OOXML approved as an ISO standard

Specially during the last year, I talked about OOXML several times in this blog. Despite already existing already an open standard for documents, Microsoft pushed its own format to be an ISO standard, and, using polemic tactics, they finally made it. The official press release isn't out there yet (it will be today), but both ECMA and Microsoft already made press releases announcing the approval.

What does this mean? Is it a defeat? As you know if you've read my previous comments on OOXML, I was against it being an ISO standard. Now that it is, it is important to stress the importance that there are two standards, ODF and OOXML, and of those only ODF is open. But I don't consider all the work made to rise issues on OOXML was in vain. The discussion arose lots of awareness about OOXML problems. OOXML was modified since its submission, and while it still has several critical problems, it is now better than it was one year ago. And the whole issue isn't over yet.

What is there to be done? Well, first of all, it's important to act wisely and understand that now that OOXML is an ISO standard, it should be supported in the biggest number of applications and platforms. For instance, OpenOffice still doesn't support OOXML (although it is already in their roadmap). Also, standards aren't immutable. The work into maintaining and enhancing document standards just doubled, but it's something that must be done. There's already work being done for ODF 1.2 (expected to be an ISO standard on Summer 2009), but surely there will be plans to release new versions of OOXML. This is quite important and shouldn't be ignored, also by (maybe specially by) people that, like me, don't like OOXML. That is the opportunity to fix OOXML problems, but there's an huge risk of having new versions pushed by Microsoft using the same tactics that were used now, making OOXML even worse for everyone but Microsoft. We all should have our eyes open to that possibility, specially because many people might expect that new versions should be automaticly approved just because the actual specification is already an ISO standard.

It that it? Will we have to deal with two standards, implement two standards, do twice the work? Well, maybe it's time to - without prejudice into the work on ODF and OOXML - create yet another format that deprecates both ODF and OOXML. This is something I really don't like, and don't think I'm recommending that, but I'm afraid that, in a not so distant future, that might be the only way of fixing all this double standards mess.

But, but... What credibility can have a standard that was approved like this? Well, not much - for those of us who know what happened, and what are the flaws in OOXML. But for non-tech people, like politicians, librarians, teachers, and everyone else, it will not be clear that this standard isn't a good choice. And here's where we must act. For instance, EU wants to have all their documents in a standard format. We (Europeans) are the ones who should show them why they shouldn't choose OOXML. Who else?

UPDATE: ISO official announcement here

OOXML in Portugal

This article is directed to the Portuguese community, so it is written in Portuguese.

O voto Português quanto à adopção ou não do formato OOXML como standard vai ser decidido no próximo dia 16 de Julho. O conjunto de pessoas que podem actualmente votar a favor ou contra essa norma é composta por oito pessoas, uma delas que preside a comissão. São assim representadas as seguintes instituições:

• Microsoft (presidência);
• ASSOFT;
• ISCTE;
• Inst. Informatica da Seg. Social;
• Jurinfor;
  
• Primavera;
  
• Poder Autárquico (Alentejo);
• Inst. Técn. Informação da Justiça.

De notar que a Microsoft é quem está a propor a passagem do OOXML a norma. Realço também que tanto o ISCTE e a Jurinfor são parceiros da Microsoft, e a ASSOFT também já estabeleceu parcerias com a mesma.

Mas, o que é que isso interessa? O formato OOXML não deve ser adoptado por várias razões, entre as quais:

