| Open Document Foundation closes up shop |
Nov. 11, 2007
Over the last several weeks, the Open Document Foundation has taken back its support for the Open Document Format, and has confused many of its friends. It has now closed up shop.
The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium's) CDF (Compound Document Format) for its name-sake ODF (Open Document Format) had left friends, users, and the W3C itself completely puzzled as to what the Foundation was up to.
Over the weekend, the Open Document Foundation Web site was shut down except for a single page. On that page, the organization said farewell with the message: "The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. is closed. We sincerely wish our friends and associates in the OpenDocument Community all the best and much success going forward. Good-bye and good luck."
The page was signed, "ge." Gary Edwards was one of the three founders of the Foundation. Sam Hiser and Paul "Buck" Martin (aka Marbux) were the others.
The public found out about the Foundation's surprising turn-around from ODF in June when Hiser announced on his blog that "We at the OpenDocument Foundation have been displeased with the direction of ODF development this year. We find that ODF is not the open format with the open process we thought it was or originally intended it to be."
In his blog post, Hiser continued, "Holding aside any tiresome stridency about motivations and possible malicious intentions (everyone wants to be successful and has their own set of objectives and view on how to accomplish them), it is important to recognize that ODF -- the format we have today along with the community structure which sponsors its progress -- does not adequately respect existing standards and does not address the market's requirements for a single Universal Document Format with which any and all applications can work on an equal basis."
Not everyone who was a Foundation member agreed with this decision. For example, open source developers and ODF supporters David Wheeler and Bruce D'Arcus seeing the Foundation's new direction, left the Foundation and are continuing to support ODF.
In ODF's place, Hiser and his companions are now supporting CDF as a universal format. In a July guest editorial at LinuxWorld, Edwards and Marbux, explained that they believed ODF, as a practical substitute format for businesses and governments had been sabotaged by Sun, and to a lesser extent, IBM.
Sun has historically been ODF's greatest corporate supporter. IBM has long supported the format. In September, IBM formally joined OpenOffice.org and immediately contributed a great deal of code to the project. OpenOffice is easily the most important office suite with full ODF support.
In an August eWEEK interview, Edwards argued that Sun and OpenOffice are part of what they see as ODF's interoperability problem. His argument ran that Sun insists that the development of ODF be limited to those features supported and implemented by OpenOffice.org. Edwards, on the other hand, favors the admission of Microsoft's Office-specific extensions, if that's what's required to achieve complete conversion fidelity.
In July's LinuxWorld editorial, Edwards and Marbux called attention to "the big ODF application vendors' refusal to support da Vinci, which was the only internal MS Office plug-in whose developers were willing to go the ODF Community route former Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez desired."
"The da Vinci plug-in could be released within a few weeks if the only goal was to add virtually perfect native ODF support to MS Word. But that is insufficient to establish interoperability with other ODF applications such as OpenOffice.org. That is because Sun Microsystems, which absolutely controls the OpenDocument standard development process, has programmed OpenOffice.org to destroy all but two of what section 1.5 of the ODF specification refers to as 'foreign elements and attributes,'" continued the pair.
Da Vinci is the Foundation's own ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office. Edwards claimed in May 2006, that the Foundation had completed its da Vinci testing "for all versions of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plug-in installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plug-in renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office."
Then, in September 2006 Edwards said that da Vinci wouldn't be ready until January 2007. After this was reported, Edwards wrote to Linux-Watch, saying, "I've never given you or PJ [Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw] or anyone else a delivery date for a finished ODF Plug-in product. It's not even a product! It's a solution designed to meet the migration to ODF needs of Massachusetts."
He continued, "I've got the challenge of meeting conversion fidelity requirements way beyond what any other non Microsoft application has ever achieved. If OpenOffice.org hits 85%, and the magnificent Stellent filters hit 93%, I've got to hit 99.99%. The same as Microsoft's MSECMA, MSXML, and RTF conversions."
