Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias In OOXML Choice 193
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here."
No bias at all. (Score:5, Interesting)
The others could support the standard. Or they could eat cake.
What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it? Moreover, what kind of "openness" is it if the single vendor is also the issuer of the standard?
No bias, my gluteus maximus...
It's not really a 'Standard' (Score:5, Informative)
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What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it?
Around here, it's called a Microsoft standard...
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What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it?
Around here, it's called a Microsoft standard...
Sony have a quite a few of those, too. MiniDisc, DAT, ATRAC, Memory Stick, and UMD? So at least 5, off the top of my head.
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Yes, but WHATEVER YOU DO. Do NOT apply that to Google and WebM.
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Yes, but WHATEVER YOU DO. Do NOT apply that to Google and WebM.
More than a single vendor supports WebM [webmproject.org], so I don't see what the problem is. Oh wait -- you own an Apple device, don't you?
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Lots of support for it, but they had no say in it's design. It will be a de facto standard based on the size of Youtube. It remains to be seen how future WebM versions will be developed.
Re:No bias at all. (Score:5, Informative)
You call this [webmproject.org] a "single vendor"?
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Well, you have Microsoft, and you have "Everyone else". In this instance, only "Everyone else" supports it.
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Microsoft supports it too (at least, they promissed they will). It is just that they also support the competition. The only party not supporting WebM is Apple.
Re:No bias at all. (Score:5, Informative)
This just goes to show that open standards are not enough to provide for competition when it comes to software procurement. Microsoft has created a standard (of sorts) and it has even managed to ram it through the ISO. This does not, however, guarantee any actual interoperability. In point of fact there are precisely zero applications that implement the ISO standard. Even Microsoft fails in this regard.
Australia would have been better off to standardize on the old binary file formats. These are at least fairly well understood, and Microsoft is in no hurry to break backwards compatibility on these legacy formats.
WebM, on the other hand, is not really a standard at all. At beast it is a file format that Google hopes will become a de-facto standard. The difference, of course, is that Google does provide source code that will read and write the format. In the end this is clearly more useful in providing true interoperability. A year from now you probably won't be able to buy a device (with a screen anyway) that won't play WebM files, and some will probably record in the format as well. Meanwhile reading Word documents will still be the crapshoot that it is today. If you have the exact same version of the software, with the same fonts, and the same print driver you might (theoretically) get the same print output as the person that created the document.
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In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
US Government denies Halliburton bias in mandating no-bid KBR contracts [wikipedia.org].
black is white (Score:4, Insightful)
OOXML is vendor neutral. Nixon is not a crook. Gorbachev has been removed from his position due to illness. Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman. Diebold voting machines were validated. AIG is a financially sound company. No oil is leaking from BP's well. Kim Jong Il's birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.
Awfully common. I've seen the Big Lie used so often that we've gotten wise to it. I wonder how such whoppers can still work at all. Mostly it just makes the teller look brutishly stupid. The more obvious it is, the stupider they look. So, Australian Govt, are you too stupid to feel embarrassed about this? Are your flunkies and subjects all supposed to pretend to be too stupid to notice, so that you don't punish them?
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Regarding IE (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a major Australian Government department. The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US. If Firefox had some OFFICIAL support for things like Group Policies and MSI package deployment (and I'm not referring to those hacks and repackaged releases you can find at certain places on the net), then maybe there would be an increase in the level of corporate uptake of the browser. As an engineer and not a lowly secretary for example, I'm able to have both Firefox and IE on the same machine. Shit I can have nearly anything on my computer, so long as it's legal of course (thank goodness for open-source). There was a lot of tweaking to get Firefox to accept NTLM authentication which is normally passed through into IE automatically (hence a lot of poking about with the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.* settings in about:config), but it works quite well in the end except for some peculiar pages.
My point is that whoever wrote the summary has probably never worked in the IT department of a company which has to suppose thousands of desktops. There's a reason Active Directory and by extension Group Policy is so useful, and hence why IE is a standard on said desktops, and it ain't about bureaucracy. As for Microsoft's Open Office XML... well, we apparently use a TON of .doc files where a nice PDF would have been more appropriate, so a cultural shift to more open standards was never going to happen quickly anyway.
