Groklaw - ODF Alliance Tests Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 ODF Support - Finds Serious Shortcomings

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:15:57AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Part of the problem is that ODF left certain parts of the format
> unspecified and Microsoft exploited that deficiency. Apparently there is
> no formal ODF spec for spreadsheet formulas, which frankly to me seems
> like a very serious flaw. Microsoft is able to produce an ODF
> spreadsheet that is completely incompatible with, say, OpenOffice Calc,
> while still maintaining  compliance with the spec.

Except they managed to not be fully compliant with the spec.

> IOW, interoperability in theory but not practice. Some observers suggest
> that this is just standard practice for Microsoft, which essentially did
> the same thing with POSIX a decade or two ago.

Absolutely.  Just compliant enough to get the checklist item the US
government required at the time, and once that item was removed, the
next version of windows dropped it (so I think NT4 was the last posix
"compliant" version).

> However, arguably Microsoft has a point in asserting that the ODF spec
> has flaws, and its exploitation of the flaws appears to be solid
> evidence. It is not completely true that the current problems indicate a
> lack of MS support for ODF. What MS is not supporting are the
> non-standard implementations -- for things like spreadsheet formulas --
> found in OpenOffice and other apps. In this case the Excel extensions of
> the spec are no less "legitimate" than the OOoCalc extensions.

They also didn't support password protection which IS in the spec among
other things.

> Having said that, there are far more vendor-specific flaws in OOXML --
> but that's not what's at issue here.

Yep, that's something else.  No one currently implements that "standard".

-- 
Len Sorensen
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