicate an MS Excel date bug for dates function to work properly), and MS has chosen to write subcomponents from scratch using MS technologies instead of already accepted standards (relying on MS Math standards instead of Math XML).

Re:Always been a MS Shill

Quick, someone go tell miguel! Microsoft just released Microsoft Jumping Off a Bridge 1.0! He'd better go copy it before they get too big of a head start.

Re:Sounds like he's sold out

If you are going to slander, then be accurate. Microsoft offered him a job, but Miguel turned it down! I know, I know the people who tried to get him.

I used to be very skeptical of Miguel, but I am tempted to believe he has it right...

Re:First things first.

It's his own blog.

Re:That statement proves it:

Icaza is a thoroughgoing Microsoft shill.

Yeah, starting with an ad hominem makes me want to take your arguments seriously.

Re:That statement proves it:

Isn't it obvious by this point that Microsoft wants to take over Linux and is trying to do this via Novell (SuSE) and threatened patent litigation? Similarly, Mono is an attempt to draw Linux (and even Macs) into trying to compete with the Windows O/S in a game stacked in Microsoft's favour. OOXML is [b]demonstrably[/b] a hideous mess. A person in this position cannot be sincerely mistaken in thinking that it's a good format. They have to be lying.

Re:That statement proves it:

Icaza being a Microsoft shill seams to be the only logical explanation.

Nobody who would create an international standard with the intent that it is actually used by the public would have created a standard covering 6,000 pages. That is just ridiculous.

A "superb" standard would build on existing standards, like using standard XML (which is something you would really expect from something called OpenXML). It wouldn't introduce bugs in its date handling because some application (Excel) not using that standard has the bugs. If you read the comments from the British committee examining that "standard", it is completely riddled with errors big and small.

Now I wouldn't want to decide whether the problems come from some Microsoft evilness, or from this being a complete rush job (if you compare this to how long development of the C standard or C++ standard takes, where every single line is examined again or again), but this "standard" should never, ever have been put on the ISO fast track. Maybe in a few years time, if Microsoft has had time to fix all the problems.

For those who don't know: Usually introducing an ISO standard is a multi-stage process. The standard is suggested, then comments are collected, problems are fixed, again and again, until eventually the whole thing has the quality and the consensus that is required for an international standard and then it goes to the vote. This proposal has gone on the fast track, which should have been reserved for standards that have passed all the early stages. Like if there had been an industry wide consensus where everyone followed the same document, and then someone has the idea to turn this wide consensus into an official standard. It shouldn't be used for something thrown together quickly.

No, I don't think that Icaza could call this a "superb" standard unless he was paid to do it. Not that I blame him; I would do the same thing if you gave me enough money. This post here is my unpaid-for opinion, I'll write another one if anyone comes up with say a five digit number.

Even if it *was* a good standard...

Even if we thought that it was a good standard--you know, something that would not contain ugly hacks like formatLikeWord95, would not need a major international company to brib^W cajole hundreds of Microsoft Certified Gold Partners to join NB's that are members of the ISO to get it passed--how does all that backwards compatibility hack^W support actually work in practice?

Well, let's take a look at one company's deployment of Office 2007 to 25,000 workstations [robweir.com]. Oh, what's that? It's still crap? Figures.

Yes, the information should help people interoperate with Microsoft. But all the parts they're keeping from us are important. They want to control de facto standards and keep all other ISVs at second-tier status without having to make good products.

People would be better off with standards not controlled by any one company. Even if Microsoft were the most benevolent company in the world, there's no excuse for giving another company the power to hold your documents hostage in this day and age. And it's about time that people realized that, especially when Microsoft has intentionally perverted standards like ACPI to harm Linux [slated.org].

The PDF link above is just for proof. Here's a transcript of the PDF so you don't have to view it unless you don't believe me:

Plaintiff's Exhibit 3020
Comes v. Microsoft

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Weslorinen; Ben Falbi
Cc: Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try to make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

MS-PCA 1389717
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

Gates Deposition Exhibit 32
2/28/02

ROXXXX-annne

You don't have to put on that Silverlight...

