My presentation – Open Standards in Education
The day before my presentation I carefully did a check with my laptop and the projector, it worked perfectly. I had the Compiz cube running on Ubuntu with my presentation on one face, a browser opened to the Moodle demo course on another face and on the other two faces I had VNC links to the screens of the EeePC and OLPC XO laptop. It was a totally cool setup and I had tested in place on the projector I would be using and it all worked perfectly.
On Wednesday, an hour before my presentation I sat at the back of the conference room and set up the three laptops again, checked they were all networked together and everything was working just right. Then at the end of the session before me I went to the podium and plugged in the big laptop, just as I had tested the day before. Up on the big screen came a quarter of my laptop screen. I flicked a few settings and ended up with even less. Restarted, I couldn’t get even the laptop screen running at a reasonable resolution. AARRGGHH! Not what you want at the start of a presentation. After a couple of minutes messing with screen settings I had to give up. I copied what I thought was the right presentation onto a USB stick and plugged the EeePC into the projector to run my presentation from that (without all the Compiz niceness). When I was about three slides in I noticed that I wasn’t using the latest version of the presentation! I got through most of the content and the demos, but it was a bit of a presenter’s nightmare. I didn’t even have a screen in front of me (because the EeePC screen is smaller than the projector resolution) so I had to keep looking sideways at the big screen to see where I was. Here are the slides I intended to present in ISO 26300 ODF format
Open-Standards-in-Education.odp
and below as a flash presentation. Tip for anyone who wants to publish presentation slides as flash. Open your presentation in OpenOffice.org then select file-export and find the Macromedia Flash option. It isn’t an open standard format however it has a Free implementation and it is quite well documented.
I hope the technical issues didn’t distract too much from the presentation. Several people did tell me they enjoyed it and I think overall it was OK, I just know the next one will be better.
Day 3 of the OFE conference
Rumours from the BRM are emerging. Many countries have a head of delegation plus a technical expert or two. In order to speak the head of delegation must raise a flag. A large number of heads of delegation are Microsoft employees, with a technical expert for ‘balance’ who isn’t allowed to speak until permitted to do so by their Microsoft minder. Some countries are represented by people who are not even of the expected nationality. My understanding is that the Côte d’Ivoire head of delegation is from Microsoft Sénégal. To be fair there are several IBM employees in the BRM, but Microsoft have a small army including many of the all-important heads of delegation.
The delegates to the BRM don’t have a vote on the final outcome of this debacle. (although they have been meta-voting on proposals about how they should vote on the undiscussed issues in order to produce a text for the big vote.) They will be simply be reporting back to their national bodies on the proceedings of the BRM. The national bodies then get 30 days in which to change their vote.
Microsoft have a tradition of issuing a spoiler press release every time someone else has a major conference. Normally this consists of an announcement of an empty promise, like the annual Lotusphere spoiler and the press release last week which was rubbished by everyone.
In the event Microsoft did get their wish of headlines, but it cost them a bit more than normal, the European Union just fined them €899,000,000. There were representatives of the EU at the conference, the best thing the EU could do to encourage free and fair competition is to stop sending documents in .doc format and start sending .odt files. If they did that then Microsoft would have ODF support in the next service pack.
Expect Microsoft reps to be clocking up some serious air miles in the next few weeks as they fly round the world doing top level schmoozing. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if in the next few weeks they announce some new regional offices with a few thousand jobs in some curious parts of the world.
If you represent a government which wants to make a purchase from Microsoft, now is the time to do it. Of course your country would be better off just telling them where to shove their defective software and monopolistic business practices.
Day 2 of the OFE Conference
Tuesday started bright and early for me, I was in the CICG just after 7am, setting up the ODF showcase. The showcase consisted of an assorted bunch of laptops set out on a table running an assortment of ODF compatible software.
There were a number of good sessions during the day, I only attended a few because I was answering questions at the showcase and perfecting my demo for the Wednesday.
The conference keynote session was held in the evening, interesting fact for Groklaw readers, the keynote was recorded by Sean Daly and will be published soon.
Bob Sutor, Håkon Wium Lie, Andy Updegrove and
Vint Cerf
Interestingly both Andy and Vint declined to use the projector and just spoke from their notes.Vint uses a Mac.
I won’t attempt to summarise their speeches as the whole event was recorded by Sean Daily, Groklaw’s roving reporter. There should be a webcast available in a few days.
The Q&A session after the speeches was most entertaining. I asked a question about whether the panel could think of a situation in any field where duplicate competing standards benefited the consumer. This led on to a question from Graham Taylor, the moderator, who asked directly whether the panel thought there should be both ODF and OOXML.
