Eric S. Raymond writes on his blog: "There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too. OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested."
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Member since:2005-07-06
If you know something to be true and people keep saying things that are untrue repeatedly, the response will seem a little repetitive, no?
That's about the size of it, yer ;-).
If people keep saying stupid things about OOXML (always with the attached tagline that Office should support ODF) when ODF suffers from flaws that are identical or worse...
Have you got a list so we can have a sensible adult discussion, or is this just something undefinable that you've come up with proving your first sentence above true?
Watching anti-Microsoft commentators attack is really frustrating because they show that internet culture has brought us once again to the days of Witch Hunting based on irrational beliefs. People ascribe all sorts of actions and motives to Microsoft....
What has this got to do with the specifics of what I wrote? If you have an issue with them, by all means itemise them and let's have an adult discussion.
If Microsoft decides to keep their formats as a hard-to-parse binary that is strongly related to OLE structured storage.......If they try to open up and document their formats and, at the encouragement of the European Commission, try to get it ISO standardized, they are evil for "making a standard just to continue their lock-in."
Errr, they aren't opening anything, because if you'd cared to read anything quoted, including Stephane Rodriguez's article, you'd realise that the BIFF format is still very much a part of OOXML if you want to do anything with it.
Trying to get it ISO standardised is not symptomatic of anything. What's in the format and how it works is far more important than the act of getting it standardised.
For example, the bitmasks used in the font signatures are actually part of a unicode standard for resolving which font to use for runs of text in multiple languages
They're actually used for more than that, but Rick Jelliffe came up with a similar sort of feeble argument. The simple fact is that is is not correct XML because a XML parser will have to do something extra to discern its meaning. Bitmasks have no place in XML (it's hard enough as it is). Although you could conceivably do something with them, that misses the entire point of using XML. Extra processing and code is required that shouldn't be necessary.
Much raging has occurred due to the 1900 date fiasco, though few people actually investigate enough to realize that there's a pretty easy work around
You miss the point. In a new format there is no place for application specific bugs, and no one should have to handle them. Is Microsoft going to do anything to fix this as a result of the ISO comments?
Fewer people still realize that this is only an issue when doing calculations involving the first 60 days of 1900 (not any time before or after that).
Oh, well that's a relief when handling documents with historical dates, isn't it? At least this behaviour is so completely logical that it can be easily handled, and won't be prone to bugs ;-).
Please, people, stick to the facts and to reasonable interpretations.
Have a read of what people have written, quote parts of it and say why it is wrong. I think I read that in a manual somewhere. What you've written here is simply laughable.
I know it's the cool thing to do on campus to flame Microsoft from your dorm rooms for any and every flaw you find in their software or public outlook. But it really is pretty meaningless...
Memo from Microsoft when handling OOXML criticism:
When all else has failed, tell everyone that this is an anti-Microsoft tactic and that everyone hates us. It's really all we have left.
Member since:2005-07-02
Eric S. Raymond has not implemented any significant piece of software?
Then again, what nonsense should we expect from someone called "PlatformAgnostic", but who invariably takes Microsoft's side.
"People who keep saying things that are untrue repeatedly" indeed...except they're OOXML's supporters, not ODF's.
Member since:
2006-01-02
If you know something to be true and people keep saying things that are untrue repeatedly, the response will seem a little repetitive, no?
If people keep saying stupid things about OOXML (always with the attached tagline that Office should support ODF) when ODF suffers from flaws that are identical or worse, then what response do you expect? I'm going to come out and say it: some sections of ODF are over-simplified and not well-designed for making a high performance Office suite (cf. the proposed standards for spreadsheet formulae). Too many things are left out of the base standard (e.g. line formatting rules) and included in app-specific configuration tags. ODF as standardized by the ISO is not sufficient to implement MSOffice's functionality and extending it to support the necessary functions would just break the format and make it into an under-specified form of OOXML (why do you suspect that Microsoft would have to document their extensions to ODF... the doc is "ISO-ODF" as long as it supports the base format... even if all the really useful data is stored in extension fields).
Watching anti-Microsoft commentators attack is really frustrating because they show that internet culture has brought us once again to the days of Witch Hunting based on irrational beliefs. People ascribe all sorts of actions and motives to Microsoft as if they are some gigantic monolith that acts with the sole purpose of doing something evil. If something positive towards Open Source comes out of Redmond (e.g. the open-source code which they produce) it is mocked and derided as just more "platform lock-in." If they produce an exciting product, it is automatically either useless or "done before." If Microsoft decides to keep their formats as a hard-to-parse binary that is strongly related to OLE structured storage, they are evil for "binary lock-in." If they try to open up and document their formats and, at the encouragement of the European Commission, try to get it ISO standardized, they are evil for "making a standard just to continue their lock-in."
And, of course, "OOXML is riddled with technical flaws and is completely unimplementable," is a really often-spouted talking point. This is invariably stated by a person who hasn't implemented any significant piece of software and who has no deep (or even shallow) understanding of the particular techincal flaws which they cite. For example, the bitmasks used in the font signatures are actually part of a unicode standard for resolving which font to use for runs of text in multiple languages (i.e. the current font does not support some character that's right next to it). Much raging has occurred due to the 1900 date fiasco, though few people actually investigate enough to realize that there's a pretty easy work around for someone producing a spreadsheet (there's a date1904 function that gives the correct behavior). Fewer people still realize that this is only an issue when doing calculations involving the first 60 days of 1900 (not any time before or after that).
Please, people, stick to the facts and to reasonable interpretations. I know it's the cool thing to do on campus to flame Microsoft from your dorm rooms for any and every flaw you find in their software or public outlook. But it really is pretty meaningless and I, for one, don't have any respect for those people who are so unbalanced, even as they have have yet to do anything significant with their own lives.