sab39 ... A rant about blind spots

1/31/2007

This post by Miguel articulates very well something that I've been hoping for a long time that someone would say in the debate regarding ODF and Microsoft's OOXML format: that "ODF good, OOXML bad" is a GROSS oversimplification of the situation. Mainly because ever since it's release, ODF has been content to rest entirely on its laurels as the "Open" and "ISO Standard" office file format specification - completely ignoring the fact that on a technical level it just plain SUCKS.

Isn't the Open Source movement supposed to be all about making software that doesn't suck? Isn't Free Software supposed to be about the freedom to FIX problems? Aren't we supposed to be a meritocracy?

A spreadsheet format "standard" that doesn't define formulas? What the hell? How ANYONE with a straight face can claim that the problem of standardizing office file formats is "solved" by ODF and all we need to do is get people to use it, is beyond me. Maybe it's the best starting point - but where's the group working to fill in the glaring holes and get that standardized too? Free Software interprets sucky standards and glaring holes in standards as damage and routes around them... by forming other groups to specify the behavior, or by moving to other standards that don't suck. See WHATWG. See CORBA on the desktop. See XML Schema. Perhaps OOXML is that better standard, perhaps it isn't, but I don't see anyone on the ODF side even admitting there's a problem to be solved [UPDATE: Apparently there is such a group, called OpenFormula, working to fix that particular hole. That's great and I wish them every success, but it's mostly irrelevant to my main point. See the comments for more...] As long as that attitude persists, OOXML has a better chance of being that better standard than ODF does of evolving into it.

We take pride in the fact that our licenses will never discriminate against any person or organization or field of endeavor. Any licence that passes the DFSG or OSD is GUARANTEED to ensure that the software may be equally used by an evangelical Christian group or an abortion clinic or a gay rights group or a pornographer, by the United States government or by islamist extremists, by the EFF or by patent lawyers, by pacifists or by the military, by spammers or by antispam organizations... I could keep going, but you get the idea. But this isn't just a minor point, this is the CORNERSTONE of what Free Software is all about. Freedom means nondiscrimination. Including against people we as the developers of the software find distasteful.

So why is it that we make a point to treat pornographers, extremists, spammers, and even evangelicals ( ;) ) with fairness and equality, but the moment Microsoft is mentioned we forget all about that freedom and fairness and meritocracy, and immediately object vociferously and almost unanimously, EVEN when what they're doing is RIGHT?

Why is it that Groklaw, the site that earned a reputation for fairness and objectivity by making a point to give SCO's claims every possible benefit of the doubt and patiently examine every one of their claims including any time there was the ghost of a chance they might have some semblence of a real point - why is it that Groklaw had a fit when someone wanted to submit a Microsoft license to the OSI for evaluation, when by all accounts the license in question DOES pass the OSD and DFSG?

Why is it that Groklaw reported the MS-Novell deal with the headline NOVELL SELLS OUT - long before there was ANY chance for ANYONE to have examined the nature of the deal to know whether it was actually problematic or not? Why are otherwise reasonable people like Bruce Perens claiming that Novell is the next SCO, when it's completely obvious that Novell's lawyers simply made a mistake and are working with a perhaps intransigent group of MS lawyers to figure out a way to fix the problems? Even one of MS's lawyers has come out and said this outright.

So why are we vilifying Novell and treating them as outcasts, rather than recognizing that they, like IBM with patent lawsuits, like Sun until very recently with their Java licensing, like Canonical with binary drivers, and even I'm sure like Red Hat although I can't think of a blatant recent example - are a company that does a lot of good things but have made a bad decision?

And why are we treating Microsoft as the embodiment of pure evil rather than a company that does a lot of bad things but in the case of OOXML is actually doing the right thing - coming up with a file format that is by all accounts a vast IMPROVEMENT over ODF, is freely licensed including patents, independently implementable, doesn't have any HUGE GLARING HOLES in it, is actually documented and specified in detail, and being submitted to ISO for standardization.

Yes, there are problems with OOXML. It's stupid to standardize options for backward compatibility with old proprietary software when you've gone to all this trouble to invent an extensible format with all sorts of ways to embed extra proprietary information. Using that extensibility to support the legacy crap should be a no-brainer, and I hope this will be fixed in the ISO comments period. I'm sure there are other issues too. Maybe lots of them. But at least it's (almost) fully specified, open, and freely implementable - of which ODF manages only two out of three.

