On display, in The British Museum, is an unimposing chunk of rock known as the Rosetta Stone. Discovery, and later translation of this stone, enabled a better understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs. There may be a time in the future when archaeologists struggle to read our digitised documents, trying to break through the secret, patented, propriety format they were saved to disc, with.
In our own time-line we have all used software to create documents, whether they be spreadsheets, word processing documents, or something else. We save the file, and think no more about whether we will be able to read them in the future. Some of us may have experienced the headbanging anguish of trying to open a document many years old. It was written using a piece of software that is no longer installed on your computer. Microsoft Office will not open it, and the hunt through the drawers, and cupboards, for the old install discs proves fruitless, and, in most cases, the discs fail. That is assuming you still have a floppy drive on your new, 21st century PC.
Then there are the problems of sharing this data with other computer users. A document written in the latest Microsoft Office format is often not readable by PC users who have older versions of the software. It is one way Microsoft can force everyone to upgrade their software.
Can we ensure that the priceless information stored on all the computers in the world will be able to be read in the future, if not by archaeologists, at least by future employees in the organisation, and those they share the documents with? Several states in the USA, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, California and Oregon, have legislated that all State Government documents must be in a open document format. They are joined by countries such as France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Malaysia and India.
Luckily file formats exist that will suit their needs. The files are stored in Extensible Markup Language (XML), basically a format that self defines the contents. It is like each file is its own Rosetta Stone.
There are two, main, competing methods of using XML, available. Open Document Format (ODF), is an open format that any software company is free to use in their products. The development of this format is guided by an organisation called the Organisation for Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS). It is currently available in products such as OpenOffice.Org and Star Office. The list of companies behind ODF is impressive, Red Hat, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems, to name a few.
Microsoft is behind the other format, Office Open XML (OOXML). As with all Microsoft products this is protected by patents, and therefore can hardly be considered an open format in the true sense of the word. To use this format, a license fee would have to be paid to Microsoft.
Microsoft is currently waging a campaign to ensure that it is OOXML that wins this format war. They are, of course, worried about market share. Microsoft has always tried to lock users into their products, and using proprietary file formats is a good way to achieve this aim.
Microsoft is not making it easy for users of ODF to share their files. They are being very slow to support this format in their Office software, so much so, that a plug-in for Microsoft Office is being provided by the OASIS group. It remains to be seen which of these formats will win the battle. It is more than likely that both formats will coexist.
- Rosetta Stone – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- ODF: The inevitable format
- The growing problem of accessing old file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the National Archives head says.
- AA dumps Open Office, buys Microsoft for ‘compatibility’
- Microsoft Office is not cheaper, but it is almost impossible to work out the actual cost of open-source, says CIO
- Why you should (but may find it difficult to) use open formats for all your files.
- Technology called Information Rights Management, combined with copyright law and Windows Vista, give Microsoft the tools to hold users’ data hostage in Office, says Cory Doctorow.
- Is it game over for OpenDocument? Probably. We’ve been expecting Massachusetts ITD to publicly revise its open formats mandate to include Office Open XML (OOXML) ever since Louis Gutierrez resigned as CIO in early October 2006. That was as clear a signal that ODF had failed in Massachusetts as needed by anyone in the know.
- Microsoft Will Support ODF If It Doesn’t ‘Restrict Choice Among Formats’
- Microsoft has suffered a setback in the quest to have its Open XML document format approved as an ISO standard.
- The lock-out begins for Office Mac users
- Mass. holding tight to OpenDocument
- The Cradle of Independence Rolls Over for Microsoft
- Massachusetts Falls to OOXML
- State by state, Microsoft responds to creeping threat
- French gov’t report recommends standardizing on ODF
- Belgian government chooses OpenDocument
- ODF in Denmark
- Openize Denmark, Parliament Orders
- OpenDocument wins more fans
- OPENDOCUMENT VS OFFICE 2007 DOCS
- A view of ODF from the other side
- Open Document Format published as ISO standard
- ODF Alliance formed to support OpenDocument format
- Why Redmond feels so threatened by ODF
- Microsoft to make Office XML format an ECMA standard
- Microsoft opens up on file styles. The software giant is developing tools that allow users to save important documents in rival formats
- Coming soon: ODF for MS Office
- Sun’s ODF plug-in can play an important role in broadening interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.
- Ubuntu Chief: Microsoft Invests Big $ On OpenXML Standards Effort
- Patent threat looms large over OOXML
- US panel set to say no to Open XML –for now
