Interview with Sun's Florian Reuter

silentbob4 writes "Mad Penguin is running a series of three interviews with people in the trenches working to bring you OpenOffice.org 2.0. The first of these interviews, with Sun's Florian Reuter, covers some of the differences between the truly open XML found in OpenOffice.org 2.0, and the closed MS Word ML found in the upcoming Microsoft Office 12. He also discusses the importance of simple end users in the process of improving the code with bug reports."

Re:OK, so what IS different?

[Uhlek]

Problem is the Microsoft XML format is proprietary to Microsoft. While the standard is "open" -- as in published -- there are restrictions as to who can implement it.

Problem comes 5-10 years down the road, if/when an organization chooses to move away from Microsoft. Maybe they're going to OpenOffice.org 5.0, or maybe they're going to GoogleOffice. Or maybe a whole other developer has come along and revolutionized the office application suite.

But, you're stuck. You have 10 years of data that's locked into Microsoft products, what do you do? Convert everything -- and hope everything comes through unscathed? Buy Office and the new product for everything? Create a "legacy application gateway" with a few copies of Office accessable via Citrix or VNC?

Also, there's interoperability with external organizations. Right now, to do business with the federal or most state governments, your business must use Office to be able to exchange data. No ifs ands or buts about it.

With OpenDocument, this isn't an issue. No matter what product you buy in the future, it can work with OpenDocument. Doesn't matter what product a client or customer uses -- if it's OD-compatible, you can exchange data.

Re:OK, so what IS different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is the Microsoft XML format is proprietary to Microsoft. While the standard is "open" -- as in published -- there are restrictions as to who can implement it.

You mean just like MS Office reference schemas [microsoft.com]?

Re:OK, so what IS different?

[ozmanjusri]

What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format.

It's not just what problems are created, it's what opportunities are lost. Automated creation of text, drawing, spreadsheet, etc documents using non native tools (such as databases or scripts) is simple with OOo formats for example, but with Microsoft's proprietary format, I'm limited to using the tools Microsoft provides.

Re:OK, so what IS different?

[ajs318]

I've actually RTFA, and I'm still at a loss about exactly _what_ is better about OOo's XML Schema, or wrong about MS's.

OK, first things first; let's have a little lesson on what XML is. XML is not really that big a deal. All it means really is that the less-than and more-than signs are reserved symbols; one writes constructs such as <foo> ..... </foo> to indicate a bounded block of type foo, or <bar /> to indicate a single instance of type bar. The meanings of different foo and bar are what constitute a schema. The HTML used for web pages is actually just a bastardised dialect of XML. End of lesson.

The issues are nothing to do with the schema itself, but rather to do with openness. The OpenOffice.org data format was conceived so that anybody who cares can write applications that speak it, as a right. By contrast, the Microsoft format is closed. If you want to write an application that speaks it, you have to ask Microsoft; they can charge you money for telling you, withhold bits if they see fit, and withdraw the privilege anytime. And if you do anything that Microsoft told you not to do, they can punish you.

What really interests me is exactly which concrete problems should I expect with MS's, that supposedly aren't there if I use OOo's format. If I try to retrieve that data in 5, 10 or 100 years, as in his answer, exactly in which way is OOo's format better?

You can expect the problem with Microsoft's format that only Microsoft -- and a chosen few appointed by Microsoft -- are allowed to write programs that can retrieve your data once it has been saved in Microsoft's proprietary format. OpenOffice.org's format is better because any competent programmer can help you to retrieve that data, without being beholden to anyone.

Exactly _what_ kind of data gets more benefits from his schema than from MS's in that context?

Any data that belongs to you rather than to Microsoft.

In which way, and for what concrete reasons does he foresee that MS's own converters (which so far still import Word 6 documents with no problems) will break down and cry like little girls if fed a Word 12 document some 10 years from now?

That is not the problem. The problem is if, five or ten years down the line, you decide for some reason to move away from Microsoft. There are any number of reasons why you might want to do that: for argument's sake, let's say MS have kept cranking up the cost of Office to the point where you now have to decide whether to try to save money on software licences or lay off staff. Now someone else's document converter may well not be able to handle Microsoft's proprietary format correctly. Your data might become inaccessible! There is also a very real possibility that Microsoft may not exist 10 years from now, and they may take their proprietary formats to the grave with them.

In five, fifty or a hundred years, any competent programmer will still be able to obtain the schema which will enable them to make sense of an OpenOffice.org document, because no one person or organisation controls that schema. No such guarantee can be made in respect of Microsoft's schema.

Or, let me put it this way. Imagine you buy a new car. The bonnet is fastened shut with a tamperproof seal, so only authorised dealers can make repairs -- and they have to use the manufacturer's original specified parts and procedures. You have to buy petrol from the manufacturer's specified filling stations {who will check from time to time that you haven't been tampering with things that do not concern you}. When the car reaches the end of its life {which may come sooner than you think, since the manufacturer can order their service centres not to repair it on a whim} you have to replace it with another one from that same manufacturer; otherwise everything and everybody you ever carried in that car will be left in limbo somewhere, and not fit properly in your new car.

Patent license

[zonix]

Well, that's exactly what I'm asking. If the XML Schema for it is published, why can't I write a simple XSLT to convert it to some other format?

There's one important point most people seem to have forgotten so far. IIRC, to have the MS Word XML schema you have to sign a patent license. In essence what this means is that Microsoft want to retain control over how you use your data (ie. how you handle your documents, parse them, etc.). This should concern you. It goes against the purpose and the openness of XML, in my opinion anyway.

The questions people should really be asking are:

• Will Microsoft use this to limit how people implement programs to interoperate with MS Word documents?
• Will they use it to charge people for specific uses of Word documents? E.g. use by third party software? Or even your in-house developed software?
• Why do they need the patent license?

Or am I just spreading FUD?

z

Re:OK, so what IS different?

[anandrajan]

I found this comment on groklaw [groklaw.net] which itself is a comment on Brian Jones' (Office manager) blog. I believe that it gets to the core of the issue. I don't think it was ever answered. So yes, the patents are licensed royalty free but not in perpetuity.

"MS can stop granting the license when they want. At that point, anyone who already has a copy of the software I wrote that infringes the patents in question can continue to use it. Perhaps new versions could be distributed to those same people (since they already have a license). I cannot, however, continue to distribute my open source project, because only MS has the right to grant my potential user a license. That is, MS can effectively kill (or at least place in stasis) any project that gets big enough to pose a threat. This is at the core of every OSS license - the right to grant the same rights I have to the recipients of my software. "