If you want a child to learn good behavior, it isn't enough to point out and punish the bad behaviors. You have to point out and reward the good ones too. It's well established that rewarding the good behaviors has a vastly greater effect, in fact. And punishing the GOOD behaviors is OBVIOUSLY counterproductive. Microsoft obviously isn't going away any time soon; to ignore them or think we can make them irrelevant is delusional. If we ever want them to be a good citizen, if we ever hope for them to become a productive MEMBER of the Free Software community, we should be pointing out the - perhaps small and rare - good things they do and making a HUGE deal about them.

I'd bet quite a large sum of money that in ten years time Microsoft will be the largest producer of Free Software in the world; that Windows and Office will both be released under Free, Open Source, DFSG-compatible licenses by that time. We can bring that day about sooner by working with the elements within Microsoft that are pulling in the same direction as us, or we can delay it by treating Microsoft as the enemy which only strengthens the elements within Microsoft that think of US that way. I know which future I'd rather see.

As a footnote: Microsoft just released the ASP.NET AJAX client libraries under a DFSG compliant license. I don't know if that will be the first package in Debian main with Microsoft as the upstream, but I am completely sure it won't be the last...

OpenFormula

By Boudewijn at 2007/01/31 10:56

The group that is adding formula standardisation is called OpenFormula, headed by David Wheeler and supported by KOffice, OO, Gnumeric and others. Lots of good work is being done. Of which you apparently don't know anything: please educate yourself, involve yourself and only then decide whether you should have written this vastly uninformed rant.

Fantastic!

By Stuart at 2007/01/31 11:11

That's great, and I'll update my post accordingly. But you're missing the fact that it doesn't change my point. The fact that I was unaware of efforts to improve ODF just means that ODF, at some point in the future, may not suck quite as badly as I thought. It doesn't mean that Microsoft's competing approach suddenly becomes less valuable.

Remember that one of the biggest things we've always wanted Microsoft to do was to document their proprietary file formats. They've gone one better - stopped USING proprietary formats, moved to an open format, and documented THAT.

We may prefer that they'd used ODF - personally I still don't see THAT much even as a no-brainer, since the holes in ODF still exist to date, so that would have required releasing Office 2007 supporting an as-yet unstandardized formula specification - but what they DID do is still good. And should be recognized as such.

Do you have any issue with the actual core point I'm trying to make, as opposed to the peripheral example facts that I drew on to make it?

Bigger picture

By Mark Wielaard (Email) at 2007/01/31 11:50

You seem to be missing the bigger picture:

http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormula
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument_v1%2e2_Action_Items

And when MS releases standard software under free software licenses then we should applaud them. But I don't really see your point here. MS is still using a format that doesn't have a free software implementation and which seems unimplementable from the spec. While ODF is en open format which is used by multiple free software projects for interoperability.

OOXML holes

By James Stansell at 2007/01/31 11:57

To the extent that so much of the OOXML spec consists of improperly documented tags of the form actLikeWord6Margin (yes, I just made that one up) the specification isn't as usable as you've made it out to be.

Hard to leave the past behind when it's not over yet

By Dalibor Topic (Email) at 2007/01/31 12:29

For people working inside Microsoft, I'm sure a lot of the stuff one sees looks like major progress (OOXML, XPS, port25, WIX, AJAX.NET, etc.). From outside, it still looks like baby steps that are routinely overshadowed by outbursts of zealotry from Microsoft's management, like the 'balance sheet liability' threat last year to sue Linux users if they don't run SUSE.

For a company like Microsoft that sells Linux now, and relies on Free Software written by FSF and other independent developers to generate demand and revenue for their Windows Vista Enterprise & Ultimate offerings, such behavior puts the good efforts within Microsoft in a very bad light. The Trojan horse association has been haunting Mono for a long time, for example.

The question how to deal with Microsoft is an interesting one. I think the approach taken so far has been a good one, given that Microsoft has not left its past behind it. Once they do that, life will be much more pleasant for everyone. :)

Responses

By Stuart at 2007/01/31 13:02

Mark,
Microsoft is sponsoring at least one and possibly two Free Software implementations of OOXML: Through the deal with Novell they are contributing money and resources towards OpenOffice support for OOXML, and they are working on a Free project of their own - either on SourceForge or their CodePlex thing, I forget which - to implement ODF support for Office which I *think* I remember reading is in the form of a converter between the two formats.

