 |
privacy |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
Blog Feed Recent Items 
The nfoCentrale Blog Conclave nfoCentrale Associated Sites |
2005-12-07Second-Guessing Microsoft on ECMA: Shape-Shifting the ODFConsortiuminfo.org Standards Blog: Terms of Microsoft’s Ecma Submission. I don’t want to get into the particulars of a set of speculations based on leaked documents from unidentified sources (by an attorney, no less), but there is a point about the presumption of product-agnostic specifications that I do want to flag. Andy Updegrove’s blog doesn’t allow comments, so I’ll put my observations right here. Andy makes the following observation about the alleged scope of Microsoft’s ECMA Submission of the Office XML Schemas:
On what authority is it claimed that OpenDocument was intended to be that? And how do we move from that intention (which I cannot find anywhere in the charter or reports of the Technical Committee) to its fulfilment by ODF? Furthermore, who says Microsoft should be doing that or even offering up a specification for an open format that meets such a high standard. (And if they did something so foolish and accomplished that, exactly how would that make OpenDocument advocates happy?) I don’t believe that providing the best-possible product-agnostic format was in scope for ODF. I certainly don’t believe that such an intention was realizable, if at all, without there being visible and clear evidence for the concerted effort it would have taken to realize such an intention. I find this supposition to be magical thinking based on a presumed capability that could have emerged from the OpenDocument effort at best as a miraculous coincidence. Andy Updegrove is an attorney and reported to be one for OASIS. I think Andy can easily determine whether or not the charter for the “Open Office XML Format TC” through its many revisions ever placed such a challenge on the committee. It is also useful to know whether and how the Technical Committee reported out that accomplishment and how the achievement was measured. For the technical details, maybe Andy has some expert sources he can cite that will reveal to us how this amazing accomplishment is to be verified. I would like to see that. I haven’t found it in the public record of the development, and I don’t find it in the specification itself. I welcome pointers. I promise to look carefully at any evidence that is offered.
from:
2005-12-06Lining Up Open Formats for Office DocumentsToward Open Format Adoption. The work to develop open office-document formats caught my attention in June, when Microsoft attracted attention to the already-licensed Office 2003 XML Reference Schema licenses and announced that Office “12” would use improved formats as its defaults, with use available under the same licenses. I didn’t give the OASIS OpenDocument 1.0 announcement any of my attention until then. Meanwhile, I developed a comparison table that reflected my best understanding of the relative status of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOX) undertakings. When Sun Microsystems introduced a covenant not to sue over implementations of ODF, I made my first update. Microsoft recently followed with their own version of a covenant and I have updated the table once again. I have also refined my analysis of the ways that the currently-available (and promised future) specifications, schemas, and software implementing the formats (or elements thereof) are impacted by the offered licenses. I then sketch how that provides room to move forward to adoption and support in ways that are valuable to me. That’s all provided in my latest on-line analysis. I am sure that there will be more reason for updates, but perhaps not at such frequent intervals. Here’s the portion of the latest comparison table that covers the Royalty-Free patent and covenant-not-to-sue provisions:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You are navigating Orcmid's Lair. |
template
created 2004-06-17-20:01 -0700 (pdt)
by orcmid |