I saw Bob Sutor's post last week titled "There is humor in the OOXML morass." This is where he calls out comments from Nick Tsilas as worthy of "a good laugh." I interpreted Bob's post as an attempt by IBM to deny that they are leading the charge against Open XML.
I like a good laugh too, so I had a look. I looked through the history of Rob Weir's blog, just to see what the chair of the OASIS Technical Committee is doing to drive the agenda for ODF, and to see if there was any sense of balance between the IBM Open XML agenda and the IBM ODF agenda. The only thing "funny" to me here is the revelation of the data behind the (Nick's) claim. So this blog is again an attempt to sort out what IBM is really saying / doing. Confusion reigns supreme.
I took somewhat of an informal look at Rob's blogging history, and it really does illustrate IBM's tactics on Open XML. I didn't use his tagging, I just read them and offered my own thoughts. It is quite clear that at least part of IBM is campaigning against Open XML. I'm not sure why Bob wants to hide from that.
By my count, Rob Weir has 134 blog posts in his archive.
94 of those posts have a central anti-Open XML and/or anti-Microsoft theme.24 of the posts are about ODF and related technology, momentum, OASIS news, etc.Many of the Open XML posts are anti-Open XML posts with significant ODF discussion Others have a focus that is dedicated to PDF, gardening or other things.
Even in the best possible light, we have a 3:1 slant toward opposing Open XML instead of touting ODF. This anti-Open XML stream originates from the co-chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee? Seems like Rob's attention is somewhat diverted. Having read most of the posts, some contradictions are apparent.
Rob Weir on one side
Rob Weir on the other side
Original Post
"Q: So, does IBM then oppose CDF in favor of ODF? (18 Nov 2007)A: No. IBM supports both the development of ODF and CDF and has a leadership role in both working groups. These are two good standards for two different things."
"That is the distortion you get if you look at a standards war through the narrow blinders of commercial interest. But if you look at the full market impact, the simple economics of it, it becomes a lot clearer. What brings greater efficiency, greater fidelity, greater innovation and lower costs? Having two incompatible document format standards? Or having a single harmonized document format standard? Fighting against economics is like fighting against gravity or the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. You are going to lose in the end. The piemen of Erie, and their modern counterparts, are on the wrong side of economics, and history"
"Those who control the exchange format, can control interoperability and turn it on or off like a water faucet to meet their business objectives."
"I personally, as Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF TC, stand ready and willing to sponsor such a harmonization effort in OASIS. So let's start harmonization now, and avoid further divergence."
"Again, in order to support OOXML fully, and provide support for all those legacy documents, we need to divine the behavior of exactly how Word 6.x "inappropriately" placed footnotes. The "Standard" is no help in telling us how to do this. In fact it recommends that we don't even try. However, Microsoft continues to claim that the benefit of OOXML and the reason why it deserves ISO approval is that it is the only format that is 100% backwards compatible with the billions of legacy documents. But how can this be true if the specification merely enumerates compatibility attributes like this without defining them ? Does the specification really specify what it claims to specify?"
"…There are now and will continue to be multiple implementations of ODF and it is legitimate that they have application-defined features. These are stored as name/value pairs in a separate XML file in the ODF archive. I can think of no argument against that. Obviously no interoperability is expected for these vendor specific features, which are for things like application settings like window sizes, zoom factors, print settings, etc. In any case, ODF merely provides a place for applications to store these settings. To blame ODF for any vendor misuse of this feature is like blaming the W3C and HTML for non-standard extensions in Internet Explorer."
I have more to do than criticize Rob Weir, so I'll have to stop here. Between the data and the examples, though, the problem is clear. I really view this IBM-centric position as self-defense against reality. It seems like if the chair of the ODF TC wanted to improve adoption of ODF, then the blog would reflect that.
I wonder if the paranoia here is because of the contrast represented in the uptake of the Compatibility Pack vs. the ODF Translator for Word? The current count is 20 Million for Open XML vs. under 237,000 for the ODF Translator… or perhaps this list: http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/applications.aspx, which is A LOT longer than this one: http://opendocument.xml.org/products. (It's also worth noting that nearly every product mentioned on the OpenDocument site also supports Open XML.)
Facts are facts here. If you strip away the adjectives and adverbs, we can have a discussion about reality, based on data. Step 1, however, is acknowledging that out sound-biting each other won't get us to a situation where we can achieve interoperability with document formats. Effort and cooperation are required. Productive discussion should come to the fore. It's hard to sustain a relevant dialog with the industry when the signals from its constituents are mixed up like this.