I had been attempting to discover how long the human body can survive on a diet of canapés and petit fours but I was quite happy to curtail my experiment and go out for a fondue with a bunch of the organisers and attendees.
Day 1 of the OFE Conference
I am not accustomed to turning left when I get on a plane and today was no exception. It is a nice white plane with orange trim, the orange OLPC XO would look right at home here, but as my XO is green and would clash with the plane I took the Asus EeePC out of the bag first (yes airport security were a bit surprised when I took three laptops out of my bag) first thing I notice is that the EeePC is totally at home on this plane and not just because it is Easy easy easy. This plane is the perfect size for me, if Stelios himself had come and measured my femur before deciding the seat positions he could not have made it a more snug fit. Even so, the EeePC still fits comfortably on my lap or on the tray with the screen tilted back so I can see it and the keyboard is forward enough that I can touch type.
I took a taxi to the hotel, which I later discovered was unneccessary. Public transport is free to visitors and there are buses from the airport to the hotels. When you get to the hotel you are given a bus pass which entitles you to free buses and apparently free yellow boats on Lake Geneva.
The OFE conference is being held at the CIGC conference centre, just down the road from the hotel, but before heading over there I took a stroll down to the lake to see the spectacular Jet d’eau, Geneva’s huge water feature. A lady from the Geneva tourist board gave us a little introduction to the area and she told us that Jet d’eau takes the water from the lake accelerates it to 200km/hour and it rises to a height of about 140m. The pumps draw about a megawatt of electricity so it isn’t the most green of displays, but it does look impressive.
The conference I am speaking at is the Open Forum Europe conference on “Standards and the Future of the Internet” but that isn’t the only thing going on here. The ISO/IEC Ballot Resolution Meeting is somewhere upstairs in the building and we met up with a bunch of the BRM delegates for a drinks reception after their day was over. They can’t talk about the details of the meeting, but they did seem to agree that the meeting was being conducted in a civilized and professional manner and Alex Brown the convener was doing a good job in difficult circumstances.
Microsoft’s “big” announcement: blah, blah, blah…
Everyone is simply buzzing with excitement – well O.K. maybe not.
Microsoft have today, made a “big” announcement on interoperability.
Here’s the press release.
Most commentators I have had chance to read so far on the ‘net, having re-read it a couple of times themselves are now getting the gist of it: ‘Nothing new here, nothing to see, just move along…’
The best remark for me so far is the highly damming comment from the EU commission as reported on the BBC’s website.
“The Commission would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability,” it said.
“Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today’s announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.”
Basically, all they have done today is to “announce” what the EU told them “do” to last September. Clearly the EU would like to see actions rather than words…
The timing of this announcement, so soon before the – oh-so-important – BRM in Geneva for their OOXML specification review is rather suspicious to say the least. Don’t let anyone have enough time to read it properly before meeting on Monday (25th Feb) but just in time so they get some nice PR to help them along.
Watch out everyone – this may well just be another part of their Jihad.
The Deprecated “Smoke Screen” of MS Office Open XML (OOXML)
BSI British Standards states:
“… a standard is an agreed, repeatable way of doing something. It is a published document that contains a technical specification or other precise criteria designed to be used consistently as a rule, guideline, or definition. Standards help to make life simpler and to increase the reliability and the effectiveness of many goods and services we use. They are intended to be aspirational – a summary of good and best practice rather than general practice. Standards are created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators of a particular material, product, process or service.”
In an effort to win quick converts to its bid to have Microsoft Office Open XML (MOOXML) accepted as an ISO standard, Microsoft is deprecating parts of its widely-criticized MOOXML. But whatever the new Microsoft OOXML file format with deprecated parts will eventually look like (if such a format ever appears in an actual application), these cosmetic changes don’t really make a difference for Microsoft or the world. Neither Microsoft Office 2007 or the version after that will ever likely produce a standards-compliant format. Besides, OpenDocument has been around now for a few years and is becoming widely supported in industry. However, there has been no meaningful movement from MS towards support. Actions speak louder than words.
What is described in the ECMA OOXML specification is not what is currently implemented in MS Office 2007. The actual specification: says ECMA OOXML is a format that Microsoft Office 2007 can *read*. Note, however, that it is not the format that Microsoft Office 2007 is actually *writing* for example: The Scripts, macros, passwords, Sharepoint tagshooks, DRM and other tie-ins used by MS Office 2007 are not part of the ECMA OOXML specification. If you try encrypting a document in Office 2007, it is no longer even a zip file + XML at that point. There is no editor reference application for Office Open XML, so an application can send Office Open files to Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office can open those files, but any edits are saved in a different format!