1. Já existe um standard ISO26300 chamado Open Document Format (ODF): dois standards aumenta o custo, a incerteza e a confusão na indústria, no governo e nos cidadãos;
2. Não existe nenhuma implementação provada da especificação OOXML: o Microsoft Office 2007 produz uma versão especial do OOXML, não um formato de ficheiro que cumpra com a especificação do OOXML;
3. Existe falta de informação no documento de especificação, como por exemplo como fazer um autoSpaceLikeWord95 ou useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. Mais de 10% dos exemplos mencionados no standard proposto não validam como XML;
5. Não existe nenhuma garantia de que qualquer pessoa possa escrever software que implemente total ou parcialmente a especificação OOXML sem estar sujeito às patentes detidas pela Microsoft;
6. Esta proposta a standard entra em conflito com outros standards ISO, como a ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) ou ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. Existe um erro no formato de folha de cálculo que impede a insersão de qualquer data anterior ao ano 1900: erros como estes afectam a especificação OOXM tal como software, como o Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 ou 2007;
8. Esta proposta a standard não foi criada através da experiência e conhecimento de todas as partes interessadas (tais como produtores, vendedores, consumidores, utilizadores e reguladores), mas apenas pela Microsoft.

O que podemos fazer para evitar que seja?

Bem, em Portugal temos duas frentes de acção: a primeira é tentar que hajam mais entidades representadas na comissão, e esse esforço já está a ser feito. A outra, talvez mais importante, é explicar qual é a nossa posição aos vários elementos da dita comissão.

Posso, até ao final do dia 12 do próximo mês, apresentar um documento que irá ser entregue aos elementos da dita comissão, para apreciação. Assim sendo, preparei um pequeno documento e estou a recolher assinaturas para mostrar qual é o sentido de voto dos Portugueses quanto a este assunto.

A tua assinatura é realmente importante.
Esta petição vai efectivamente ser lida e tomada em consideração.

Agir é fundamental! http://www.petitiononline.com/OOXMLPT/

Say NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

You know Office? Yeah, that tool people use for producting documents, of almost any type: memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, word processing documents... So, nowadays
we have an Open Standard for such documents: ODF (OpenDocument Format). If you're into this issue, you may already know that Microsoft has their own new format, Office Open XML (OOXML), and they're trying to make it also an ISO standard.

Why is it bad?

1. There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;
2. There is no provable implementation of the OOXML specification: Microsoft Office 2007 produces a special version of OOXML, not a file format which complies with the OOXML specification;
3. There is missing information from the specification document, for example how to do a autoSpaceLikeWord95 or useWord97LineBreakRules;
4. More than 10% of the examples mentioned in the proposed standard do not validate as XML;
5. There is no guarantee that anybody can write a software that fully or partially implements the OOXML specification without being liable to patent damages or patent license fees by Microsoft;
6. This standard proposal conflicts with other ISO standards, such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times), ISO 639 (Codes for the Representation of Names and Languages) or ISO/IEC 10118-3 (cryptographic hash);
7. There is a bug in the spreadsheet file format which forbids to enter any date before the year 1900: such bugs affects the OOXML specification as well as software versions such as Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, 2003 or 2007.
8. This standard proposal has not been created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties (such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators), but by Microsoft alone.

If you agree with me and also think that these are reasons enough for a rejection of OOXML as a standard, please sign this petition!

After OOXML, XPS

When you thought that OOXML was enough trouble, XPS comes to be talked about. Many people just ask why Microsoft decided to create a "standard" (OOXML) to something that already had one (ODF). My answer is: "why should they use what everyone uses, when they can make anyone use what they're using?". Sucks, I know. But OOXML was just a start: now I start to understand why Marcos Santos (from Microsoft) kept saying "we should look into the future". Is the future "let's replace every standard with a Microsoft format"? Seems so, considering they're now trying to make XPS an ISO standard.

Here's a nice looking table where you can easily understand what am I talking about (shamelessly copied from this post):

Feature	OOXML	XPS
Origin	Microsoft	Microsoft
Editor	Microsoft via Rex Jaeschke	Microsoft via Rex Jaeschke
Standards Body	Microsoft via MS-ECMA	Microsoft via MS-ECMA
Patents	Microsoft promise OSP	Microsoft promise CP
Duplication	ODF ISO26300	PDF ISO32000
ISO Liaisons	ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34	ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34
ISO plans	in progress	will be submitted to ISO
Restricted technologies	WMA, WMV, MP3, OLE, Binary space, Macros	HD-Photo

So, it seems that after forcing their own replacement for ODF, they're now trying to do the same for PDF. What will come next? HTML? Place your bets...