Re:Regarding IE (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been managing Firefox through Active Directory for a couple of years now with FirefoxADM.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefoxadm/ [sourceforge.net]
It doesn't require a strange build of firefox. I manage proxy settings for the domain with the ADM templates and update Firefox on the clients with standard mozilla.com builds of Firefox. I don't know if it is OFFICIAL enough for you but it has proven effective here in letting Firefox work just as transparently as IE with AD and our proxies.
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Looks nice, but it would never pass muster with those who set IT policy unfortunately. From the looks of it, it doesn't seem to be an officially authorized, Mozilla-endorsed set of templates for which Mozilla themselves can be held responsible if something fucks up (no need to mention the fallacy of believing this means anything in practice of course, but the lawmakers like to know they can shift the blame to someone). I imagine the software probably works quite well, however the 3rd-party nature of it is s
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How do you blame Mozilla? I'm not seeing it. The same is true for Microsoft's software. You have zero warranty for any particular purpose according to the EUL.You are making excuses rather than bringing it up to your superiors in charge of IT policy.
He's not, I've seen the same thing before.
You know you can't usefully blame a software vendor. I know you can't usefully blame a software vendor. But do the senior management know, understand and accept they can't usefully blame a software vendor? 9 times out of 10, the answer's no.
In fact, quite often it's not only "no", it's "no, and they won't accept being told by underlings".
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Like I said to another poster though, whatever these 3rd-party mechanisms are to integrated with Windows Domains better, they're not from Mozilla. Frankly I don't even think IT even cares about such matters. They have a corporate firewall, carefully designed group policies, and so on. IE 7+ has tabs, and with the upcoming switch to Windows 7 will also have a sandbox for IE, which none of the other browsers even have. You'd have to find a reason for those guys to get off their arses and support Firefox to th
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Death-throws of IE6 (Score:3)
You'd have to find a reason for those guys to get off their arses and support Firefox to the level that IE is
As someone who is "one of those guys" I take issue with this. The reason we use IE still is due to legacy programs requiring IE6. Now I hate IE6 more than anyone else in my building. As someone who has spent years developing websites, I know the terror of IE6. But I've had it explained to me that we can support 1 browser with our resources (fortunately the webteam aren't required to follow this policy for the external websites). It can be either IE or Firefox. Due to the fact we must support IE6 only progra
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Holy shit, that goes back to 2004. 7 years. In the time it's taken to get anywhere on it, two major versions of Windows have been released. It's like the Duke Nukem Forever of FireFox bugs.
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Huh? When was NTLM last a problem in a Mozilla browser?
Come on, that's a bit weak.
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The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US.
Yes, but which version of IE is really used ?
IE6, IE7 or IE8 ?
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You pretty much nailed it. The company I work for is exactly the same (in the US).
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Fair point. I was mostly addressing the attitude presented in the summary that the decision to stick with IE was less for technical reasons and more because of Governmental stubbornness. The latter probably does still have something to do with it, but I doubt it's the main reason, and expending the share of IE to any alternative browser shouldn't be
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Re:Regarding IE (Score:5, Insightful)
The real cost will be felt in fifty years, decades after Microsoft has abandoned Word 97-2003 formats, or maybe there's no Microsoft at all, and someone has to reverse engineer what really is a fucking terrible document standard.
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Not a real government (Score:2)
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I do think that their manic ramblings deserve the same global attention as a loud fart in a third-grade classroom in Central Falls.
Fixed.
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This will probably annoy some Americans who will mutter about free speech, but it's not really about that. Instead it's about not giving automatic reverence simply because of a job title. One example of the difference is shown in this Chaser video where the leader of Australia was approached by a man with a fake axe and then a running chain saw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSJ6OR9tx8 [youtube.com]
If some
Firefox = not very good for corporate. (Score:3)
Didn't have an MSI installer or GPO support for years on end,
has bad support for multiple instances (if you are running more than one session on the same machine, firefox won't even launch)
can't administer settings remotely, or lock down settings pages based on user rights.
