The staff at Groklaw has never really tolerated any dissent when it came to OOXML. They spent years advocating against OOXML only to have OOXML emerge not only stronger, but also with an ISO stamp of approval.
Today they tried to insinuate that my involvement and opinion on OOXML was somehow the result of the 2006 Microsoft/Novell agreement.
Their conspiracy theory falls apart as our active involvement on OOXML goes back to the year 2005, 11 months before there is any agreement between Microsoft and Novell.
My interest in the file format interop problem goes back to 1998-1999 when I wrote the Gnumeric spreadsheet and both Michael and his brother started contributing a plugin for reading and writing Excel files.
My involvement with OOXML started in 2005, when Jack Messman was still Novell's CEO and the company was in the middle of various legal disputes with Microsoft. Not the best environment for collaboration between companies.
ECMA was starting a new working group to look into standardizing OOXML, and since we were already members of ECMA (as part of our work on C# and CLI) I recommended that we should participate in the effort to come up with solid documentation that we sorely needed for improving OpenOffice's interoperability story. ECMA had been great in particular for the CLI, in large part thanks to Sam Ruby at IBM who pushed for the file format to be specified (the original drafts did not document the actual assembly file format, only the instruction set).
In 2005, one of our major goals was to make Linux suitable for enterprise desktop deployments, and interoperability with Microsoft protocols and file formats was key to this strategy. We were the major contributors to OpenOffice outside of Sun (and perhaps still are) and what mattered to us was to get a good spec we could use to fix customer issues that prevented us from deploying the Linux desktop to enterprise customers.
For years, we had been reverse engineering Word and Excel. This was our chance of getting important information on the file formats. Our work in this area today benefits every OpenOffice and Gnumeric users.
So we attended and participated in the ECMA OOXML meetings starting with the initial meeting on December 15th. I blogged about this publicly on November 2005, and so did Novell which on the same month Novell blogged about our participation on the Open Invention Network (we were founding members) and was actively promoting OpenOffice.. The minutes of this meeting and every other meeting ever since are available to all ECMA members.
It was our team that pushed to get the entire Formula Spec in OOXML back in 2006 (those 700 pages of formula specs, the ones that actually make spreadsheets work) as well as filing piles of issues as we prototyped the work with Gnumeric and OpenOffice. And all of this happened before any Novell-Microsoft agreement.
My involvement after setting up the initial participation was superficial, as the actual hackers working on OpenOffice and Gnumeric took over (Jody Goldberg and Michael Meeks). These were important years for Mono, and that is where my energy has been going since about 2002.
The 2006 agreement with Microsoft did not impact much of my work, despite Mono being something where interop could really be helped.
The ECMA work on OOXML brought hackers together and allowed our teams to interact as people looking for some shared goals instead of interacting as foes. In my experience face-to-face meetings, like the ECMA working groups, help smooth out human relationships that might have been poisoned by preconceived biases.
But the interop agreement certainly allowed other collaborations and meetings in other areas with Microsoft, for example, it lead to various components used by Mono to become open source, and to our Moonlight/Silverlight collaboration.
So two full months into having signed an agreement with Microsoft, I wrote my first pro-OOXML post, largely based on a news report that I felt was misguided. We had been working on this at this point for a year, and clearly people with no actual office experience had already formed an opinion.
In retrospect, had I known that double standards, hypocrisy and character assassination would become the tool of choice of the anti-OOXML crowd I would not have said a thing.
The energy that went into stopping OOXML could have been better used in actually completing the formula spec for ODF, which almost four years later is still not part of the ISO spec. In the eyes of the ISO world, it remains an "implementation specific" work. But "advocacy" is a little bit like watching the TV, it is relatively easy. While actually working on improving open source, or open standards is equivalent to going to work. It requires skills, time and longs hours of difficult work (particularly if you are working on the OpenOffice code base).
As for the March agreement of 2010, it is absolutely brilliant. Microsoft is funding our OpenOffice team to develop open source code that will improve the OOXML import and export capabilities and we help drive the OOXML standard forward based on the experience that we will gain from doing this work.
If you do not like us doing this work, there is an easy solution for you: do not open or save files in OOXML format with OpenOffice.
See what I did there Trevor? I found out what bothered you emotionally, decomposed the problem, and BAM! I provided you with a solution. It is called teamwork, Trevor.
Michael Meeks from our OpenOffice team provides more color as he was the one actively working on this.
Posted on 21 Dec 2010