OOXML

The recent Burton Group report, What’s Up, .DOC? by Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly was made available free to the public for a stated purpose:

We’ve made the overview available for free (I must admit I’m not sure for how long), as we believe this topic warrants expanded industry debate before a February, 2008 ISO ballot on OOXML, and we want to help catalyze and advance the debate.

The degree of expanded debate achieved may be estimated by noting that Microsoft is sending this report to every JTC1 national body involved in the OOXML ballot, from Pakistan to Ecuador, and has invited Peter O’Kelly to speak on this paper both at the recent OOXML press event in Washington as well as this week’s Office Developers Conference.

Much could be said of this report, but I’ll limit myself to commenting on a single passage:

[S]everal vendors interviewed for this overview indicated that it’s essentially impossible to get ODF proposals approved if they’re not also supported in OpenOffice.org, and further noted that Sun closely controls OpenOffice.org (much as it also holds control over Java).

It should be noted that, before making this statement, the authors neither contacted OASIS nor the OASIS ODF TC in order to check their facts.

The ODF Alliance published a rebuttal of this report, and in particular took umbrage at that passage, saying:

This is demonstrably false, and the use of unnamed “vendors” as sources does not eliminate the need for doing basic fact checking on such claims. Rumors and innuendo do not objective analysis make.

First, on the control aspect, note that ODF 1.0, the standard, is owned and controlled by OASIS, a standards consortium of over 600 member organizations. Sun is just one company among many members. Indeed, for most of the development of ODF, Microsoft was on the Board of Directors of OASIS.

Second, OASIS is a corporation. It is legally bound to its Bylaws. There is no arbitrary control by member corporations.

The ODF TC is co-chaired by an IBM employee and a Sun employee, and is regulated by the OASIS TC Process document, which is publicly readable by all and has clear rules of procedure and appeal.

The ODF TC has three subcommittees. The Accessibility SC is co-chaired by IBM and Sun, while the Formula Subcommittee and the Metadata Subcommittee are each chaired by individual members of OASIS who are not affiliated with any large corporations.

Voting rights in the ODF TC, for accepting or rejecting features, is currently as follows:

• Sun – 3 voting members
• IBM – 4 voting members
• Individuals – 3 voting members

This can easily be verified at the OASIS ODF TC website.

Is sharing the chair position on the TC and on 1 of 3 subcommittees considered “closely controlling”? Is having 30% of the votes considered “closely controlling”?

As for proposals being accepted into ODF, we note that all three major features for ODF 1.2, RDF metadata, OpenFormula, and enhanced accessibility, are new proposals which have not been yet implemented in OpenOffice. Moreover, the ODF TC is currently processing a set of features requested by the KOffice open source project. So the assertion that it is “essentially impossible” to get new features into ODF if they are not already supported by OpenOffice is not true. This error is unfortunate and needs correcting through rigorous fact checking, as do the others, in our opinion.

Oddly enough, this particular error occurs in several places. A search of the report for the word “control” shows it used six times, once in reference to “Chinese communists” and five times in reference to Sun Microsystems. Note, however, that no mention is ever made of the strong direct control Microsoft asserts over OOXML, its having sole chairmanship of the Ecma TC45, and its having secured a committee charter that prevents any changes to OOXML that are not compatible with Microsoft Office.

Again, we’re puzzled by the inaccuracy on one hand and the lack of balance on the other.

Now, back to the Burton Group, where Guy Creese responds on the Burton Group blog:

We were not expecting to be told that Sun had significant sway over the standard, but several people told us that (spread across more than one ODF-oriented vendor), which is why we noted it in the report. As the ODF Alliance notes, IBM and Sun—two of Microsoft’s most powerful productivity application archrivals today (as well as partners to Microsoft in myriad other domains, e.g., Web services-related standards initiatives)—collectively control 70% of the votes in the ODF TC which determines if proposals will be accepted or rejected. This suggests there is ample opportunity for conflicts of interest.

Guy, excuse me, did you say “conflicts of interest”? Please explain. Or maybe when Peter O’Kelly comes back from speaking at Microsoft’s Office Developers Conference he can explain it for us?

In any case, the factual errors in your report with respect to the control of ODF have been clearly demonstrated, but instead of simply admitting and correcting the error, you hide beyond anonymous sources and further impugn OASIS by charging some sort of “conflict of interest”.

To follow your logic further demonstrates the absurdity of it. If you believe that the fact that IBM and Sun “collectively control 70% of the votes in the ODF TC” lends weight to your argument, then what is shown by the equally true mathematical fact that IBM plus independent members also control 70% of the votes? Why is this equally true fact not mentioned? This is the nature of plurality, that there are many different combinations of votes that could make a majority position. Further, note that these groups in practice do not always vote as a bloc. We’ve had votes where the independent members split their vote, and we even had a vote where the IBM members did not all vote alike. So much for your simplistic control theory.

I will not question whether your anonymous sources indeed misled you. For sake of argument, I will accept unquestioningly that you indeed had sources and that they said exactly what you claim they said. However, having sources does not excuse you, as an analyst, from doing basic fact checking. The rules of OASIS and the voting composition of the ODF TC are facts, not opinions, and the correct information was sitting there, on public web sites, for you to check. It is not your fault that you were misled by sources, but it is your fault that you did not verify their claims. To publish controversial statements based on anonymous sources without fact checking, this is not something that represents the Burton Group’s finest work.

The Burton Group has denigrated the work and the members of the OASIS Open Document Format Technical Committee (of which I am Co-Chair) with published statements that have been shown to be false. The Burton Group owes us an apology and an immediate retraction.