Document Freedom Day

This one is going to be short, I promise.

Tomorrow is going to the the "Document Freedom Day". I intend to celebrate it in Lisbon. If you want to celebrate it in Portugal you might be interested in checking about the events in Lisbon and Oporto. If you want to know about other countries, there's a list aggregating the events happening all over the world.

Document Freedom is an important matter. I've been a fan and user of LaTeX for more than 10 years. The main reason I liked it in the first place was the easyness of creating, writting an maintaining a document. I remember having a really old 386 laptop which only use was a LaTeX compiler, the vim editor and a DVI viewer. What starting as being "wow, this is a cool new way of doing stuff, without that boring formating crap and I'm really more produtive with it!", quickly started being a lot more things, as I stumbled upon more advantadges. See, LaTeX is an Open Format. Besides being available in any Operating System I stumbled upon, the fact that it is distributed under the terms of the LPPL, thus being free software, made it suitable for a lot of uses. Heck, I earned some real money doing translators and interpreters of, or using, LaTeX. The beauty of it was that, since it was open, anybody could read, alter, interpret or otherwise manipulate a TeX document. I was happy, but the format never was really adopted but in some specific cases or scenarios, and in the academic world (specially Mathmatics, since LaTeX has the most powerful - in my oppinion at least - way of representing math formulas). On one hand, LaTeX is only suitable to produce word processing documents, formulas or presentations. Office suites give you that, and also spreadsheets and charts. On the other hand, even if fully documented, LaTeX (and TeX) aren't standards.

I heard for the first time about ODF in 2002. Of course I knew that there were concurrent formats to those of Microsoft Office, but as soon as I heard about ODF I became more happy. No, I wasn't intending to be a ODF user. I still do my documents in LaTeX, even today. But this was - finaly - a document format, open as (La)TeX, but an "office suite format", meaning that it would also cover spreadsheets and charts. The cherry on the top of the cake, those making ODF happen wanted it to be an Open Standard. Great! I was not the only one - of course - understanding the power and importance of an Open Standard for documents. Documents in an open format - specially if regulated by a standards body, warrants you long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers. In 2004 the European Union understood its importance, and demanded from the existing vendors the existence of a document standard. The ODF work was already being done, and in 2005 ODF became an OASIS standard, a step into 2006 where it became an ISO standard. In that same year I attended to XTech '06, where I met Donna that spoke about ODF, Our Document Future. It was a great presentation in many ways: The talked about the importance of digital preservation, how can we do it, and why ODF was the best choice. She then talked about the massive adoption that ODF was already having in Australia, with the Digital Preservation front efforts. That was just the beggining: Italy adopted ODF in 2007, the same year that saw ODF 1.1 as an ISO standard (1.2 should be ready in summer 2009), and nowadays ODF is being considered and already adopted, in some cames more massively than in others, in countries like Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, France, Norway, Japan, Germany and Malaysia.

But Donna also told in her 2006's presentation that the future would bring us dark clouds in our sunshining scenario: Microsoft and OOXML. She was right. See, Microsoft has no commercial interest of adopting ODF (or any standard, for the matter). Yet, with all political pressure, it is mandatory that they support a standard... So they decided to create their own, which was aprooved as an ECMA standard in December 2006 and is now in the process of trying its aprooval as an ISO standard. Microsoft doesn't really support ODF (despite their trolls saying "but we pay for the development of converters!"): if they wanted to support the ODF standard, even if not their format of choice, ODF would be integrated in a stock instalation of their Office Suite. Also, if you considered that they were never interested in contributing into making ODF a better standard (which would be the natural action of a party interested in the field) that would serve for their technical purposes, you can't really think nor expect people to believe that Microsoft was really interested in a standard. But OOXML is worse than that: it isn't open (thus, even if it turns into a standard it will never be an open standard), is encumbered with software patents, while supposedly being a XML format (like ODF) has in its specs examples that show invalid XML, and has an incomplete specification.