As far as "unimplementable from the spec", keep reading:

James,
Yes, I addressed in the original post the fact that the actLikeWord6Margin kinda tags are stupid proprietary legacy stuff which I'd expect and hope to be fixed in the 6 month ISO review period: the OOXML format is extensible and has support for custom information to be embedded in a standardized way. And it seems like a no-brainer, as I said, that that facility should be used for the legacy stuff, rather than a requirement for all conformant implementations of the standard.

However, when you say that "so much" of the spec consists of these tags, what evidence do you have of that? After all, as is so often pointed out by OOXML detractors, the spec is 6000 pages, and the usual cited example of an "actLikeWord6" tag is a paragraph-long quote. Even if there were several dozen such tags described by a paragraph each, you're looking at less than a hundred pages of improperly documented stupid tags. I fully admit I haven't read the whole spec; Miguel has obviously looked at it enough to come to a moderately informed, moderately positive opinion, and others have come to enough of an opinion to point out problems, but I think it's telling that the same, *short* examples of problems always seem to be given.

ODF lacked an entire, vital, chunk of information; yes this is being fixed, but in my mind that should have been considered a showstopper well before standardization was even CONSIDERED. I haven't seen anything to indicate that OOXML has problems on anything like such a scale - and if ODF can be fixed post-standardization, why doesn't that apply to OOXML too? The only difference that I can see is there's still plenty of opportunity to fix OOXML *prior* to standardization, especially considering how small the holes seem to actually be, and how obvious the fix is.

Dalibor,
It seems to me that once Microsoft has left its past behind it the question of how to deal with them *then* is basically a no-brainer and uninteresting - we've won, when that happens. To me, the question of how to deal with them NOW, to try to get that point reached SOONER, is far more interesting and important.

While I agree that the baby positive steps are overshadowed by the routinely backward negative actions, and that it's entirely appropriate to criticize the latter, I don't think that changes the fact that we aren't doing nearly enough of encouraging and applauding the former.

If the baby steps forward get met with "who cares, it's Microsoft?" or "I'm not touching it because there MUST be a catch" or - in the case of OOXML - somehow acting like something that's objectively a positive step forward as if it were an anticompetitive maneuver, then the few dedicated people who've worked very hard inside Microsoft to get them to MAKE those positive steps are hardly likely to feel encouraged to keep fighting for further progress. And the larger majority of people inside Microsoft who DO continue to hold to the anticompetitive, CRUSH ALL ENEMIES mindset will just feel vindicated that everyone's out to get them and needs to be squashed. How can the message of freedom advance within the company in that environment?

I think Microsoft eventually turning themselves around and becoming a productive member of the community is inevitable; Free Software is a paradigm shift that Microsoft simply can't stop, and they ARE very good at adapting to survive. I just fear that we as a community are pushing away their tentative overtures in that direction and thereby slowing down that process and making it even more painful than it has to be.

Please do read up on some background info

By Mark Wielaard (Email) at 2007/01/31 15:45

Stuart you grossly misrepresent the state of the various specifications. Please do read some background information about ODF and OOXML like I posted in a previous comment. Like why and how the ODF and OpenFormula specifications are separate and complementary, started 3 years ago:

===

No format specification before OpenDocument format included an open specification for spreadsheet formulas. The lack of a formula specification in OpenDocument 1.0 was not an aberration. Rather, the OpenDocument community was the first in history to recognize the need for a formula specification, and wanted to ensure that it was done well. As such, we are at the forefront of the development of Open Standards. This need was first discussed in the OpenDocument TC in 2004, and it was agreed that it would be valuable (and that it would need to be done separately). The first draft of OpenFormula was released in February 2005, and was informally developed through the interaction of many in the community of OpenDocument users and application developers. OASIS formally established the formula subcommittee on February 2006; the subcommittee uses the OpenFormula project's specification as their base document. Even more importantly, the OpenFormula specification is being developed through an open process, including competing vendors and several volunteers. It includes input from multiple implementors and multiple users, without domination and control by any.

