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de lcaza calls OOXML a "Superb Standard"
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 10, 2007 08:08 PM
from the say-it-ain't-so-miguel dept.
from the say-it-ain't-so-miguel dept.
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.'"
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[+]
Technology: GNOME Foundation Helping OOXML? 471 comments
christian.einfeldt writes "According to long-time OpenDocument Fellowship member Russell Ossendryver, it appears that GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza's widely-publicized praise for OOXML as a 'superb standard' is being followed up with on-going support by the GNOME Foundation in 'resolving' the thousands of criticisms leveled against Microsoft's proposed standard. In an open letter in his blog, Ossendryver urges the GNOME Foundation to halt its apparent support for OOXML as a standard and to put its efforts behind enhancing adoption of the genuinely open standard, ODF, which was approved by the world standards bodies as ISO/IEC standard 26300 on 2 May 2006."
[+]
Technology: KDE and KOffice Rebuke OOXML, GNOME Dithers 398 comments
Peter writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"
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Good morning, people. (Score:5, Funny)
ROXXXX-annne (Score:5, Funny)
Is Miguel speaking as a Microsoft officer? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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Riiiiiiiiight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Table like Word95
Only Microsoft has that information. No one else can implement this "superb" standard like MS can.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is good in him! (Score:5, Funny)
-Because, there is good in him. I've felt it. He won't turn us over to the Emperor. I can save him. I can turn him back to the good side. I have to try.
Does this guy have any credibility left? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there an opposite to FUD? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems he hasn't read about how you can "look but not touch" when it comes to the internal data. An expert in the Office format recently proved you could modify the xml in the new Office formats but Office would complain and not load it.
The fact that it's XML seems to only benefit the world in one way, it compresses nicer.
Read his latest comment . . . (Score:5, Informative)
I'll paste it here to make sure those averse to clicking on links can read it too (anonymously even so you don't say I'm karma whoring):
Hello,
On 9/10/07, martin.schlan...@gmail.com wrote:
> On 6 Sep., 07:37, "Miguel de Icaza" wrote:
> > 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. This is at a time when
> > OOXML as a spec is in much better shape than any other spec on that
> > space.
> Michael Meeks didn't seem to think so at FOSDEM 2007.
That is odd. Michael and I have discussed this topic extensively. He certainly would like clarification in various areas and more details in some. But Michael's criticism (or for that matter, the Novell OpenOffice team working with that spec) seems to be incredibly different than the laundry list of issues that pass as technical reviews in sites like Groklaw.
The difference is that the Novell-based criticism is based on actually trying to implement the spec. Not reading the spec for the sake of finding holes that can be used in a political battle.
Finally, Michael sounded incredibly positive after the ECMA meeting last month when all of their technical questions were either answered or added to the batch of things to review. I know you are going to say "The spec is not owned by ECMA", well, currently the working group that will review the ISO comments is at ECMA.
For another view at OOXML look at what Jody Goldberg (no longer a Novell employee) has to say about OOXML and ODF from the perspective of implementing both:
http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/ [gnome.org]
I find it hilarious that the majority (not all) of the criticism for OOXML comes from people that do not have to write any code that interacts with OOXML. Those that know do not seem to mind (except those whose personal business is at risk because Microsoft moved away from a binary format to an
XML format, which I also find hilarious).
> >Will I have to suffer
> > > the shadow of Microsoft patents over Silverlight when using or
> > > developing Moonlight?
> > Not as long as you get/download Moonlight from Novell which will include
> > patent
> > coverage.
> You're saying two things here that really shock me. Please tell me I
> misunderstood.
1) You're saying that people _will_ have patent problems - i.e.
> Moonlight "infringes" MS patents and doesn't work around them. Even
> though Novell promised never to ship code that infringes MS patents -
> but always avoid them one way or another.