Firefox is great browser, but it's very difficult to deploy and administer to a large corporate environment.
The recently added MSI installer is a step in the right direction, but there's still some ways for Firefox to go before it can really break into corporate.
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Like ActiveX support? What you say is true, but unfortunately even IE7, IE8 or the upcoming IE9, which will all have the specifications you're listing, aren't getting as much adoption as they should, mostly because business applications still rely on antiquated technologies that only run in IE6.
The biggest hurdle to a move forward are those internal web applications.
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Wrong. I regularly have it running concurrently under two logon sessions on Windows 7 Enterprise x64. I took my local admin privs away from my domain account, so I often login concurrently with a local admin account when I'm doing something that will need me to type my password a lot and an admin cmd prompt isn't sufficient. Thus I frequently have two instances of FF.
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I meant when you're logged on as the same user into more than one session, FF won't start and quits with the "Firefox is already running but isn't responding" warning. It's not uncommon to have an administrator account logged on to the same machine using two different remote desktop sessions.
AGIMO Comments re-opened (Score:2, Informative)
The department/agency responsible has re-opened comment on the COE due to the level of interest the announcement caused. Have your say.
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The more things remain the same (Score:2)
People raised concerns when Australia was voting whether to accept OOXML as a standard. We were ignored, Australia went ahead and voted Yes.
Do you think they are going to care about any protests now that they have mandated using it? No way.
What do we do next? Protesting votes by voting out the politicians doesn't change who runs the govt departments - they just report to different ministers, and keep doing what they are doing. Until we get someone who actually (a) Understands, and (b) Cares, we are going
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You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mark my words, this anti-Bureaucrat nonsense is the start of a class war to pit private employees against public so the rich can drop all our wages without us noticing. You'll be too busy wondering why the public sector employees have it so good to ask why you've got it so bad...
Sure its biased (Score:2, Troll)
The only way it would not be considered biased here on /. is if it selected Linux and Open Office ;) Sheesh.
(Let's see how soon collective /. consciousness mods this down to "troll" so as not to see an opinion different from the general consensus)
Re:Sure its biased (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ok, how do you explain this then [microsoft.com]?
On Office 2007:
The 2007 Office system supports the ECMA-376 Office Open XML Formats standard, which was later submitted to ISO/IEC and was published in late 2008 as the ISO/IEC 29500 Office Open XML Formats standard.
And on Office 2010:
Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
My gut feeling is that this is just idiocy in government and someone without a clue wrote this particular requirement. If Microsoft was behind this then surely they wouldn't have asked for ECMA-376 because their current version of Office can't even write it.
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Mate, it's not biased because of one platform versus another, it's biased because OOXML isn't a widely-supported (or well-supported) standard, and they're picking it on the false premise that it is.
You can say it isn't widely supported, but it is widely used - way more than ODF. And considering that 99% of the files are already in that format and do not require conversion (which would inevitably lead to formatting differences) then you can't say that there are no benefits to choosing that format and that this therefore must be the result of bias.
In my business, I would love to move to a free office suite, but most of our files get sent to other people outside this company and so we have to use the for
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but most of our files get sent to other people outside this company and so we have to use the format that makes it easy to deal with the real world.
So you use pdf then?
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So you use pdf then?
No, this is for collaborative editing purposes.
No other office suite? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm. News flash, even MS Office doesn't fully support said "standard"!
AND IT'S THEIR FUCKING "STANDARD"!
Who is taking the bribes then? (Score:5, Interesting)
So exactly which politician is taking the M$ bribes then? Come on, name and shame time.
Sticking with MSIE is just dependence on an archaic IT infrastructure, and no respect for security, but forcing the use of OOXML just makes no sense other than for vendor lock-in.
Buy any ANSI standard (Score:2)
Open XML is not required (Score:2)
This is hilarious.
They standardise on things which can read and write OOXML, forcing things to be MS Word, then they say "but you can use any document format you want, so long as what produced it can read and write OOXML." This means people will upgrade to the newest Office, and use the slightly different default non-OOXML format, and those docs will float around, and the path of least resistance will be to upgrade everyone, again. They're specifically embracing the MS trap.