====

And here is some of the timelines about the invitations by the ODF community to work together on a multi-vendor specification for formulas:

===

Microsoft has steadfastly resisted, and still refuses, to publicly document the ".xls" file format that is widely used to exchange spreadsheets (including their formulas). Microsoft didn't even begin working with a standards body until December 2005 - 11 months after the first public draft of OpenFormula, and 7 months after OASIS had completed its work on the OpenDocument 1.0 format. What's more, the initial December 2005 version had no details on formulas; up through April 2006, Microsoft had refused to publicly document the formula specification in their vendor-specific XML format with any specificity. Finally, 15 months after the OpenDocument community began defining formulas, Microsoft finally began; in May 2006 it released its first public draft specifying the Microsoft XML format for formulas. Yet this version is very incomplete, and worse, it was released using committee rules that openly discriminate against all other suppliers. We are glad that 15 months after the OpenDocument community began developing an open standard for formulas, Microsoft has started to follow in the tail-lights of the leaders, and has begun to release information about its native format for formulas. We continue to invite Microsoft to instead join other developers to develop industry-wide standards in a neutral setting.

===

As you see Microsoft is still welcome to join. People are critsising them for going at it alone and not joining the public debate. Maybe you can get them to change by praising their baby steps forward, that would be cool. But describing the ODF and Open Formula activities as "technically Sucks" or that they didn't even consider these issues or that people don't even want to work together with Microsoft if the result could be more free software and open standards is really besides the truth.

ms can take care of itself

By autocrat at 2007/01/31 17:46

I don't know why you feel it's necessary to defend microsoft, as if it needs your help.

I don't see you questioning the logic behind MS fast tracking OOXML - there isn't going to _be_ a "6 month ISO review period".

Additionally, you failed to in any way enumerate, concretely, in what way OOXML is such a "vast IMPROVEMENT over ODF", other than some vague mutterings with no real content.

Further, you similarly make absolutely no attempt to make any sort of mention about what you percieve as ODF's shortcommings, other than the single item concerning a lack of spreadsheet formulas in the spec - which your whole rant seems to be structured around.

You use LOTS OF STRESS, to *declare* many THINGS! YET you _don't_ appear to have *backed* up your "assertions" with ANY _coherence_ WHATSOEVER.

ms can take care of itself

By autocrat at 2007/01/31 17:46

The enemy within

By Dalibor Topic (Email) at 2007/01/31 19:14

"And the larger majority of people inside Microsoft who DO continue to hold to the anticompetitive, CRUSH ALL ENEMIES mindset will just feel vindicated that everyone's out to get them and needs to be squashed. How can the message of freedom advance within the company in that environment?"

It can't, unless the environment inside Microsoft changes. It will have to change, sooner or later, and the sooner it happens, the better for Microsoft's survival in the long run, but it's nothing that can really be directly influenced from outside. It's a matter of their corporate culture, which dictates their hiring and firing practices.

As long as the Microsoft culture is that the 'embrace, exterminate, extinguish' approach to collaboration is tolerated, and even encouraged by the majority of Microsoft employees, and unethical conduct regularly demonstrated by its CEO(and other managers whose acts are responsible for the regular EU and other lawsuits targeting Microsoft's anti-competitive practices) is left without a trace of negative consequence within the company, as long it's fair to write dealing with Microsoft off as inconsequential at best.

I'd see little point in trying to liberate that company from a legacy mindset, as there is so much more exciting stuff going on outside Microsoft's gates today.

Even in the best case scenario of Microsoft actually turning open source tomorrow, they'd have to shrink down drastically to match their shrinking profits without the monopoly royalties, and the resulting company's contributions would be hardly worth writing home about, given that Microsoft bleeds money in all divisions except in those where the company can extract monopoly royalties, which would mean huge cuts all over the place.

So that future 'turned-around' Microsoft could give the world yet another WINE and OpenOffice clone, at best. Is that worth fighting the good fight for? Will having Microsoft WINE and MS OOo be worth something in, say, 10 years from now, with the current push to do everything on the web, or will it be more like the belated opening of the Motif and UNIX source code, cute but irrelevant to the world that's moved on to free software in those areas?

More responses

By Stuart at 2007/01/31 22:30

Mark,
Touche: clearly I should have researched the formula issue more thoroughly before using that as the starting point of my rant - and obviously by starting from that viewpoint it isn't very clear that the shortcomings of ODF, real or imagined, are tangential to the real issue I'm trying to raise, and the most important point I'm trying to make is equally valid even if ODF is perfect in every way.

I'll post a followup sometime in the next few days with an attempt to express more clearly what I'm trying to say without the distracting and - as it turns out - inaccurate assessment of ODF.

I'm glad to see that OpenFormula exists and that apparently people are aware of it... I'm not sure why, when I follow quite a lot of blogs on both sides of this debate and often read comments on relevant articles on places like Groklaw and Slashdot, I've managed to remain unaware myself. Perhaps that means that ODF advocates could benefit from being more vocal about its existence, as it's a good response to the most common criticism...