First of all, am not aware of such Novell promise to "never ship code that infringes MS patents". You can not make such statement because for one, the patent system is broken. Novell statements are wildly different, they are of the form "we do not believe that we infringe" and am sure they say something along the lines of "we dont plan on infringing, and we plan on removing infringing code". But I am not aware of all the promises Novell has made, and I can not comment on other parts of the organization. If you want an official answer, my personal blog on politics and poor attempts at humor is not the place to get an official answer. Contact Novell public relations for that.
But you might be referring to the policy that we use for Mono, and I will be happy to discuss those with you. The policies are on our FAQ, so you might want to read that before you post in panic again.
Moonlight does not have the same policy that Mono does in terms of us working around to remove infringing c
It's a wonderful spec (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, to put this in perspective: Jim Mason (of Oak Ridge National Laboratory) isn't on one side or the other, but has been doing document-format specifications for a looooong time -- he was, I believe, the founding chair of SC34 and had a hand in the creation of SGML. The dude knows documents, he knows standards, and when he writes
I'm inclined to take his word for it than Miguel's.This is just getting downright indecent. (Score:5, Informative)
OOXML is wholly un-XML-ish.
It doesn't re-use existing ISO and W3C standards, whose behaviors have already been publicly vetted.
Its licensing is still quite unacceptable, especially in its lack of clarity.
Look, Miguel, I know you love MS and all, and I guess I can at least partially tolerate that, but keep the fellatio behind closed doors, OK?
RTFL - Submitter is a Jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
(a) He says OOXML is great not because the specification itself is a work of engineering genius, but because out in the Real World is easier to implement than ODF. That might not be for a good reason (OOXML is similar to existing World formats in structure, and so existing code is easily modified to use it, where ODF requires an entirely new approach and so is far harder to add to existing software), but it's certainly a different story than Miguel just blindly loving the OOXML spec.
(b) The patent protection claim is exactly what it sounds like, except for the fact that there are NO known parents which Moonlight or Mono infringe. It's a simple of matter of, "if something comes up, we won't sue your customers." Those same companies (Microsoft and the MPEGLA group) are still totally free to sue the developers and companies behind FFMPEG, Linux, GNOME, KDE, Apache, X.org, OpenOffice.org, etc. Nothing about the protection Novell offers will increase the risk of those lawsuits - all it does is decrease the risk for people who download from them. It's a nice gesture that some suit-wearing types give a fuck about, and the rest of us are free to ignore just like we ignore the patent minefield for every other project, all of which are guaranteed to be infringing _something_.
(c) The article submitter is a sensationalist jackass.
This is the end of my respect for Miguel (Score:5, Informative)
I have been following the OOXML saga fairly closely; from Rob Weir's blog [robweir.com], to the NO-OOXML site [noooxml.org] (admitedly that is a rather partisan site, but I've found the technical arguments presented there generally to be both verifiable and compelling), and the Standards Blog [consortiuminfo.org], by Andy Updegrove who seems to know his stuff (which is bizarre since he is also a lawyer, but I guess he came from a parallel universe). I've also looked at sections of the spec myself, and I agree with the major technical criticisms; aside from being redundant in that there is already an ISO standard that could -- with well defined extensions -- cover everything Microsoft wants to include (ie, the backwards compatibility stuff), the OOXML document is a poorly worded draft of a 'standard' that is incomplete, inconsistent, and not ready for standardization.
By usual ISO standards (if it hadn't been submitted on the fast-track), it would be at the stage of a 'committee draft', with at least a couple of years of serious effort into working it into something useable. This is the process that ODF, along with most other ISO standards, went though, and if OOXML makes it through without a similar amount of scrutiny, ISO will have egg on their faces.
For Miguel to say it is a 'superb standard' means he either hasn't read it or followed the technical discussions (in which case he deserves the panning he will get for making such a clueless statement), or he really has sold out, in which case he deserves exile.
Re:First things first. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even if it *was* a good standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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Always been a MS Shill (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Always been a MS Shill (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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!
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Re:Miguel's just doing what's best for himself... (Score:5, Funny)
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What damage has he done? (Score:5, Insightful)
-jcr
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