Walk Alone

A certain banking and finance institution whose name begins and end with i and which also has i as the middle letter in its name seems to have adopted the OpenDocument Format for its documentation needs.

Over the past several weeks, I have been called in to help out with the mysterious ODS files that executives and officers from this company keep mailing in to people in my company and its sister concern - AKA the data analytix department. ODS is nothing but OpenDoc Spreadsheet.

You possibly cannot fathom the thoughts running through my head as I calmly changed the file extension from ODS to ZIP and extracted the archive.

There’s your data in those XML files. Get a Perl script to read them and pump it into an Excel file.

Those were my exact words. But then, I’m the best in Perl they have; rather, the only Perl coder they have. And I am not inclined to look up the Excel modules on CPAN and hammer out a script. In the end, I dragged them screaming and kicking to using OpenOffice.org. But those ingrates use it only for its “Save As …” function!

Its still a beginning…

Quite a few of my friends work in TCS. I might know some code-coolie in Infosys and Wipro too, given the way these companies vacuum up students during on-campus placement drives. I pity them. These companies have just sold their souls to the devil.

Maybe they view it as a case of level-headed pragmatism winning against naive idealism.

But some hard questions need to be asked.

• Do they know what a standard is?
• Were they not aware that ODF got there first with unanimous approval?
• Are they aware that against all definitions of a standard, OOXML can’t be completely implemented by an ISV because of references to Microsoft’s proprietary file formats?
• Were they sleeping while Microsoft subverted the ISO process? Or maybe they are hand in glove with Microsoft? Preferred partners, channel partners and all that sales stuff.

Here are twenty reasons - listed out succinctly because we all know how busy these companies are churning out software - why you should say NO to OOXML.

Tsk. Tsk. My dream employers’ list just grew shorter by three.

Henry Ford said about the Model T :

You can have it in any color, so long as it is black.

Something very similar is often said by FOSS advocates - “You can choose any software, so long as it is FOSS”. I’m of course, referring to the dissent being voiced whenever we hear about some large scale adoption of Microsoft software. Other proprietary software products are also adopted on large scales, but MS has a special place in our hearts .

Are we being hypocrites? If choice is one of the many things FOSS stands for, then shouldn’t we accept others’ choice, even if it happens to be a non-FOSS one?

I think there are more factors than a simple FOSS/non-FOSS choice involved here.

One is interoperability. When you use proprietary software, you are alienating those who have opted not to use the same product. Office 2007 has a lot of features and bells and whistles - not found in any other office suite and very essential in enterprise environments. But if my boss mails me a docx file to read over the weekend, what am I supposed to do? I am supposed to get a plugin for OpenOffice.org which will convert docx to xHTML and display the result. It will be an axiomatic statement if I say office documents will never reach the same level of portability as HTML. But is it too much to expect MS to release just enough specs so their files can be read and edited using other products? Natively? Apparently, yes. And hence, we protest.

Another is standardization. An ODF file can be opened in any ODF-supporting applicaton. While MS says its Office Open XML is really open and has also released a specification document which is in the process of being ratified as a standard, there are questions and criticisms.

You will rarely hear protests if someone ditches OpenOffice for KWord or Abiword. I say, those are real options. That is what we mean by “FOSS gives you a choice”. A pity we won’t be seeing MS Word in the list any time soon.