| Novell's OpenOffice.org is not a fork |
Dec. 05, 2006
Wakey, wakey, let's look at the facts, shall we? I've heard from several people in the last day that Novell's support for Open XML in OpenOffice.org 2 represents a fork in the code. Ah... no, I don't think so.
What Novell is actually doing is its throwing its support behind the Open XML/ODF Translator project. This project is under the BSD open-source license.
These translators can then be used to read and write to Microsoft's Open XML format.
Novell has also said that it will make these translators available as plug-ins to Novell's version of its OO.o (OpenOffice.org) product. The company will also release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source, and will submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. Thus, all OpenOffice.org end users will eventually be able to share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as a result of the documents maintaining more consistent formats, formulas, and style templates across the two office suites.
So, let's see. The translators themselves are under the BSD license, which is about as open as you can get. The "glue" code will be submitted to OpenOffice.org, so it will end up under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) with the rest of OO.o.
Now, you can argue that Open XML, the standard itself, isn't enough of an open standard. While Open XML does come with a Microsoft patent covenant that the boys from Redmond "will not seek to enforce any of its patent claims" that may be connected to Open XML, Microsoft didn't go as far as Sun has with its own patent promises about ODF (Open Document Format).
The key difference, according to Andrew "Andy" Updegrove, a partner with Boston Law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP, and the editor of ConsortiumInfo.org, is that Sun placed its covenant under the control of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), whereas Microsoft is the sole authority on its covenant and what it will cover in the future.
Still, this is a matter of open standards, not open source. In his blog entry entitled, "Novell, ODF and Castles in the Sand," Updegrove notes that what Novell is doing will be providing "'bi-directional' [support] (as in, you can easily convert Word documents and ODF-based documents back and forth), as well as the news that Novell (unlike Corel) will support document interchange between presentations and spreadsheets as well as text documents. I also see that all of the most important functionality (text) will be available imminently."
Updegrove continued, Novell "will be making its plugin codes available to the OpenOffice.org open source community, meaning that others can make use of these capabilities. Presumably, with the cooperation of Microsoft, this will allow very high quality document conversions - the next best thing, I assume, to Office supporting ODF itself. Will it support conversion of all 200 Office borders? I expect not, but I'm not too troubled, either (how many borders do you use?)."
He continues: "Is that a fork? It doesn't seem that way to me, and I don't see Microsoft asserting any patents against code that it encourages its partner to contribute to OpenOffice.org."
From where he sits, Updegrove sees "a circle of legitimacy of ODF (Open Document Format) that continues to widen, with more bridges being built all the time between ODF software packages -- and more importantly, between ODF-compliant software users and users of other software. More and more vendors are concluding that they can't avoid making ODF functionality available to their customers, and also that they need to make it more and more easy for ODF-formatted documents to coexist easily in a world that is transitioning away from proprietary software and documents based on proprietary formats."
Thus, Updegrove concludes, "I can't look at the Novell announcement as being anything other than further good news for ODF."
That's pretty much how I see it to. I know some people can't stand the idea of Novell working with Microsoft, but, again, if you look at what's actually been said and done, so far the deal seems to be working out well for Novell, open source, and open standards.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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