I’m always looking for opportunities to promote open source in general (and OpenOffice.org in particular) outwith the “FOSS ghetto”. The day job is not exactly a hotbed of open source (at our last corporate Technology Conference, Steve Balmer gave a video keynote about what a great customer we are). So when I noticed that our in-house Perspectives periodical was looking for contributions, I was happy to offer my services. In exchange, they kindly sent me off today on a feature writers’ workshop. I hasten to add this was before I submitted my contribution

Anyway, half way through the afternoon, I took a call from David Meyer at ZDNet looking for an instant reaction to the news that Microsoft have succeeded in getting ISO accreditation for their proprietary OOXML file format, in opposition to the ISO accredited ODF used by OpenOffice.org. I duly gave him a few quotes. To be honest, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Microsoft has succeeded, as one illustrious industry guru predicted two years ago.

Where does this leave OpenOffice.org? as usual, we will support whatever file formats our market present and future requires. In an ideal world, this means our engineers would just read the OOXML specification and code it up. Alas, as many commentators have pointed out, the OOXML spec is not fit for purpose, and following that route simply wouldn’t give a usable result. To quote from an engineer who works on this stuff for us and knows what he is talking about:

…there is a fundamental problem for all filter developers: the mandatory part of the OOXML spec will not be enough to implement proper MS Office filters but these filters are what the market wants. Developing an OOXML filter is totally useless as there is no application on this planet that follows this spec verbatim.

So, it’s back to the old game of five man years’ or more reverse engineering what Microsoft’s software actually does, rather than following the incomplete and inconsistent dog’s breakfast called the OOXML spec - which the world’s highest technical standards body has just blessed with an ISO number. Ho hum.

And how was the writing course? well, apart from troubles with the word processor I had to use, I thought it was a day well spent, and my piece on open source is much improved as a result. When the article comes out, I’ll let you have a look (copyright permitting) and you can judge for yourself. Meanwhile, keep on looking for similar opportunities outwith the ghetto, and never underestimate the realities of dealing with the world’s most successful monopolist.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 8:40 pm and is filed under OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org, The day job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.