[odf-discuss] strategy for ODF migration (was: A story of TIFF)

[Daniel Carrera]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 14:08 -0800, marbux wrote:
> Right now, a huge barrier for enterprises migrating to ODF apps is
> posed by the necessity of doing a complete rip and replace of all
> relevant software overnight. That doesn't allow phased migration at a
> sane pace. But if you have full fidelity, you can migrate at your own
> pace, e.g., migrating your trainers first, then migrating other people
> one at a time as the trainers and the people to be migrated have
> overlapping time in their schedules.

Yes, I understand the benefits of a phased migration. I understand that
it can be the difference between migrating or not migrating at all. But
what are you migrating to? You are migrating to daVinci+MS Office,
making ODF files that are just as tied to MS Office as they were before
(_more_ tied actually, as long as daVinci's ODF interop is less than
OOo's 85%).

> The *only* market requirement specifically identified by the Ecma 376
> draft standard that can not already be fulfilled by ODF is the
> migration of Office legacy binary formats to Ecma 376 itself.

I understand that point too. If we could show that ODF can represent
everything Ecma 376 can, then there is no need for Ecma 376. But I am
not confident that using (legal) extensions of ODF and putting binary
dark objects in them, proves this.

Consider a fictitious example (a thought experiment): Ogg is a really
cool audio format. Suppose that the Xiph foundadation submits it to ISO
to become the ISO standard for digital audio. You can insert digital
audio in ODF by invoking the same "dark object" method that the plugin
does. Just add a new namespace, create a tag, and dump the data in it.
You can store it in any binary form you like. Ogg, MP3, or heck, just
raw data. And this is a valid ODF file in exactly the same way that the
Foundation's files are. Of course, ODF apps won't know what to do with
that data, but you can certainly make a plugin for any audio player that
reads the data successfully from that ODF file with 100% fidelity. 

Should this prove that Ogg is not needed? I think we can agree that it
doesn't. For this reason, I don't expect any argument based on section
1.5 extensions of ODF to carry much weight.


To be clear, no one disputes the points you listed:

* point 1: There is a reasonable market requirement for full fidelity
during migrations from Microsoft formats to ODF.
* point 2: There is a reasonable market requirement for full fidelity
round-tripping after migrations from Microsoft formats to ODF.

Your points 3 and 4 are about the converse direction ("interop subset").
For the sake of sanity I will only discuss the MSO->ODF direction.

The premises that there is a market requirement for full fidelity
MSO->ODF is not in question. It is whether the proposed solution
achieves the desired goals:

1. Reducing vendor lock-in through a migration to ODF.
2. Proving to ISO that Ecma 376 is not needed.

I have argued that these goals are not achieved by the plugin ODF
+extensions solution.

> Microsoft's resistance to generating conformant
> ODF is temporary, and an even shorter term phenomenon if it loses its
> bid for Ecma 376 to be adopted as an ISO standard. Just as with its
> previous efforts to avoid producing conformant HTML, if ODF becomes
> widely adopted, Microsoft will eventually be forced to support it.

HTML is a relevant example. Remember how MS extended HTML? They added
their own tags, and made IE-HTML. Today Firefox, Konqueror, Safari,
Opera and every other browser has to struggle displaying many websites
because they are "optimized" for IE. The situation has improved, it used
to be really bad. It took an enormous amount of effort to deal with
Microsoft's extensions to HTML.

I worry that something similar might happen with ODF. I don't want to
see MS-ODF. I don't want to see ODF files tied to MS Office the way many
web pages are tied to IE. And I fear that the Foundation plugin is,
effectively, MS-ODF.

Best wishes,
Daniel.
-- 
May you live in interesting times.
May people in high places take notice of you.
May all your wishes come true.
  -- Chinese curse.