Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Lie in, slugged with the babes, while J. shopped. Lunch. Bert popped over for tea and help getting into his house. Out to the heath with H. N. and E. for some sledging fun down the footpath (the only smooth piece to pick up real speed on) - much excitement for a while, followed by cold-feet induced misery and return home.
Interested to see Groklaw's take on Novell's work on interoperability.
- Firstly Groklaw are once again doing a good job at pointing people at things of interest, and having this sort of discussion in the open can only be good. Clearly having a first draft of history to hand is useful, though naturally I'd like to point out some of the more drafty pieces.
- The context seems to be of a transcription of a Microsoft document from a trial, which outlines Microsoft's response to IBM's ultimately un-successful assault on Windows via OS/2, one part of which appares to be to break compatibility and/or interoperability between Windows and OS/2. This is then transposed to a concern, that Microsoft today wants to create incompatibility in the Office domain, and exploit it to their advantage.
- Of course, those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and caution is useful, however - the Novell association is via a published agreement whereby Microsoft helps to fund the development of improved interoperability between the Free Software desktop world, and Microsoft Office - which at least on the face of it appears to be the opposite of creating incompatibility.
- Why would they do that ? and is Novell per-se evil for writing this software ? In part, it is true that having a second implementation of OOXML is helpful to improve the standard, and make it more acceptable. Given their need for that, I prefer a Free Software second implementation (available to all under the LGPLv3) instead of a proprietary alternative. Novell has different needs: to serve its customers, who have real interoperability requirements which this work helps to meet.
- Another, interesting charge is that this creates private interoperability between only Novell and Microsoft's Office suites at everyone else' expense. Indeed by reading the repeated mention of things like "Novell OpenOffice productivity suite" you could easily be annoyed into that conclusion.
- Of course, this is not the case. Since we cannot promise something that other people deliver - it is necessary to phrase everything in terms of an abstract Novell Office product; obviously. However, all of our code is publicly available to others under the LGPLv3. Furthermore, there is no private or special information we have on the standard or implementation beyond what is published and public.
- There is also concern about implementing Microsoft's extensions to OOXML which are published and covered by the OSP (a hard requirement for us to touch them). This extension mechanism attempts to provide a forward and backwards compatible way of serializing both an extended version of a feature, and a compatible fall-back version. The alternative is fairly clear - breaking forward compatibility and/or dropping data on the floor. Implementing this, unarguably, makes a Free Office suite's interop. seem better, for all the cases where a feature is not supported, and the extended object not edited. Presumably that lets us compete more effectively, until such time as the last feature gaps can be closed. For feature gaps in the reverse direction using the same extension mechanism can potentially let MS Office users edit parts of an OOXML document, without destroying ODF specific features embedded in the document. It is not clear to me that the alternatives - loosing data, or permanantly freezing the feature set are better for anyone.
- There are a few amusing pieces - of the Pope-is-Roman-Catholic variety: that Microsoft wants partners to show up to and participate in related standards forums for example. Emphatically, Novell's presence does not imply uneqivocal support for any standard, and we give our candid opinion, and demos of Free Software in those situations. Finally, there is the historic chestnut about bing.com returning no hits for openoffice; which appears to have been related to a robots.txt configuration issue on openoffice.org, rather than some hideous, partisan, product specific censorship attempt.
My personal conclusion: an interesting article (for me at least) on the Windows and OS/2 background. However, making Free Software interoperate with proprietary products is not per-se evil. Though it brings some risks it brings enormous benefits to our customers and users. Our position on formats is unchanged with ODF as our default file format, and abstaining on the OOXML standardisation issue.
Papers committee IRC meeting for GUADEC/Akademy 2011, Lydia over in the evening.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2010-12-21: Tuesday.