New Zealand gets a “handle on the jandle” onto the cheating Microsoft

Just to begin, a “jandle” is a slang term used by New Zealanders for a sandal, and is very popular with the Samoan mothers living in Auckland…

Whilst I was surfing through Digg, I found this article regarding New Zealand blocking Microsoft’s bid to fast track OOXML becoming a standard across the Tasman (Aussie slang for New Zealand. Are you learning yet?). This follows the “rigging” (in my opinion) of the Swedish vote to adopt OOXML which was discovered by the Swedish Standards Institude, and the claim also backed up by the Free Software Foundation Europe. Now, Sweden to what I know has yet to make a decision regarding this. Now, according to this article on the same website, the United States and Brazil have also declined Microsoft success in making OOXML an official standard. Standards Australia have declined to participate, which is sort of a shame.

Honestly, I think if the ISO allow OOXML to become the official document standard, Microsoft’s dictation will now spill into the governments of the world. Despite Microsoft are trying to make the standard open, it won’t. Good ol’ Microsoft will fall back into their old habits, and the Microsoft effect will run twice over. No room to move, no room to work, and Bill Gates makes another 56 bloody million dollars. This will push the world two steps back, despite trying to go the one step forward. I personally believe that ODF (OpenDocument Format)should be the official standard. This standard can become more of a democracy, and one that anyone can contribute to. The system can be cheaply implemented as it is an open standard. This will allow the more poorer governments to run computer systems, which is a good thing.

Now, there are better arguments for ODF than there is for OOXML. These can be viewed at the Open Document Fellowship website, and the NoOOXML Petition website. I will highlight a couple of these arguments that struck me:

Firstly to the OpenDocument Fellowship. Their frontpage tells us that ODF is: (bracket contents are my notes)

XML-Based (which is what OOXML is)
An Open Standard (which OOXML isn’t)
An ISO standard [ISO/IEC 26300:2006] (which OOXML isn’t)

Stop there. We have an ISO standard document format already. There is no need for two competing standards in our world. Also, I find that most Windows computers that I come across are running Office 2003 which doesn’t have OOXML. Ha Ha Microsoft!

Back to the arguments. Now we move onto the petition. They say that:

There is already a standard ISO26300 named Open Document Format (ODF): a dual standard adds costs, uncertainty and confusion to industry, government and citizens;

As I mentioned earlier, we have two standards, which creates unnecessary competition. Which will confuse everyone.

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;

So Office 2007 isn’t OOXML compliant. Well, Redmond should be scratching their heads at this. Inconsistency will cause trouble with the people that upgrade from Office 07 to Office 14 (remember, Microsoft think that 13 is an unlucky number, and it shant be used). Hopefully those poor souls won’t have to use another Microsoft document converter so that they OOXML compliant documents.

Also, I have found that OOXML doesn’t comply to other standards such as the XML standard. That gives Microsoft a bad wrap because they are creating a standard that HAS XML IN IT’S NAME! And, the standard conflicts with other standards such as ISO 8601 (Representation of dates and times, yep this is all American software), ISO 639, ISO/IEC 10118-3 among others.

There is also a bug that was found that prevents someone using a date prior to 1900, which falls across the OOXML board. So if you are writing a historical piece or organising historical information (well, something along those lines), your stuffed. This goes back to Excel 2000. Well, go figure.

And, the only software that will be able to use this standard will be Microsoft Office. Microsoft want to make this a One-Horse race, and kill off the competition in a way that only Microsoft could (If Microsoft get their way, OpenOffice my favourite offline office software will be dead). Also, it is an all Microsoft standard, no one else was consulted.

Well, I wonder what the EU will have to say about this. This should be a clear breach of anti-competitive laws (I am no EU laws expert, so this is a guess based on the Windows Media Player debarcle, and the Apple iTunes Music Store in Sweden).

To sum up, I hope for the sake of the Free and Open Source community that OOXML dies off. We should win because we were more organised and bugless unlike some people (*cough* OOXML *cough).

And that was my rant. Hopefully you have learnt something, and that you have made up your mind on the OOXML debate.

Matthew Rossi.

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