This is a bad decision, but it
"The policy is vendor-neutral." (Score:2)
A: You can see their mouths moving.
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96% of desktops use IE6 and thats because most users are blocked from installing their own apps. Upgrades to IE are rare due to this breaking old web code that they rely on. This is less malice or conspiracy and more stagnancy than anything else.
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That and retraining government employees is incredibly difficult.
Ironic seeing as in the DPS (Dreaded Private Sector) workers love free training as we can ask for more money, get a free lunch and a 3-5 day semi-holiday (when was the last training session you had tha
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Ironic seeing as in the DPS (Dreaded Private Sector) workers love free training as we can ask for more money, get a free lunch and a 3-5 day semi-holiday (when was the last training session you had that went past 4 PM).
I've never had a private sector employer send me on a training course, or even reimburse me for one i've sent myself on. And on the note of training sessions going past 4pm, the Novell, VMware and EMC courses I've been on over the last 4 years have all gone past 5pm on several days.
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Either you and the AC are unlucky or I'm quite lucky.
Three out of three IT employers in the last 5 years have sent me on training courses. Especially vendor training that lets the company get special deals. Software dev hous
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Three out of three IT employers in the last 5 years have sent me on training courses
Fat lot of good it did them. They trained you up and then you left shortly afterwards.
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People need training to use firefox?
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Not in IT, well most IT orgs in OZ, the trick is to get in before the training budget is used up. If your own company provides the training it's even easier. I've been on a few training courses that had nothing to do with sys/net admin simply because I asked and we ran the courses ourselves.
Re:I want to believe (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I want to believe (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear ya man. I worked at uni that went from an awesomely diverse mix of mac, pcs, linux & unix desktops to a nearly total microsoft takeover. What orgs like microsoft , dell, oracle & cisco tend to do is force universities to sign exclusivity contracts that stop them from making purchases from competitors. I mean sure cisco stuff is great, but when we want to just stick a 4 port in the photocopier room to make a little room for an extra terminal, it sucks having the dept told we cant spend $80 on a little d-link switch and instead had to blow hundreds on some overpriced cisco thing that was far overspecced for our needs because some prick in a suit and no idea of the implications signed an exclusivity contract. Even worse when our old 3COM router rack was forced to be dismantled and replaced with a hideously expensive cisco thing because the compliance officer took a shit when he discovered the perfectly reliable rack of unix+3com gear.
I felt really bad for the physics + chem guys who where getting denied unix workstations to run software that could ONLY run on unix because of these deals. I know at one point the dept actually threatened to unplug from the network and get a private fibre link to completely dissociate themselves from the university. Watching lawyers INTERNALLY battle is bizzare.
And yeah, we knew it was all over when our beautifully functional Solaris mail servers where replaced with exchange crap , requiring a grand total of 2x solaris servers servicing 10K+ students perfectly with a rack of about 10 exchange servers that NEVER where able to cope with the load. What a waste of good money.
And yeah, I knew my time was up when I was told my beloved Netware servers time was up. Good night sweet prince and hello private industry. Not sure I made the right decision though.
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Re:I want to believe (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sharepoint is a PITA, but I've used some of it's competitors and they're worse.
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Sharepoint solves the wrong problem, but MS marketing makes people trink they want that problem solved. So we get at the worst possible situation, where we get a worse than useless software that is actualy well done (if you don't look to the backend), and your manager wants it. You can't tell him he shouldn't want it, and you can't tell him any competitor is better.
On a related point, have anybody ever seen a sucessfull Exchange deployment?
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Netware's time is up because Novell haven't done shit all with it for 10 years and now they're gone. It's done, for better or worse. OES was a nice try, but it was far too little and far too late.
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OMG the big bad government mandated that all internal documents have to be in a common format that is used by the majority of the corporate world!
LOL.
Every time someone sends me a .docx file at work I'm glad I run Linux with Open Office because the Windows PCs all have Office 2000 so they can't read it.