I've included my swag at the Rob Weir posts.
Rob Weir Post
Anti OOXML
ODF focus
Anti ISO
Anti PDF
Other
The Case for Harmonization
X
What every engineer knows
Comedy tonight!
The Standards Trolls
You are Here
The Piemen of Erie
Legacy format FUD
Those who forget Santayana...
A Lick Back in Time (stamps)
The Right and Lawful Rood
Bait and Switch
662 resolutions, but only if you can find them
The Myth Of OOXML Adoption
PDF, The Waste Land, and Monica's Blue Dress
Document Format FUD: A Guide for the Perplexed
ODF enters the Semantic Web
Cracks in the Foundation
The biggest media launch of all time?
OpenOffice.org Conference 2007
Office 2007's Confusion Mode
How to Hack ISO
Pseudorandom Thoughts
The OOXML BRM
Disenfranchisement
Defective by Design
Is it safe?
The dog that didn't bark
The to the power of hype
The most recognized tune of all time
Two Feet, No Feathers
An Invitation: ODF Interoperability Workshop
One Year and One Hundred Posts Later...
My comments on the ETRM 4.0 draft
Competition Optional
Stranger than Fiction
The Cookbook
OOXML Fails to Gain Approval in US
The Formula for Failure
A File Format Timeline
The Value of Choice
No Representation Without Specification
Hemidemisemiquavers
Documents for the Long Term
The Legend of the Rat Farmer
Interoperability by Design
The Funnel and the Wedge
So where are all the OOXML documents?
Math markup marked down
Sometimes I need to remind myself
The Case for a Single Document Format: Part III
The first harvest of the season
The ODF Validation Service
The Case for a Single Document Format: Part II
Cannibalism
Pruning Raspberries
ODF Freely Available
The Case for a Single Document Format: Part I
Fast Track. Wrong Direction.
Document Migrations
Compatibility According to Humpty Dumpty
OASIS Symposium and OpenDocument Workshop
Essential and Accidental in Standards
Standards and Enablement
The Anatomy of Interoperability
Washing Machines are not Lamps
The Word Ends on May 1st, 2010
How Standards Bring Consumers Choice
Once More unto the Breach
Here today, gone tomorrow
Merely a flesh wound?
A Barleywine
Declaring Bankruptcy
Introducing ODF 1.1
More Matter with Less Art
Defining Deviancy Down
Microsoft on Standards
Adobe to Standardize PDF
A Review of the Wikipedia Article on ODF
Crocodile Tears
Linus's Law Applied to Standards Review
Document Format Punditry
The Parable of the Solipsistic Standard
Opportunity Knocks
Amusing but Confusing
The Vast Blue-Wing Conspiracy
A Foolish Inconsistency
Calling Captain Kirk
Guillaume Portes Redux
Surviving the Slashdot Effect
The Formats of Excel 2007
Broken Windows and the Ghost of Keynes
How to hire Guillaume Portes
A Brief History of Open
And then there were three...
Got ODF?
A notable achievement
How to Write a Standard (If you Must)
The worm in the apple
Some short notes
Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts
Happy Thanksgiving
Genesis 11:5-9
Two simple questions
Unlocking the Wordhord
Ass-backwards Compatibility
The Chernobyl Design Pattern
Why is OOXML Slow?
The Celerity of Verbosity
A bit about the bit with the bits
When language goes on holiday
A Leap Back
Lingua franca, lingua exposita
In Dublin's Fair City
Nothing is certain but death and ...
ODF: Twenty Patterns of Use
Proposal for an Open Document Developers Kit (ODDK)
Fruits of the Season
Lyon Summary
The OOXML Compatibility Pack
A quick look at the 0.2 ODF Add-in for Word
Happy Labor Day
A Tale of Two Formats
The 96.97 percent problem
Four Shorts
A Demo: Mathematica, MathML and ODF
Math You Can't Use
Follow the Leader
Throwing stones at people in glass houses
Add-in finitum
Cum mortuis in lingua mortua
Site Updates
A game of Zendo
Lost in Translation
Traduttore, Traditore
Hi Peter,
I do have a lot of better things to do, but unfortunately there's this problem of gross factual error being spread about my products / company and Open XML that warrant coorrection.
Add another minute to your total.