I could go on and on about all the process and steps that Microsoft made this last couple of years to make OOXML a standard, refering to the way they admitedly bought votes and comitees, how issues were handled and so far, but I don't think that's useful. Last October I was invited to be the chair to a debate about ODF and OOXML. Not even one of the dozens of entities that supposedly support OOXML in Portugal were available to attend. The excuse of Microsoft, for instance, was that "during the aproval process there were made personal acusations to Microsoft workers in newspapers and blogs, so we don't have conditions in participating". This same Microsoft employee writes frequently in several blogs whenever the issue arises. But what really made me stop writting much about the issue was the fact that... it's a war I can't win, and that pisses me off. Everytime someone talks about the issue, dozens of Microsoft-payed people (they admited it) go to the blogs and flood them with lies, circular references, and anti-IBM or anti-SUN messages. They have the means and the money to do that, I don't. But I still have the truth with me, and tomorrow I'll show it. Because the world doesn't need to be controled by some corporation. The world needs Document Freedom.

ODF x OOXML in Lisbon's first Free Software Forum

Next Friday and Saturday we'll have in Lisbon [1] the "I Fórum de Software Livre de Lisboa", an event about Free Software.

Saturday, from 15:00 to 16:30, I'm going to chair a debate called "ODF x OOXML" were we'll focus on the following topics:

• The need of a standard


• The standard format creation process


• The adoption process of a standard format


• The importance of document formats to our future


• ODF x OOXML - adopt which one?

For now we'll have the presence of ANSOL and SUN in the debate. I'm still trying to find out someone willing to participate in the debate who thinks that OOXML is what should be adopted. I'll write about that later, probably after the debate.

See you there!

[1] - http://www.softwarelivre.com.pt/ptematico.php

OOXML in Portugal - the CM Cascais issue

One of the entities that suposedly was representing Portugal in its vote about the aprooval of the OOXML format as a standard was the City Hall of Cascais. Now, the really funny thing is that, when asked about their decision to aproove this format as a standard, the City Hall answered:

«Effectively, CHoC did not emit any kind of opinion against or in favour of OOXML's specification through it's representatives with competence on the subject matter.»

Seems that the person that went there "representing CHoC" was not representing them at all...

More about this issue at http://tinyurl.com/3cw85l .

Document standards: there can be only one?

The Inquirer is running a story telling that Brydon, from ISO, told them that

"Naturally, its desirable that there is only one international standard. The market seems to be going for two. But eventually one international standard will be listed."

Considering that there is already one document standard, ODF, and that OOXML is not a standard, is there that much to say? Obivously the right conclusion for this whole thread is that ISO should say NO to OOXML as an ISO standard, and the worldwide focus (including that of Microsoft) should be into making ODF better. Looking to what already happened in the last few years regarding to OOXML this is improbable: Microsoft is surely going to apply their unethical tatics to ruin the digital documents world...

Links

To make a change to my latest blog articles, here's a post of "links".

First of all, congratulations Prt.Sc. Prt.Sc is a Portuguese blogs aggregator and I'm happy to be one of the screenies that are aggregated there. Prt.Sc is, for me, with no doubt the best information source for Portuguese geeks (since there's a big ratio of Portuguese content, I don't think it is quite suitable for non-Portuguese readers). It is now making 3 years, and I'm quite confident that this next one is going to be exciting.

Then, Merankorii. For those who still don't know, Merankorii is my own musical project. There are quite some news about it: tomorrow is the official release date of Merankorii's fifth album "A Viagem", that is going to be released both in MP3 format and as a 30-copies extremely limited CD edition with a packaging that doesn't let anyone be indiferent about it. Also, and following what happens with the third CD "Melencolia III", now "Sanguine", the fourth Merankorii album, is also available in MP3 in a "Name Your Own Price" regime: from $1 USD to $20 USD, you can choose how much you want to pay to have my music.