Is Miguel speaking as a Microsoft officer?

Downloading from Novell comes with a Microsoft patent license?

I'm sorry, Miguel, but this is getting weirder and weirder. You may be a sierra-hotel coder, but I'm not sure that translates into authority to make legal commitments on behalf of Microsoft.

Re:Is Miguel speaking as a Microsoft officer?

It should be added that de Icaza is a Novell VP. So in light of the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement, I think we should all take his opinions with a dose of skepticism. That's not to disparage in any way his work in Free software, of which there are many and great, and I thank him for this. But that does not exonerate him from future badness and/or idiocy.

Really?

"It should be added that de Icaza is a Novell VP"

And yet his blog sounds like it's written by someone very young. Consider this from his answer to a post on his site:

    "You do not have to pay anyone any money. Duh.

      Nobody said so. Either English is not your first language, or your reading
      and comprehension skills are busted.

      Miguel."

Is that what passes for civility and adult behavior at Novell from a VP? I must say I'm a bit surprised.

Re:Novell is distributing concealed patent landmin

Well, you quoted my posts out of context(I provided a *lot* of context).

I did provide a link to the blog containing the quoted posts. Perhaps you could explain what I got wrong regarding this:

Moonlight does not have the same policy that Mono does in terms of us working around to remove infringing code. For one, we do not know what it could be (that is how the patent system works) and two we have agreed and have obtained permission from any patents that might exist in Moonlight to implement it.

This policy makes any software released under it a patent trap.

Re:Novell is distributing concealed patent landmin

Miguel,

I'm not trolling when I ask you: have you read the OOXML proposal or parts of it?

If you have, do you believe the content is a standard? [atis.org] in the light of the comments [noooxml.org] from various organizations?

If you have not read the OOXML proposal, on who's authority do you base your positive comments?

Riiiiiiiiight....

' In the same post he says that to avoid patent problems over Silverlight, when using or developing Mono's implementation (known as Moonlight), it's best to 'get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include patent coverage.'

I'll think about getting it from Novell....as soon as MS hands over the list of "patent violations". IMHO, this is just a try to make the "If it's Novell/MS, it's legal" line of shite more palatable.

If you're going to try to feed us a crap sandwich, do NOT tell us it's filet mignon.

Re:Riiiiiiiiight....

Well, when it comes to .NET, there is a crap ton of copyrighted and patented stuff, and Mono breaks a lot of em, and they know it. They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.

C# the language is an ECMA standard (I beleive?), but from VB.NET to just about anything in .NET beyond console applications, everything is patented, copyrighted, etc (well, anything that could be), and MONO uses tons of it. No need to list em (in opposition to Windows vs Linux kernel, where its far from being as obvious).

Now, if those patents and other intellectual property crap would stand up in court, thats another story altogether, but unlike the Windows vs Linux patent thing, these are much harder to deny.

(note that the above doesn't change that telling people to get it from Novell is indeed FUD because no one will ever get sued for using Moonlight from someone else's than Novell. I'm just stating how this situation is different from the mostly baseless "Linux is stepping on X amount of our patents" deal)

He's right...

...the standard is superb - superbly arrogant!

Nope

Little things like this in the spec make it less than superb:

Table like Word95

Only Microsoft has that information. No one else can implement this "superb" standard like MS can.

Re:Nope

The fact that Microsoft has their legacy blobs all over the OOXML that they write is exactly why I don't like it. They don't seem to want to implement it in an open fashion. They just want to fein like they are being open so that all of the goverment agencies and corporations that are concerned about vendor lock-in are given a warm fuzzy feeling.

So yeah, the standard is shit. Nobody can implement it the way that the creator can, by the creator's very design. It is defective by design, as the nutty FSF people like to say.

Re:Nope

I've developed in both formats, and ODF uses consistent naming conventions and builds upon existing standards whereas OOXML is exceedingly inconsistent (google: "sz" node) and it comes with a lot of new standards.