Yes, clearly Microsoft gets a big Could Do Better on their term report. But they could do, and have historically done, a WHOLE lot worse.

autocrat,
I'm not trying to "defend" Microsoft because it "needs my help". I'm talking about strategy. Sure, we as a community don't NEED Microsoft's help. We also are perfectly capable of mustering enough resources to beat back their attacks on us without breaking a sweat. But wouldn't we proceed faster if all the massive resources Microsoft can muster were directed in the same direction we're going? Wouldn't it be nicer if all the resources that Groklaw and other organizations put towards defending against MS attacks could be put towards something constructive, rather than just preventing something destructive? Of course Microsoft still does a lot more bad things than good things, but it also does a lot less bad things and a lot more good things than it did just a few years ago. I want to do what I can to encourage that process to continue rather than reverse.

Dalibor,
Of course I agree that there's a huge amount of exciting stuff going on outside of Microsoft, but there's also a whole lot of exciting stuff going on INSIDE too. The .NET framework, Linq, WPF, ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, the new Office 2007 UI... These are things that the Free Software community would eventually create (and will emulate even sooner since MS came up with them) - and yes, I'm aware that few of them are really new and many of them are already implemented somewhere in Free Software, but nobody's pushed them into the mainstream successfully before, even the Linux mainstream.

Would you say it's irrelevant that Sun are freeing Java? I see Microsoft's mindset as not all that different from what Sun's was ten years ago. The way the community dealt with Sun's intransigence eventually led us to the massive victory we got a few months ago, but just imagine if it had been possible to get that message through to Sun five years earlier, how much further ahead Java could be today. It would be completely ubiquitous on Linux, for starters, and things like Beagle would definitely not be written in C#. And all that development effort that got poured into Classpath could have gone into inventing NEW awesome things.

But Sun and IBM demonstrate that even a company that seems completely stuck in its ways can drink the kool-aid and become part of the community. And that the way the community approaches them plays a role in whether, and when, that happens. And Microsoft demonstrates on a regular basis that it IS capable of shifting its focus while remaining a huge force in the industry. Remember what happened with the internet around '95?

Consider Character

By Simon Phipps (Email) at 2007/01/31 23:16

"Would you say it's irrelevant that Sun are freeing Java? I see Microsoft's mindset as not all that different from what Sun's was ten years ago."

Can't agree there, Stuart. Sun is a company started by geeks to work with free software and clever hardware, and has repeatedly acted in character with that foundation in the last 24 years - NFS, TCP/IP activity, tcl/tk, Mozilla and GNOME work, X work, OpenOffice.org and plenty more. Sun's failures have been out of character and are regretted by most thinking people inside the company. And the stuff over Java - well, ask me about it some time, it's complicated and not as open-and-shut as you imply :-)

By contrast, Microsoft has consistently been an aggressive and often unprincipled competitor seeking to win by all means throughout the same period. The things you praise are indeed laudable, but they are out of character and it will take more than those things to persuade most of us to give them the benefit of the doubt.

OOXML will get no review at ISO of the depth you imply. What the world really needed was a baseline document standard with layers built on top by Microsoft and others to support legacy applications and then layers for applications introducing new innovations in future. ODF was designed to be that baseline, but Microsoft chose to shun the work at OASIS and to compete with it instead. When you grok the story back to 2002 (when the work at OASIS on ODF started) you'll see that actually Microsoft is acting largely in character here, only in a way calculated to allow interpretations like yours and Miguel's.

In other words, Microsoft is indeed learning from experience and changing. Sadly, what they are learning is how to look safe while remaining harmful, rather than the other way round.

Free Software Fascists

By Rick at 2007/02/01 04:19

The subject says it all. I've been programming on Linux professionally since '97 and every year I just went to get further away from the whole "free software" crowd which tends to be a distinct group from the open source crowd.

As far as I'm concerned, GPL jihadists from the FSF and Groklaw can go jump off a bridge.

There is less money in it, though

By Dalibor Topic (Email) at 2007/02/01 09:13

Indeed, there are things that Microsoft's research division does, that are quite interesting. :)

I don't think that the assumption that Microsoft would have much resources to contribute is correct, though. The only reason why Microsoft makes money are the monopoly royalties it can extract on its operating system and office suite. The excessive markup for the customer lock-in that makes Microsoft a profitable enterprise to the tune of 1 billion dollars per month today, would disappear if they indeed changed, and actually embraced open source as their new way of doing things.

