[odf-discuss] UOF on slashdot (was: Re: Microsoft playing footsie with China?)

[marbux]

Lars, if you run across any good harmonization/convergence statements
involving ODF, I've started collecting them. I append what I have so
far.

I am sensing that the need for convergence/harmonization is likely to
develop as the strongest argument for rejection of Ecma 376, so
showing that doing so is recognized by the big players as feasible,
desirable, or inevitable may come in very handy. And requests from the
user community like the PEGSCO report quoted below demonstrate the
existence of a market requirement for harmonization/convergence.

Best regards,

Marbux

================


Alan Yates of Microsoft during the Massachusetts file format uproar:

"I would say, in the future, some time, you know, at some point, there
will be convergence. Convergence does happen over a period of time. Or
there will be incorporation, there will be subsetting, supersetting.
You know, the wireless standard, the A version merged into the B
version, merged into the G version over a period of time to give
better performance and functionality over a period of time.
...

"So, good news, I think, on that front is that this problem will be
solved in time. It is not an easy, sort of snap-your-fingers sort of
problem."

<http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051222164719482>


========

Tim Bray of Sun (one of the co-chair developers of XML 1.0, an
recognized luminary):

"The ideal outcome would be a common shared office-XML dialect for the
basics—and it should be ODF (or a subset), since that's been designed
and debugged—then another extended vocabulary to support Microsoft
features , whether they're cool new whizzy features or mouldy old
legacy features (XML Namespaces are designed to support exactly this
kind of thing). That way, if you stayed with the basic stuff you'd
never need to worry about software lock-in; the difference between
portable and proprietary would be crystal-clear. And, for the basic
stuff that everybody uses, there'd be only one set of tags.

"This outcome is technically feasible. Who could possibly be against it?"

<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/11/27/Office-XML>

========

IBM VP Bob Sutor, May, 2007:

"I believe we need convergence of document standards. I would welcome
Microsoft's active and honest participation in further advancing the
OpenDocument Format by adding its requirements and expertise. It's a
crying shame that they have been absent from this effort, and we
invite them to take their product-specific knowledge embodied in their
binary and OOXML (OpenXML) formats, and make them work more generally
using modern, well-designed XML for the benefit of all. There's hope
that the China-developed UOF will converge with ODF, and I would
welcome the same comrades-in-arms common effort to bring ODF and OOXML
together. Remember, ODF is a community based global standards effort."

<http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1616>

========

Pan-European e-Government Services Committee, PEGCSO Conclusions and
Recommendations on Open Document Exchange Formats (6 December 2006),
pg. 6/6.

"Industry, industry consortia and international standardisation bodies
are invited:

"6.6.   To work together towards one international open document
standard, acceptable to all, for revisable and non-revisable documents
respectively;
...

"6.8. To avoid invalidating the purpose of open document exchange and
storage formats by offering extensions to the relevant international
standards as default formats."

<http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3439/5585#PEGCSO>.(Note that
6.8 is a somewhat oblique way of asking that folks not embrace,
extend, and thereby extinguish standards. That is not an issue for
Microsoft this time around because it produced a crippled subset of
its new XML formats as its draft ISO standard offering. It was shrunk,
not extended. Honey, I Shrunk the File Formats! Now if they'd just add
a feature to Office allowing people to write to the cripplied formats
instead of offering import only ... :-)