In fact, I told Murata-san some time ago that submitting defect reports to SC34 rather than submitting to OASIS directly would only lead to needless process delays. Oh well…

rob , reviewing jtc1 sc34 public documents, i see that MM has issued another ODF defect report

do you plan to add this to the official Errata ? or you plan to fix them in a 2nd batch?

thanks in advance, go (truly) open standards !

orlando

[0] http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/1078.htm

The interesting comparison is not to Microsoft’s overall numbers, but to their expenses for the development of their core Office applications (Word/Excel/PowerPoint). How does $125 million compare to their core Office development expenses for a year? What would it indicate if their single largest Office expense brought no new feature or benefit to end users, but was merely a wasteful escapade in selling a standard that Office itself does not implement? Certainly, they can afford it. But what does it say about priorities?

Felix,

ODF 1.0 took 2.5 years to create, approved by OASIS in May 2005. ODF 1.1, a minor release, was approved 1.5 years later, in February 2007. It is now 1.5 years later, and we are working on ODF 1.2. ODF 1.2 is a substantial update, with many new features. My prediction is that it will be closer to a 2.0 year total effort, meaning approval in Q1 2009. But that’s just my personal prediction.

can you give us an idea of when ODF 1.2 will be finished by the TC and passed upwards to become an OASIS standard?

Whether it’s a useful way of spending the money, or whether it would be better to hand it back to stockholders so they could buy larger yachts, work harder on eradicating Malaria, or whatever personal projects they have in mind, is open for debate.

I can’t raise $125M. They can. What would you do, if you had that sort of cash ?

DWayne, Thanks for that link. I heard a talk about XLIFF earlier in the year. It sounds promising.

By comparison to the money Microsoft spent on lobbying for OOXML, a very small sum to pay. If I were Microsoft it is worthwhile paying for the translation.

The bigger problem for Microsoft is that we the public still does not have the final ISO document for OOXML. Without it, how can one start translating?

The converter is part of the Translate Toolkit which provides tools to localisers for the manipulation, management and QA of various file formats.

Adding ODF is useful for us and others as we want to make it easy to translate documents without having to run a word processor and thus lose all the features and power of our localisation tools. We’re converting to XLIFF as this is an emerging localisation standard and one that many localisation tools can understand. And PO of course because much OSS localisation is still managed in the PO format.

Hats off to the current translators, your efforts are making the standard even better for everyone.