As some of you noticed, my recent blog post about the Document Freedom Day is generating a lot of comments, mainly from me and Microsoft's Marcos Santos, where it is being somewhat debated wether OOXML is or not suitable of being an ISO standard. It's not a surprise that the theme is being so much debated all over the internet this last few days: yesterday the vote submissions ended, and now everyone is just waiting for ISO to announce what are the results (is OOXML is aprooved as an ISO standard or not). ISO already said that the anouncement is going to happen wednesday (I wonder if they did it just to avoid having a press release mistaken as an April's Fool joke). There are some blogs doing an excelent job of tracking down all the announcements and rumors about the vote of each country, and predicting the result. By now, we all already expect OOXML to be aproved by ISO, since the chances of the result being another are dimming almost every hour.

I've already linked to my friendfeed, but I'll do it again. I'm using it more regularly, and I really like the way I use it and how I quickly get track of what my "friends" are doing. I'm also using it to post quick comments or links, so if you're fond of this posts where I give you a collection of links, you might want to follow me on friendfeed.

Some time ago I wrote about OpenCoffee and how it was (not) working in Portugal. VD decided to take a slightly different approach and ended creating "OpenPub", here in Lisbon. I really prefer this concept: people get together to have a drink (to socialize), but since you're gathering informally people with somewhat simmilar interests (or at least with interests in the same field), the socialization ends fruitous. I didn't manage to be present in any of the gatherings that happened until now, but I really hope that this starts happening even more spontaneously (with more people yelling "let's have a drink!", and doing it more frequently), and, of course, that I manage to be in one of those gatherings. The most similar thing I had recently was the dinner from the Document Freedom Day celebration here in Lisbon, and I suppose I'll have fun this weekend, at...

...Tecnonov 2008. Tecnonov 2008 is going to happen at the 5th (this saturday), whole day, in Coimbra. The entry is free, and the talks good. We'll also have free swag (t-shirts included), a Debian key-signing party, and the promise of an event that - like last year - is surely extend itself all night long. I hope to see you there!

OOXML rejected, for now

While this isn't official news, so you should not take this as truth, internal sources are saying that OOXML is rejected for ISO. Also, I'm not the only one getting the same feedback on internal sources, NoOOXML has a simillar report, and ANSOL too.

Anti-OOXML Portuguese petition

The Anti-OOXML Portuguese petition is now closed and delivered, to be presented on Monday. It has 1277 valid signatures.

I'm somewhat time limited, so for now I'll just leave you with a big THANKS to all of you that have signed. Please consider repeating your act, and sign the international petition.

Portuguese Petition
International Petiton

OOXML is NOT a standard

I don't usually do this, but this time, here it goes: I'm quoting an entire press release, this time from ISO:

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

In accordance with the ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, the appeals are currently being considered by the ISO Secretary-General and the IEC General Secretary who, within a period of 30 days (to the end of June), and following whatever consultations they judge appropriate, are required to submit the appeals, with their comments, to the ISO Technical Management Board and the IEC Standardization Management Board.

The two management boards will then decide whether the appeals should be further processed or not. If they decide in favour of proceeding, the chairmen of the two boards are required to establish a conciliation panel which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several months.

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.

This, in other words, means that OOXML is NOT a standard.

OOXML: is it just "wait till February"?

Most of us sane enough to be against the adoption of the OOXML as a standard are more or less convinced that now it is somewhat a question of waiting for February and the final decision. Well, it seems that Microsoft is outsmarting us, and seeing a lot more steps until then. For instance, there is a push by Microsoft and others to move ISO toward a "direct participation" model where corporations can participate in ISO directly, bypassing the national body mechanisms altogether. This would essentially turn ISO into a vendor consortium. The ballot that will decide this,
"JTC 1 N8812 - 60-Day Letter Ballot on the Establishment of an Ad Hoc Group on Direct Participation and Call for Participation", is going to be voted at the 24th of this month, and the only open vote I've heard of until now was the one from USA: "The US vote to approve the establishment of the JTC 1 Ad Hoc Group on Direct Participation and intent to participate has been submitted."