Waiting until after February, after the DIS 29500 process concludes, to make corrections is unacceptable. Since your stated purpose in making this report public was to “advance the debate” in the current OOXML ISO process, withholding factual corrections until after that process concludes would imply that you and the Burton Group see no problems with knowingly persisting in influencing an ISO ballot with false information published under the Burton Group name. I don’t believe that is the image that the Burton Group would want to project. So I urge that a correction is in order now.

Depending on who you ask, document standard harmonization is either impossible or inevitable, anathema or nirvana. Let’s dig a little into this question and see if the two sides are really that far apart.

First note that many JTC1 NB’s raised the issue of harmonization in their DIS 29500 ballot comments last September. Some merely requested harmonization, such as Korea, South Africa, Belgium, Peru, Switzerland, or the Czech Republic, while others in addition outlined ways to achieve harmonization. For example, AFNOR, the French NB stated:

After 5 months of extensive discussions between stakeholders in the field of revisable document formats, AFNOR, in the aim to obtain a single standard for XML office document formats within 3 years, makes the following proposal:

• Split the current ECMA 376 standard in 2 parts in order to differentiate the essential OOXML core functions necessary for easy implementation from those functionalities that are needed for the exchange of legacy office file formats;
• Incorporate the technical comments below and those in the attached comment table submitted to the Fast Track;
• Attribute the status of Technical Specification to both parts;
• Establish a process of convergence between ODF (already standardized as ISO/IEC 26300) and the above mentioned OOXML core. ISO/IEC shall invite parties involved to commit themselves to initiate simultaneously the revisions of the existing ODF v1.0 and the OOXML core in order to obtain at the end of the revision process a standard as universal as possible.

(Note that a Technical Specification, in ISO process, is for proposals which lack insufficient support for approval as an International Standard, but for which publication is still desired. This may be appropriate for OOXML.)

New Zealand’s proposal was similar:

• OOXML should be considered by JTC 1 for publication as a Type 2 Technical Report.
• Seek to harmonize with the existing ODF standard to reduce the cost of interoperability, cost of having two standards, and cost of support/maintenance .

Further, the NB’s of Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States requested that specific features be added to OOXML in order to improve interoperability with ISO ODF, in total 40 features such as the ability:

• to have more than 63 columns in a table
• to have background images in tables
• to have font weights beyond “normal” and “bold”.

Notably, these were the same features that Microsoft sponsored translator project on SourceForge identified as needed to improve translation with ODF. These are the features that the project noted were lacking in OOXML.

Ecma rejected every single one of these requests. They did not argue that the requested features were unreasonable. They did not argue that the requested feature was not needed. Their argument was that harmonization of the formats was not necessary because there exist tools that will translate between OOXML and ODF. In other words, they rejected these requests merely because they were pro-harmonization, regardless of the underlying merit or need of the feature. Ironically, Microsoft’s conversion tools are restricted in their fidelity because of the lack of these very features.

On the question of harmonization, we are either moving toward it, or we are moving away. There is no time better than the present to harmonize. Waiting will only make matters worse, as we will then need to consider legacy OOXML documents as well as legacy binary and legacy ODF documents. The Ecma response does not move us toward harmonization, but starts down the road toward further divergence, a long and costly divergence.

Tim Bray made the critical observation back in 2005, “The world does not need two ways to say ‘This paragraph is in 12-point Arial with 1.2em leading and ragged-right justification’.”

Microsoft likes to claim that harmonization is impossible, that slapping together the features of both standards would lead to a messy, impenetrable mess. Of course, but only an idiot would suggest that as an approach to harmonization. So why do they always bring that up as their strawman?

A look at OpenOffice and Microsoft Office shows a huge degree of functional overlap. Harmonization starts from looking at this functional overlap – and there is a significant, perhaps 90%+ area where they do overlap – and expresses the functional overlap identically, using the same xml schema. In other words, harmonization identifies the commonalities at the functional level and finds a common representation for that commonality.

It would also be expected that the common functionality between ODF and OOXML would also include a common extensibility mechanism, a way for a vendor to express application-specific features that are outside of the harmonized standard.

The remaining 10% of the functionality would be the focus of the harmonization work, the area that requires the most attention. Some portion of that 10% will represent general-purpose features that we can imagine multiple application supporting. We take those features and add them to ODF. That remaining portion of the 10%, which only serves one vendor’s needs, such as flags for deprecated legacy formatting options, could be represented using the common extensibility mechanism.

Does this sound impossible? That’s not what Microsoft says. Gray Knowlton, Group Product Manager for Microsoft Office, was candid to PC World a couple of weeks ago:

Also, if individual governments mandate the use of ODF instead of Open XML, Microsoft would adapt, Knowlton said. The company would then implement the missing functionality that ODF doesn’t support. However, those extensions would be custom-designed and outside of the standard, which is counter to the idea of an open document standard, Knowlton said.

So we’ve agreed that this approach is technically feasible. We’re also agreed that extending ODF outside of the standards process is not a good idea. So the obvious solution is to extend ODF within the standards process. So, let’s do it! What are we waiting for?

There is no reason why, by a harmonization process, all of the functionality of Microsoft Office cannot be represented on a base of ISO 26300 OpenDocument Format. I personally, as Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF TC, stand ready and willing to sponsor such a harmonization effort in OASIS. So let’s start harmonization now, and avoid further divergence.

My read of NB comments indicates that there is a sizable bloc, perhaps even a decisive bloc, of NB’s who are in favor of harmonization. Lets push on this and articulate a roadmap along the lines of the proposals by France and New Zealand, that accomplishes this.