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So you can read docx files in Open Office? Interesting how everyone here is carrying on that no other office suites support these formats.
It'll read it, for the most part, and may even write it now, but there are formatting issues. It doesn't have certifiable support for the format, so using it would technically be breaking the rules.
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Most offices I've been in run 2003 or higher. Office 2003 supports docx via a compatibility update that was released for it after Office 2007 came out.
The stated reason for the Australian government choosing OOXML over ODF is that they have a whole bunch of Office 2003 and Office XP installs that they don't want to upgrade. I don't think Office XP has .docx support at all.
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If they wanted MS only, why not do a local version of the "no bid contract" and then it would all be fine.
Re:Why should they change? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why should they change? (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't about the particular document creation software. It's about the notion that a clean room reimplementation of the document specs could be done without any knowledge of the originating software. This certainly can be done with ODF, because, though it is hardly perfect, has relatively straightforward specs.
OOXML, on the other hand, by even the most generous description, is a fucking mess. Yes, I'm sure sufficiently competent programmers could probably get the data and a good chunk of the formatting out of a docx file, the spec makes that quite difficult, and there are certainly cases, particularly since Microsoft has yet itself to create any software that in fact implements the ECMA version of OOXML.
No matter what way you cut it, from the basic position that adopting an open document standard should assure the ability to produce software to decode the document, years, even decades into the future, even if the original software is lost or no longer runs on any extant hardware, choosing OOXML over ODF is a sign of either intense stupidity on the part of the Australian government, or more likely that Microsoft and/or its Business Partners have had undue influence on the choosing of an open document standard. From a technical perspective, OOXML is a laughable joke.
Re:Why should they change? (Score:4)
Sorry, meant ISO version, not ECMA version, but they're both crap. OOXML is a bad spec, so bad not even Microsoft implements it the way they have submitted it to any standards body.
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I'm curious. How do you plan to create a clean-room implementation of an interoperable ODF using office suite when ODF doesn't specify things as important as how spreadsheet formulas are specified?
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Very old FUD. Come back later. http://lwn.net/Articles/410387/
And yes it took time because there are different partener involved in the definition and they try to do it right (exactly the opposite of Microsoft OOXML qhich does have formula but with plenty of error found during the ISO process).
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Thanks for admitting i'm right. The person I was responding to said "make a clean-room implementation", meaning they will use *NOTHING* but the specification. plug-fests are hacks in which people use de-facto standards to try and make themselves interoperable.
All you're doing is validating my point. Plug-fests should not be required to be interoperable.
Re:Why should they change? (Score:4, Informative)
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Great, and what part of that is mandated by ODF 1.1? You know, the only ratified standard version? What? You mean it's not? So someone can write an ODF compliant app without using this and using their own formula system? Yep, that's right.
Is OOo even compatible with OpenFormula?
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the patch for that attack is due to be deployed in 3 months
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I agree that in some cases, the
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it seems to want to create confusion between it and the name of the cross-platform product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
To be fair, OpenOffice.org does have the name Office in it so you could say that Microsoft didn't start it!
But seriously folks, I don't think that it is a problem to "imply independence from vendor lock-in" because that is the point of making, publishing and standardising the format after all. They wanted other office products to use their format.
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Does any vendor properly implement the standard? Unless you have 2 vendors that do an honest attempt to implement it then I would say it isn't a viable standard.
The standard is published, anyone can implement, the fact that they choose not to doesn't make it not a standard. FOSS, Open Source, Freedom...all that rhetoric... sounds more like 'it's only a standard if it's developed by our community, not if it's by someone we don't like'
Hmm. The problem is this: you have one standard which is relatively short, re-uses many other well-established standards for which there is existing code that can easily be plugged in, is clearly broken down into different levels of functionality, and for which there are already several pre-existing interoperable implementations for which you can get source code so you can see how it's done.
On the other hand, you have a second standard which extends to several thousand pages, defines its own incompatible ve
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It irks me every time I read OOXML.
The level of dis-ingenuity and sophism represented by the name of that "so-called" standard used to make me almost nauseous with disgust. Maybe I've got hardened to it by now.