Next step: to find out if Portugal is going to vote for this or not.

Portugal: digam não ao OOXML!

Ajuda Portugal a tomar uma boa decisão, diz não ao OOXML!

Queres ter um counter destes? Basta usares este pedaço de HTML no teu blog:

<iframe width='102' height='36' src='http://www.petitiononline.com/signatures.php?petition=OOXMLPT' frameborder='0' scrolling='no'></iframe>

OOXML and Second Life

A quick post:

After writting a lot about what has been happening in Portugal about the standardization of OOXML, Groklaw as a good article about it.

Remember that Second Life HTML client I've been talking about? It's called AjaxLife, lets you log in into Second Life via your browser, and is now Open Source. Which remembers me that I've been teaking in my spare times with libsecondlife and I should write about it - in another post. But, mainly, I hate C#, .NET, Mono, and I just wish someone would port libsecondlife to anything non-.NET. Please.

OOXML in Portugal

Basicly, the final decision was postponed to a later meeting, in the end of the month. Let me remark the fact that representatives of Sun and IBM didn't attend to it because there were no chairs for them. Yup, it goes THAT far. But not all is lost, the fight is yet not over. I'm not going to write more about this issue today, but let me quote a comment on the chair's issue:

Specially since this isn’t true. For seating people there were seats enough for almost 30 people, but they chose to steer away one of the most important big companies in terms of open standards.

They further refused representativity to universities, libraries, and other entities that care a lot more for structured documents than Primavera or Jurinfor, Microsoft parners, or most ASSOFT registered companies.

Microsoft alone wasted three seats. ASSOFT wasted two more, business partners of Microsoft wasted a few more spots.

The President, Microsoft representative, tried to shut me up twice. At the second attempt I accomplished my promise of speaking louder if I had to in order to be heard, refusing to be cut off.

Rui is writting at this moment a more extensive review of what happened there, so soon you'll be able to know all the sordid details here.

Links for today

http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003674850
MySpace starts thinking about ad-supported music, with a model that I don't really like, and I don't really believe in its success, even if they have the scale-factor...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/spiralfrog_looses.php
SpiralFrog, another ad-supported music website, lost $3m in 3 months, but again, I never found their model interesting...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/20/the-google-set-top-box-think-android-for-tv/
Google aiming for IPTV? Are they going the "Android for IPTV"? Most importantly, what's the underlying business model?

http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-27501/portugal-will-send-microsoft-to-the-brm
I'm getting more and more ashamed of being a Portuguese, when I see that this country is letting Microsoft use us as puppets... Microsoft will represent Portugal in the vote to approve their own format (OOXML).

http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2007/11/exclusive-int-1.html
It's not a secret that I like ReverbNation. If you want to know more about it, you might like to read this interview.

Stuff

Last friday this blog made it's 2nd birthday. Of course, I've missed it.

The weekend was... awkward. Paula and I are both sick with a flu or something, the Portuguese trains company had one problem and all the sudden there were no trains working in the country, the ODF x OOXML debate went quite well (even if in an event no one knows about since there was pressure in the media to avoid talking about it), my kitchen got flooded since my laundry washing machine is messed up (I'll have to buy a new one, probably even today), and today I arrived at work just to notice that my laptop's hard drive is quickly dying (I'm trying to backup ~ , but I don't know if I'll make it...).

*sigh*

OOXML: Portugal says "yes with comments"

Today is a bad day.

Quick links

Quick links for the day:

• I wonder where is this legal, but being able to capture Last.fm streams into propperly tagged mp3 files is sweet (TheLastRipper);
• Music to check out;
• More music to check out;
• The Portuguese petition against OOXML has surpassed the 1000 signatures;
• UK and Microsoft ignoring the existence of ODF;
• After all Amie.st is not that hot, I'll probably write about this later;
• My musical project has now all its tracks licensed with a Creative Commons license, and the latest CD is almost sold out.