Looked like you called out the Foundation – they just decloaked their anti-ODF plans more fully. Well done.

So, the Foundation are no longer interested in OpenDocument. I hope OASIS enforce their trademark and stop them using it. They can be the Compound document foundation if that’s what they want.

Happily they’re doing to save us all from interoperability disaster with their buzzword-friendly CDF+ format with no “eXtensions”. What’s the betting that – just like “ACME 376″ or whatever it was – this is just RTF transliterated into XML and a little bit of spice.

CDF is just a container, like a Zip file. They are notably quiet on what the CDF file _actually contains_.

Microsoft says this today – before the standard is even approved and it’s important for Microsoft to look as standards-lover. Do you have nay doubt that when OOXML will be approved they’ll change the stance to even more aggressive one ?

As Rob says, the vote on the list proposal reflected a consensus opinion of the TC, and the proposal that won was in fact most directly developed by and vigorously promoted not by Sun, but rather the KOffice developers; you know, exactly the kind of free software effort Gary and Marbux promote.

As for the problems with OASIS, I really don’t see the conspiracy. I fault OASIS for being a little dim on the politics of the whole rules issue, and Gary for being careless with those rules, and with not informing those of us most affected by them. In the end, a number of TC members (from IBM, Sun, Adobe) stepped up to get those of us actively contributing free memberships.

It’s also worth noting that two of the biggest new additions to ODF 1.2 (metadata and formulas) were primarily driven by independent developers unaffiliated with the big vendors.

As for what Rob said about the hypocrisy of trumpeting open source and interoperability but not releasing the source for the fabled plug-in, what he said. I’m confident we’ll never see it, but would be happy to be proved wrong.

Bruce D’Arcus (having problems logging in)

You can track the progress of ODF 1.2 through the ODF TC’s wiki. It shows the various proposals being worked on for ODF 1.2 and where they are in the process. OpenFormula will be part of ODF 1.2.

I’d love to see a beta of the plugin, and some reassurance that it will be open source.

Note that I am not opposed to having a 100% fidelity conversion plugin. My beef is that if you have one, you should be distributing it. It should be possible to be seen by people. From what I’ve been able to find out about Gary Edward’s converter, I have to assume it’s a 0% fidelity converter, because I have seen a grand total of zero conversions it produced.

Marbux, please reconsider with whom you work, because if you work for someone who appears to be deceptive, you get a reputation for deception, even if you do not do any yourself. In my opinion, your reputation is clearly being damaged by this relationship.

I was reading this in the unread-items folder of my feed reader and I had no idea who was speaking. I didn’t figure it out. I had to see your signature at the end. Lovely, just lovely. As a bystander, you make more sense of this than anything else I’ve seen.

One nit: I don’t have the same sense as you about XPS (an OPC-carried final form that may have more legs in high-end on-demand publishing than PS and PDF do) and the WPF thrust of XAML, Silverlight, and such. It will be interesting to see.

When I first saw the daVinci bluster, along with some rather cynical whining, I sealed a prediction in an envelope and mailed it to a friend. I’m not ready to have it opened, but I bet your prediction would not be much different than mine.

I’m also pleased to see you mention ODF 1.2. I don’t see much on the site, and I wonder what is going on with OpenFormula. There has not been a new draft in some time. Is it soup yet and what ODF version is it expected to appear in?

Unlike most of my blog postings, I took no pleasure in writing this one. In fact it was quite painful for me to write. I know that you and Gary have, in the past, made many, many contributions to benefit ODF.

However, you are increasingly boxing yourselves into a militant, anti-ODF position and spreading all sorts of zany conspiracy theories, and it is even more painful to listen to and read those. So I’m no longer going to let my respect for your past contributions blind me to your recent errors. Of course, it is a free country and you can say whatever you want. And so can I.

As for conformance clauses, this is a fair point. OASIS recognizes the need for formal conformance clauses, and as of this summer all OASIS standards, even those not going to ISO, will require a formal conformance clause. So this is something we will need to write up for ODF 1.2. The contents of such a clause is a good thing to be debating in the TC, or even publicly.

If the OpenDocument Foundation has no official role, then the owners of the OpenDocument trademark should not permit its trademark to be misused in this way any longer, because it is misleading and damaging to the OpenDocument format. The name “The OpenDocument Foundation” is absolutely misleading.

I can’t help wondering if there are ulterior motives to The OpenDocument Foundation’s recent moves. First, have they been bought by Microsoft? If I was Microsoft, and I looked at The OpenDocument Foundation, and I saw that it was an oficial looking but proprietary company that could be bought in order to attack ODF, then I would be 100% certain to buy into it for this purpose.

I also wonder if ODF 1.2 with it’s foreign element tags would allow others to bypass it’s proprietary DaVinci plug-in for MS Office with better implementations, and whether this is the reason for their sudden switch.

Got a link to those interoperability conformance requirements for the OpenDocument specification, Rob? Why not? Might it be because they don’t exist?

It’s good to see IBM finally talking about OpenDocument interoperability issues in public. But I invite you to focus on the issue of the missing interoperability conformance requirements .

Best regards,

Marbux