The implications of this are that OOXML is considerably more expensive to implement because there aren't a lot of components to choose from (eg, compare the number of SVG serializers to DrawingML serializers). Building upon existing standards is a very important part of a good standard, I think (and so do the ISO)

Don't take my word for it though, both files are ZIPs of XML* so google for some files and see which one makes sense to you :)

[*] although it's recently been discovered that OOXML refers to OLE objects which are undocumented in OOXML and in Office '07 these are stored as binaries :( ODF and OOo have their own problems of course, but nothing complex like this.

Re:Nope

That's clever. Did you miss the part of the standard where that sort of thing is required for backwards compatibility? Apparently only Microsoft
cares about that sort of thing, so that's why it's in the damn standard.

That's the completely wrong way to specify it. A "standard" that says things like "tables like Word 95" is worthless, just what's that supposed to mean anyway? If you want to standarize a method of brewing coffee you don't say things like "The way Bill Gates makes it", you specify the exact procedure to be followed. If the behavior can't be fully determined based on the standard, then it's crap.

Things like that shouldn't be in the standard in the first place. If you're opening a Word95 document and saving in another, then to preserve the formatting you don't say it's "like in Word95", you specify the list of attributes to achieve the same effect: padding, alignment, margins, etc.

Re:Nope

A "standard" that says things like "tables like Word 95" is worthless, just what's that supposed to mean anyway?

I have been wondering why the standard is so mind-boggingly long. Why can't it just say "Do OOXML the way Microsoft does it" and be done with it? Seems such a waste to write 6,000 pages (or whatever) when you can say the same thing in seven words.

Re:Nope

And why do you care if they are there? Do you figure the evil Microsoft will have some tricksies up their sleeves because of these tags? What part of the phrase "ignore them if you don't care about backwards compatibility" do you fail to grok?

If a major Office competitor implemented OOXML but ignored the backwards compatibility parts, Microsoft would be sure to use those when saving OOXML files in MSOffice just to make sure they don't look right in the competitor's office suite. Which part of that did you fail to grok?

Re:Nope

The problem is that OOXML defines a bunch of tags for 'backwards compatibility', but doesn't define what they do. To say that 'ODF fanboys and FSF-sponsored trolls don't care about that sort of thing' is insulting. Lots of people, including FSF members, have spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to reverse-engineer Microsoft binary formats. A document specifying this behavior would be universally welcomed, by both the FSF and 'ODF fanboys', because it would then be possible to write high-fidelity converters between old MS formats and ODF (or from MS binary formats to a non-legacy subset of OOXML, for that matter).

Having a bunch of tags with no definition as to what they do is not an ingredient of a good standard. If you wanted to define a bunch of custom tags, it could just as easily be done as an extension to ODF, which, if it was well-defined, ISO and the open source community would surely have no problem with. Having a international standard where significant parts of it are 'depreciated', is itself rather bizarre. If the backwards-compatibility binary-format tags are depreciated, why include them in the international standard?

Re:Nope

But if it can be ignored, will the document lay out the same in two different products? If layout is different, why have you gained?

Re:Nope

(it is an optional tag that can be ignored).

Not if Microsoft keeps using it you can't.

Sure, you can ignore it if it comes up in a document, but if a user with little care or knowledge about such issues loads a document up that uses such a tag in (for example) OOo and their table doesn't look like it did in Word, they're probably going to think that OOo is at fault, and may make a decision to not use the alternative software in the future (or may go around telling everyone they know that said software sucks).

If Microsoft, the developer of the main product which generates these data files continues to use these tags, they become impossible to ignore without introducing rendering issues which will be sufficient to annoy potential users of alternative software.

Yes, purportedly these tags are only supposed to be used by Microsoft when converting documents in older Word formats -- but how many hundreds of millions of such documents exist out there? Quite a few, which seems to guarantee that these "ignorable" tags are going to occur quite frequently, and will impose sufficient differences on document rendering if they are ignored. So unless these optional tags are fully documented, why should anyone outside of Microsoft want to adopt this standard?

