Rob Weir slides ODF and OOXML

OOXML promotion in India?

Indian email.

While this might seem like great news, Mr. Mundie as diligent in avoiding any specific commitments, such as the simple one of guaranteeing that any Microsoft application will be able to export to an openly-published, patent-unencumbered, standard format, without loss of information. While the presentation went ahead to extol the virtues of meta-data, and the use of XML data formats, Mr. Mundie somehow omitted to mention that XML does not automatically imply openness, or freedom from patent restrictions. Finally, it seems to be the opinion of Mr. Mundie that industry standards are needed to keep a check on "unconstrained innovation", which leaves me wondering how Microsoft knows about innovation, unconstrained or otherwise.

Certainly a core issue: what would they offer to ISO member organisations?

Opera's Wium Lieu joins OOXML discussions

Opera's Wium Lie puts it like this:

In this conflict, ISO must answer a difficult question: is there room for both ODF and OOXML inside ISO? I'm not a fan of either format, but ISO should be concerned about the closeness of the two formats. They are similar in function, solving the same problems and using XML as the syntactic foundation.

A matter of principle: coke or pepsi?

Further, the letter claims that "ODF is closely tied to OpenOffice and related products" (bad!) while OOXML "reflects the rich set of capabilities in Office 2007" (good!). A more even-handed sentence might read: ODF is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of OpenOffice, while OOXML is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of Microsoft Office.