Pass the Source

John,

There is a little bit more to the Danish announcement than you mentioned. To quote the IDG report in the CIO magazine:

“The Danish Parliament has decided on a set of rules to which open document formats must adhere if they are to be used by state authorities after April 1, 2011, Denmark’s Liberal Party said on Friday.

The agreement isn’t about restricting users to one office suite, or choosing between the ODF (OpenDocument Format) or OOXML (Office Open XML) standards. Rather, the Danish Parliament has agreed on the criteria that open document formats must meet, the Liberal Party said.

Approved formats must be recognized by an internationally known standards body such as the International Organization for Standardization, and they must be fully documented. It must be possible to implement the format on different computing platforms.

A panel of experts will now start working on list of which formats actually meet the criteria, and can approved for use by state authorities, according to the statement.

The Danes are pushing hard for the use of open standards, and the agreement will help solidify it as one of the world leaders in the field, the Liberal Party said.”

http://www.cio.com/article/527258/Danish_Parliament_Sets_Rules_for_Open_Document_Formats

For an actual translation of the report see:http://notes2self.net/archive/2010/01/29/an-update-on-document-formats-in-denmark.aspx

Kind Regards,
Mark Rees

Mark,

Thank you for adding that background. On the desktop, the challenge is ensuring round-trip interoperability between heterogeneous office productivity tools and strict adherence to Open Standards is required for this. We must be able to collaborate and exchange electronic documents with one another, regardless of the software we use. However, it’s not enough to make a generalised commitment to open standards; we have to be confident that specific standards will work everywhere. Adopting ODF as a lingua franca will let us achieve this.

JR

Hello Mark,

I think you’ll find that OOXML is not really a contender. It’s merely a “theoretical” open standard. So far as I know, even though it was, to put it politely, forced through the ISO fast track process (despite not being implementable), it is my understanding that there is not a single reference implementations – at least not one capable of producing reasonably complex documents which are fully compliant.

Not even Microsoft, who created the “standard” (and destroyed the credibility of ISO in the process) to look just like their DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats, have succeeded in implementing it.

So, technically, ODF is the only viable open standard (and, let’s face it, the world only needs and *wants* one), and therefore I would submit that your clarification, though perhaps not inaccurate, is quite academic.

Dave

It’s interesting to note that the Norwegian gov’t have published a paper more or less saying exactly what I did above. OOXML is not a useful “standard”.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/technology/ooxml-not-suitable-for-norwegian-government-says-study

Mark – as an apparently loyal Microsoft employee, I imagine you must get very tired of having to mince words. I don’t envy you. I wouldn’t have the constitution to do what you do – I’d spend too much time feeling sick to my stomach.

Dave

Dave,

Thank you for your concern. I am an employee of Microsoft in New Zealand, but I do not suffer from the nausea you mentioned.

I am fortunate enough to spend my day helping our many customers and partners, deploy, and derive value from our software.

Regarding the Norwegian example you mentioned, you might have noticed that the article stated that the report was written by an independent consultancy (although sponsored by the Norwegian Government) and designed to stimulate debate. As a New Zealander, I welcome thoughtful debate.

Regards,
Mark
–
Mark Rees
National Technology Officer
markrees@microsoft.com

Thanks for stating your affiliation, Mark. To return the favour, I am founder and co-director of a business, called Egressive, that provides free and open source (note the “free” part) software solutions for many businesses and organisations, and helps ween them off of proprietary systems which tend to focus on proprietary standards like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office when they develop an understanding of the liability that committing their own valuable data in the form of closed, proprietary standards (aka “lock-in”) owned by independent (and often customer-hostile) vendors creates.

I note that you don’t contradict my statement about the suitability of OOXML or its status as an “open standard” without a single significant working reference implementation.

Even Microsoft, who designed the so-called OOXML standard, has not successfully implemented OOXML except for trivial documents. It’s quite telling that MS now support ODF instead. Even more telling that MS’s support of ODF is very poorly realised (or is that on purpose?). It is certainly not good enough to allow practical interoperability between one of the many ODF-supporting free and open source applications and MS Office.

So, you state that you welcome “thoughtful debate”… but I’m not sure on which point you’d suggest debate…

Dave