With the monopoly revenues, the money and the resources to pull of neat things like Microsoft Research would be gone, as well. There is no way they could keep extracting the same amount of money out of locking in their customers into Microsoft's proprietary solutions, and unfortunately that's still Microsoft's business model in a nutshell, as the documents from Microsoft in the Iowa trial show.

In other words, I think Microsoft's worst enemy is themselves, rather than the folks who don't applaud the few good steps being made. Ballmer has begun to emulate Darl McBride's vitriolic rhetoric, and SCO's shown where that road leads to. SCO's problem wasn't the people not applauding them for the few good things they did, or people refusing to acknowledge that SCO's resources would have been better used to create open source software, rather than lawsuits. Microsoft's case is not very different: they are on their eternal war path against everyone [1] by their own choice.

Fortunately, since I don't work for Microsoft, that company's future prospects are not my problem. :)

[1] See Microsoft's "Evangelism is War" and similar stuff in the Iowa trail documents.

Abusive comments

By Stuart at 2007/02/01 13:33

Rick, I've deleted your abusive and insulting comment. If you can come up with a way of making any actual point you might have without insulting people, please go ahead.

Fairness

By Robert Devi at 2007/02/04 11:07

One key problem with the argument that OOXML is treated unfairly is that ODF and OOXML are held to different standard.

ODF had been standardized and changed over several *years* by multiple vendors. ODF used existing standards (in accordance with ISO policy) so implementation is easy (i.e. there are tonnes of shared libraries that implement these standards already) and it's easier to find problems (i.e. it's easier and faster to read and re-read 300 pages than 6000 pages and it's easier to keep it all in your head so it's easier to notice contradictions). ODF also *looks* like existing XHTML and incorportates XFORMS so it's easier to convert to other existing W3 standards using an XSLT transform (not so with OOXML). There is also a full irrevocable patent pledge on the standard.

OOXML was standardized quickly with the condition that it be more or less as Microsoft says it is (Microsoft has veto) and is attempting to ram it through through the fast-track so people can't have timefind all the problems in it. ODF uses it's own "standards" for everything (e.g. references to VB for scripting) without fully defining what they are (is there a VB spec anywhere or implement as Word 95 spec anywhere?) in preference to existing standards, and since these "referenced but not discussed standards" are not covered by the patent pledge, there's no guarentee that you'll be able to implement them with impunity even if you're able to reverse engineer them. The OOXML also forces you to implement bugs like the leapyear bug in previous versions of Excel. Here's a hint for the OOXML spec writers, why just just define a "buggyExcel95Leapyear" function in whatever scripting language is used for OOXML and use it when converting Excel95 documents and keep the bug out of the actual standard. For that matter, why isn't the whole "look like Word95" thing just a style-sheet. Special case hacks have no places in standards. The size of the standard are also relevent, since as stated, it's a lot harder to debug and implements, especially since you can't rely on existing shared libraries to ease the work.

The comments on OpenFormula also holds ODF to a different standard than OOXML: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula ):

"Microsoft continued to protest that OpenDocument could not be used because it did not define a format for spreadsheet formulas, yet its own specification continued to omit any specification about formulas through April 2006. Finally, in May 2006, Microsoft also began defining formulas in its XML format, 15 months after the first version of OpenFormula and 3 months after OASIS posted its first official draft of its specification."

The whole "Novell will implement OOXML" is also disingenious. WINE has been trying to implement Win32 for years and although it is better, is still quite far from being a drop-in replacement for Windows 2000. There's no guarantee OOXML will ever be completely implemented in any other non-Microsoft product, but ODF *has* existing non-OpenOffice implementations.

Finally, ODF will only be advanced when the multi-vendor consortium agrees to advance it. This gives people ample opportunity to implement the standard with no one vendor having the advantage. Microsoft has shown with the ECMA standard on C# that they don't believe that other vendor's input counts. They've implement "yet to be submitted much less standardized" features in C#, so that the only official version of C# is the one Microsoft implements and even though Microsoft may be true to it's promise to standardize those features, it leaves other vendors at a disadvantage.

There may be a reason for OOXML's existence, but as it stands now OOXML is just too broken to fix without a substantial revamp -- something Microsoft has stated it will not do. And even if they did agree, 6 months is no-where near enough time to do it.

ODF isn't perfect (but the gaps are being looked it), but OOXML is just plain irrepairably bad.

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