"I've got the challenge of funding this incredible effort and delivering the solution at no cost to Massachusetts, California and the EU/IDABC. That's no cost, as in $0.00."
The mention of a lack of money for da Vinci -- not to mention the lack of support from major vendors for this particular proprietary approach to ODF/OpenXML translation -- may be a key reason for the Foundation's reversal of course on its ODF support. Da Vinci was never finished.
In the Foundation's Google page, which remains up, the group announced that it was ceasing work on the da Vinci ODF translator. Instead, the Foundation, or to be more precise, some of the people behind the Foundation are working on the "the da Vinci class of CDF plug-ins for Microsoft Office."
The group also stated that the new converter is "only provided to the public as a proof of concept." At the same time, though, the group claims, "We are however able to make full, high fidelity 'round trip' conversions to the W3C's CDF -- meeting critical market requirements."
In the meantime, for OpenXML/ODF translations, Sun has released its own ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office as a supported product. In late October, the SourceForge OpenXML/ODF Translator Add-in for Office project, released its first translators for Excel and PowerPoint, and version 1.1 for Word documents. This open-source translator project has the support of Microsoft, Novell, and numerous small Linux vendors.
What happened to da Vinci on its way to becoming either a product or a solution?
In part, it simply never fully arrived. In addition, the OASIS ODF technical committee, which is in charge of the ODF, disapproved of specifications that the Foundation claimed were needed in the forthcoming ODF 1.2 standard for da Vinci to work.
Specifically, the Foundation wanted ODF to include a way to preserve a document's metadata. Indeed, Marbux claimed that Sun doesn't want ODF to be a truly interoperable standard because of Sun's "destruction of its foreign elements and attributes" in the ODF.
A typical response to this argument from other Committee members is this one from Patrick Durusau, a markup language expert and former Foundation VP: "If you want to offer some constructive suggestions on how to deal with this issue I am sure everyone would be interested. However, jumping up and down and saying that xml:ids must be preserved isn't helpful. It really doesn't matter how much you want that to be the case if you can't offer any reasonable way for a standard to require it."
It should also be noted that the ODF Technical Committee is supported by Adobe, Sun, IBM, Novell, and Intel. It also includes individuals and members from open source organizations such as KDE. For the Foundation, another contributing factor in its rejection of both ODF and its Technical Committee, is that it felt under-represented on the Committee in favor of corporate members. In a Technical Committee message from June, Marbux wrote, "The Foundation has reluctantly concluded that ODF can not be salvaged within the OASIS framework because of big vendor hostility to application interoperability."
Andrew Updegrove, a partner with the Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove, and the editor of ConsortiumInfo.org, said, "It's a shame that a group that was expressly formed for the purpose of supporting ODF is now actively working against that standard. As far as I can tell, they are alone in supporting their approach, and have not gotten much notice. There are many thousands of supporters of ODF around the world, and many open as well as proprietary products that have implemented it. I think that there is far more to be gained by building on the global efforts already so well advanced than by pursuing another path."
Updegrove continued, "What I think that Gary, Sam and Marbux are missing is that standards are, by definition, consensus tools. No one has to adopt them, so they have to work well enough for enough people that enough vendors actually implement them. Gary and company didn't get what they wanted, and decided to back another standard instead. There's nothing inappropriate about that, but there is something very unrealistic, as I doubt anyone sees CDF the way they do. Standards are one string that you can't push, unless you've got monopoly power--and needless to say, that they don't have."
Looking ahead, can the former Foundation members' turn CDF into a universal document translator format? According to Chris Lilley, a W3C employee, in a discussion printed in ConsortiumInfo, the answer is no.
Lilley indicated that the W3C is puzzled by even attempting to use CDF. CDF, Lilley explained, is an "interoperability agreement," mainly focused on two other specifications -- XHTML and SVG. WICD (Web Interactive Compound Document, pronounced "wicked") would work better for exporting, but that's only suitable for viewing, not editing, documents. In short, CDF, even with WICD, was not created to be, and isn't suitable for use, as an office format.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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