Launch Microsoft Office and try to save a file in the format specified by the draft standard at ISO. You can’t. There is no compatibility mode in Microsoft Office that limits input to the feature set specified in the official Microsoft Office Open XML draft ISO standard. Any suggestions of interoperability for anyone wanting to support the Microsoft Office Open XML specification is ridiculous, especially since Microsoft itself won’t allow its customers to write to that format.
Microsoft will NOT change its Office program to become compliant with ECMA . The marketing firms on retainer will simply advertise loud and clear that “Microsoft OOXML is now an ISO standard”, and will blur the differences it sees between MS OOXML, ECMA OOXML and ISO OOXML. This will do the trick for most people, who are not technical experts. But they will eventually get caught again in the confusion. Microsoft is not concerned about what the global community needs, but is acting strictly to protect its monopoly.
Deprecating some controversial issues shows some of the signs of the significant failures of the format. Shuffling chapters around and putting some parts in the annex is not the answer to technical shortcomings. Such aggressive proposals at this time, seem more geared to be for “Talking Points” only rather than the sincere interest in creating a truly open standard.
There are still major problems with the format as now proposed in its deprecated form, from cultural and linguistics adaptability problems, accessibility issues, to the reliance on the MS Windows product, the guidance to what is called the “DEVMODE” structure, increased Patent problems, added harmonisation and interoperability problems, such that third party implementation remains almost impossible. And there are many, many other problems with MOOXML as an ISO standard. And let us not forget the proposed format has never been implemented or tested. Indeed, one wonders if MOOXML can be tested or implemented by any vendor other than Microsoft. MOOXML is still far from achieving acceptance as a true standard.
The fact is that even MS Office 2007 itself has not implemented the initially proposed ECMA format. So it is more than apparent that the new “smoke screen” proposals will never be implemented or even if they can be, not even by Microsoft, let alone third party vendors. It also dooms all the .docx files out there already. Is MS ready to carry out a product recall or ready to develop another converter for this problem? Not likely.
Moving stuff into deprecated status does not ease the burden of implementing DIS 29500. The TRUTH IS that every application will need to support the deprecated features in order to read files with the deprecated features.
The legacy binary formats remain closed. If a file is one which was converted from an older format of Microsoft Office by DIS29500 and allowed to wrap the old file in xml, it remains unreadable for everyone else. OOXML is still a closed spec tied into to many proprietary formats.
ECMA 376 is a bomb disguised as a standard. It redefines functions and components just to retain ties to the undocumented legacy formats. Therefore a number of things that should be fixed by now, thanks to better engineering, and existing ISO standards, are left not only unfixed, but even perpetuated by ECMA376. Why? There is a difference between preserving old files and moving them to a new format with all the same internal bugs. In essence, Microsoft is shoving their own mistakes right down the throat of ECMA/ISO. Microsoft has the audacity to appear to be saying that the standard meets a different need, when all it seems to mean is : “we don’t wanna fix our bugs, because that would force us to use standards, and that is unacceptable to us.” Unfortunately, the new proposals illuminate this unchanged and obstreperous position.
Further more the proposed deprecated changes increases the already dramatic overlap with the established ISO standard for Office Documents. If creates new patent problems in such that now MS reserve the right to sue you if you implement any of the deprecated stuff moved to the annex of the proposed standard. It makes harmonization and interoperability worse than ever because without the code for interpreting the deprecated items, any file with deprecated data will be impossible to read properly. It is obvious, but despite the obviousness, the problem persists.
To the extent that Office 2007 will have to be changed, to the extensive coding work which would need to be done, don’t you think it is just wiser to reject OOXML as a ISO standard because it is not one, and for Microsoft to collaborate on the development of ODF and create one universal file format for everyone.
The Culture of Self Interest is not Open
ABOVE: Comes vs. Microsoft Plaintiff’s Exhibit. See original version here in PDF.
So let us be clear, an ISO standard should benefit everyone and should be developed by consensus for fair competition and through open participation for all to embrace, enhance and share. DIS29500 as now proposed still only serves the commercial interest of one vendor and will always only serve the interest of one vendor – Microsoft. This is the way the OOXML format was designed. It was designed to ferment their monopoly into the sun. Microsoft will make promises to the National Boards that it will fix the OOXML format “later”, but as this standardisation process has shown so far, Microsoft doesn’t keep promises.
Unless wasting time is part of the current marketing tactics used by Microsoft, the most advantageous action would be for that company to accept the standing invitation to collaborate on the development of the established standard, the OpenDocument Format, and to create one universal file format for everyone – the fundamental purpose of standardisation.
This article was originally written by Russell Ossendryver.
