For your kind info (sorry for the cross posting)
-----Original Message----- From: ganeshtk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:44 AM To: lina Subject: MS, IBM fight to own office docs heats up MS, IBM fight to own office docs heats up 8 Aug, 2007, 0152 hrs IST,Harsimran Singh, TNN HYPERLINK "http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2263811,prtpage-1. cms" \nPrint NEW DELHI: The fight between worlds biggest IT companies Microsoft and IBM-Sun Microsystems combine has landed on Indian shores. Come September 2 and India faces a deadline: to vote for making Microsofts Open Office Extensible Markup Language (OOXML) as an ISO standard for electronic documents or not along with 123 other countries. But the Bureau of Indian Standards, which has to submit a vote on Indias behalf seems clueless, despite less than a month to go for the deadline. Microsoft and rival ODF (Open Document Format) alliance led by IBM & Sun Microsystems are hurling accusations at each other. A meeting on the issue has been called on Wednesday by BIS. Sun Microsystems country director (government strategy) Jaijit Bhattacharya said, About 160 technical issues have been identified with OOXML. OOXML does not seem to address its design goals. Moreover, no Indian organisation or institution was involved in the development of OOXML. If we do not have any say in the development of a standard, we lose out on the technological sovereignty. We do not see any standalone implementations of OOXML by an Indian firm unlike the ISO ODF standard. Microsoft, however, counters Suns claims. A meeting has been called on Thursday by the government in which both parties will meet. Microsoft Indias national technology officer Vijay Kapur counters Sun, OOXML is an open standard and its specifications are fully documented. There is no royalty charged and it works on a covenant of not to sue. It does not recourse to any proprietary information held by Microsoft. OOXMLs design principles are based on the old binary format which is known only to a selective few, decided by Microsoft. There is no clarity by Microsoft on the same. OOXML is also not fully interoperable as the full fidelity of an Open Office (ODF) document is not maintained in MS Word or other OOXML based word processors, adds Mr Bhattacharya. ODF advocate IIT-Delhi assistant Prof P Vigneshwara IIavarasan clarifies the issue, The politics behind the battle is clear. Microsoft wants to retain its over 95% market share in word processing documents in the garb of OOXML. But Sun Micro and IBM want to grab a pie of it and prevent Microsoft in its plans. He, however, confirms Sun Microsystems claims that a MS Word document is not fully interoperable with Open Office (by ODF) and hence not an open standard. A converter or translator has to be downloaded to convert one format to another. Experts say that adopting OOXML will make India locked into a particular vendor. **** -- ubuntu-in mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-in