Standards aren't often perfect the first time around, but someone at Microsoft should have realized this, and should have prevented themselves from trying to fast-track this standard. The biggest problem is that there is the appearance that Microsoft was trying to pull a fast-one on the international standardization community with an incomplete, and highly imperfect standard that they wanted to rush to fruition for purely competitive (and not technical) reasons. With time and revision, OOXML may indeed be a fine standard, but as it stood at the point where they tried to ram it through the ISO, it had (and has) serious flaws.

In one of your other posts to this thread, you mention:

Am personally proud that Jody and Michael made Microsoft add ~650 pages or so to the spec that documented the formulas (one of the things we struggled a lot with in the Gnumeric days).

Here you admit that you've already seen first hand how incomplete standards can affect Open Source (and really any third-party) development. You had a problem with the lack of documentation, and pressured MS for more details to get your software working correctly. So why is it that you have an issue when others want to pressure MS into either rectifying other areas lacking proper documentation, or removing them from the standard altogether, in areas that matter to them?

Yaz.

Re:Nope

Yaz, you wrote an essay and ignored the part where I said that ECMA was going to document that for the next batch of issues to resolve in the spec.

I didn't ignore it at all. I'm glad this is something that the EMCA is eventually going to resolve. My comment is solely as to why it's important that it is documented, and why your statement that "it's optional" is hardly a solution. It may be optional, but it's important to implement to give users the expected level of interoperability, and this is why many people have expressed concerns about the standard as Microsoft has originally submitted it.

So they know about the issue, they will write the docs for it, and integrate it into the doc.

So basically "Your bug is being going to be fixed". Next issue.

I think you and I can agree that the standardization organizations are doing a good job of ensuring that the standard is itself up-to-standard. But I can't subscribe to your opinion that nobody has any right to complain about the standard as it was submitted by Microsoft, just because it will (hopefully) eventually be fixed. I can appreciate that these faults will be fixed, but that doesn't mean that I (or anyone else) have no right to comment on its current state.

In addition to the above I predict it does not matter, because its a legacy setting and they are themselves trying to not drag documents that contain that.

So they say, and for now, but I've been a Microsoft watcher for more than long enough to say that I'll believe it when I see it. And "trying not to" doesn't mean "won't" -- I'd be significantly happier if Microsoft were to say "we won't use these legacy tags ever", and then kept their word (forever -- in which case they would be unnecessary to have in the standard, as I imagine nobody else is going to need to use them if MS itself isn't going to use them).

Yaz.

Appeal to secret knowlege

Well, you ignored the part where I mentioned that this was being taken care of.

1. You mentioned that "things" were being taken care of; you did not (in any of your posts here, and I read them all) specify that the scoping was one of them
2. You're pulling the classical "I have secret knowledge that proves that I'm right" rhetorical trick. Point me to the revised spec and we can talk.
3. You've practically proven, all by yourself, that DIS-29500 isn't at the level of committee draft, much less final ISO submission. One of the basic responsibilities of a technical committee (see, for instance, JEDEC JM-21L) is clearly defining the requirements for conformance and clearing legal rights for those requirements. According to you, that hasn't been done and here we are at the ISO final vote stage. ECMA-376 needs to go back to committee until it's actually ready for prime time.

Now you argue about optional, so let me clarify, I meant OOXML "optional" which has a very precise term in the spec. Since we are talking about OOXML I expected you to be familiar with it, I guess you were not familiar with it, but only with the handful of bullet points circulating the intertubes.

As a standards maven, I've read the controlling portions (I'm not planning to implement it, so any controlling language hidden in footnotes missed me. As they should.) I'll point out that "optional" has a predefined meaning in standards literature, much as "scope," "shall," "may," and other words that are no more subject to local redefinition than any other legal term. Apparently, the drafters of ECMA-376 had never done any standards work before (the "Scope" section alone makes that very clear) and ECMA made no effort to correct even the most basic flaws.

The problems with technical details I'll leave to others.

Again, your "most of that has already been fixed by ECMA" is an indictment, not an excuse.