[odf-discuss] Mass may endorse OXML.

[marbux]

On 7/4/07, Lars Noodén <lars at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> > They don't have the money to do a rip out and
> > replace migration.
>
> Ballmer is apparently successful in spreading the belief and point of
> view of 'rip and replace'.  I realize the microsoft effect has spread to
> many facets of life, but basic common sense and basic software
> engineering dictate that things be done in stages.  There's nothing,
> yet, preventing ITD from rolling out OpenOffice parallel with existing
> legacy packages.


Except the interoperability barrier between them and the fact that all of
the relevant existing business process scripts are hooked to Microsoft
Office.

I have difficulty imagining that there are any gullible enough to thing
> that the plug-ins from or sponsored by MS will ever work better with ODF
> than the company's earlier tools worked with HTML.


They're a subterfuge, broken by design. On the same day the Novell-Microsoft
deal was announced, Steve Ballmer said they would never achieve high
fidelity conversions. <
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2050848,00.asp?kc=EWEWEMNL103006EP17A>.
Which
means they can never be used for ODF aps to infiltrate the enterprise market
with its existing Microsoft-bound business processes.

Businesses and politicians often give proposals names with meanings
precisely opposite to real goals. E.g., the U.S. Patriot Act, which purports
to extinguish a number of civil rights including the right of habeas corpus.
The Microsoft deals with Novell and Sun (and now Xandros and Linspire) were
uniformly described as "interoperability deals." But the deals would be more
accurately described as "Anti-interoperability Deals," creating a Sherman
Act antitrust market allocation scheme enforced with incompatible file
formats and Microsoft's 45-patent club now being used to drive OOo users to
StarOffice and proprietary Novell OOo, where Microsoft, Sun, Novell,
Xandros, and Linspire share the revenues through royalty payments to
Microsoft.

See e.g., Palmer v. BRG of Georgia,
Inc.,<http://laws.findlaw.com/us/498/46.html>498
U.S. 46, 50 (1990) (per curiam) ("[s]uch agreements are anticompetitive
regardless of whether the parties split a market within which both do
business or whether they merely reserve one market for one and another for
the other"); *see also* 15 U.S.C.
1:<http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/15/chapters/1/sections/section_1.html>

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or
conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or
with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make
any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to
be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof,
shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if
any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or
by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

The courts have imposed a requirement that restraints of trade thus
prohibited must be "unreasonable." A finding that a Sherman Act restraint of
trade is unreasonable may be "based either (1) on the nature or character of
the contracts, or (2) on surrounding circumstances giving rise to the
inference or presumption that they were intended to restrain trade and
enhance prices." *NCAA v. Board of Regents of Univ. of
Okla.,<http://laws.findlaw.com/us/468/85.html>
* 468 U.S. 85, 103 (1984), *quoting* *National Society of Professional
Engineers v. United States,* 435 U.S. 679, 692 (1978).
Other case law interpreting the Sherman Act prohibits agreements not to
supply a market requirement, in this situation the market requirement of
high fidelity interoperability. Such agreements are regarded as so unformly
anti-competitive that they are among the few restraints of trade that are
unlawful per se, which in the antitrust context means that a court can find
them illegal without hearing any evidence whatsoever on the impact on
competition. And agreements not to supply a market requirement are illegal
regardless of whether one or more of the conspirators has a monopoly.

The Clever Age transformer plug-ins being developed by Clever Age/Microsoft,
Novell, and Sun exist to give the company lawyers something to talk about
when the antitrust charges begin to roll, not to provide high fidelity
interoperability. But Microsoft in particular is going to have some real
problems with justifying its resort to the Clever Age external transformer.
As former Massachusetts Secretary of Administration & Finance Eric Kriss
said:

"… technical people at Microsoft told him it would be "trivial" to add
support for ODF to the new Office 2007. The resistance to doing so came from
the vendor's business side, according to Kriss."

<
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=273815&pageNumber=2>.
The fact that the Foundation developers were able to accomplish the task so
easily using  the MS Word APIs for adding native file support -- once they
had reverse engineered it -- and to do so with high round-trip conversion
fidelity will become important evidence in the antitrust cases, as will the
evidence that Microsoft, Sun, and Novell all attended demonstrations of the
plug-in in action. Indeed, Microsoft's announcement of financial and
technical support for the Clever Age plug-ins came the very next day after
it attended a demonstration of the Foundation plug-in for IDABC.
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