[odf-discuss] Gnome, Ecma, and what governments (and FOSS?) should have done

[Jody Goldberg]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 07:22:14PM +0100, Alberto Barrionuevo wrote:
> 
> One thing is that ECMA committee is composed by Microsoft and its backers 
> (Intel, Apple, Novell, etc.)

To characterise Novell as a Microsoft backer is grossly unfair to my
ex-colleagues.  They have contributed a massive body of work to
OO.o, improving and advocating it.

> "OOXML is an open standard with many and competitive
> implementations" (what remains false, because actually only
> MS-Office implements it... and badly in the case of the DIS 29500
> or ECMA-376 versions of the specification).

They can already cite the Apple, and Word-perfect filters for that.
Which I suspect has significantly better name recognition than
Gnumeric.
 
> So Jody joining officially in the name of Gnome of course that is helping to 
> Microsoft to get its ISO. And an ISO for OOXML means severe problems for ODF.

That depends entirely on how we look at it.
1) We are not helping explicitly.  As stated previously we are
   not taking part in the issue resolution.
2) We're not helping implicitly by writing the filters.  There are
   already commercial efforts that probably had more development
   time than the few days Gnumeric has seen.
3) MS was forced to promote it's spec as the MS Office file format.
   It is not being promoted as 'the' format for office suites.  That
   would be problem.  I do not see MOOX as a severe threat to ODF,
   with or without an ISO imprimatur.  MS was forced to acknowledge
   that they serve different goals.

> Different would be that Jody joins via another entity not as important in the 
> free software world as Gnome. I would see no any problem on that approach, 
> since he could get the interoperability information he looks for in the same 
> way. But Microsoft wants/needs to Gnome in the team, not any other.

Not unreasonable.  I chose GNOME because of my strong ties to the
organisation, and because of our community focus on just making
things work for our users.

Unfortunately there is likely to be a small 'not in my backyard'
problem.  What organisation of any importance is going to welcome
taking on the role of community whipping boy of the week ?

    "Hi my name is Jody, and I'd like join your organisation and
    have it sponsor my participation in causing 'severe problems'
    for ODF"

There aren't likely to be many takers.

Actually, there is one set of organisations that could, that could
handle it, and stage a PR coup at the same time.  An ODF
advocacy/support group could sponsor me to join ECMA in the dual
role of clarifying MOOX and acting as a liaison.

Any offers ?