President George Bush said something like "You are either with us or against us". when he started the invasion of Iraq. In the the battle for one and only one standard for document formats, it has been just like that too. You are either with us or you are against us. Most bloggers and other participants has been either pro or con. Even the journalists has been force to take side in the battle. One standard versus Microsoft. Nothing in between.
I have seen only one participant in Denmark taking an odd approach (odd should not be understood as weird). One person only has taking the position: Two standards is OK if they can reach the expectations. Other participants has had either "Microsoft sucks" or "Microsoft rules" as their basic opinion. And I count my self in here as well. I'm not neutral, because i think they sucks.
This guy deserves some respect, because he has been able to stay relatively neutral in the debate. He has my respect. He has been angry with us on the ODF side, because he thought we became too much anti Microsoft. But he stayed calm and picked up the challenge to make a technical comparison on his blog. Unfortunately it's in Danish.
He did what we all talked about: He implemented it. Both standards ! He has been critical in his description of both ODF and EOOXML and he finds none of them perfect.
He started the debate on the website http://version2.dk but later he opened his own blog on http://idippedut.dk/
To Jesper Lund Stocholm i would like to say:
Your posts deserves either your own or a professional translation into English. I think they could be a very important input int the debate internationally.
Del.icio.us
5 comments:
Hi Leif,
Thank you for your kind words - it is nice to see that the controversy in Denmark has not completely polarised the IT-sector.
For each article I write I am actually considering whether to write it in Danish or English. My blog was initially created to make a Danish, technical, platform for the discussions taking place here, but I am aware that quite a few of my articles could have an international audience too. The problem is that if I start writing in English, my blog will just be "another OOXML/ODF-blog" out there and maybe loose the "Danish connection". As the debates continue here in Denmark, I actually think it is important to have information available in Danish about what we talk about.
But due to your post I will consider it again.
:o)
Just wanted to give you a heads up on my current activities. I am involved in the "pilot-projects" defined by ITST and we are currently working on defining specific lab-tests and analyzing the outcome of the projects from the various parts of the government.
As soon as I get the time I will begin blogging about some of the results - and these posts will be in English.
:o)
@Jesper
I'm looking forward to see more from you ;-)
Can you tell us some more about how you are involved ind the pilot projects ?
Leif,
My "job" there is as a OOXML technical resource, but of course my knowledge of ODF comes in play from time to time as well.
We are a bunch of parties from the IT-sector that are working with ITST in evaluating the results of the tests performed around Denmark. These projects and the reference for them are based on the infamous B103-decision by the Danish government. We are looking at the findings and are trying to evaluate what the cause of the problem is, e.g. could it be
* The used converter is bad
*Problems with interoperability across platforms
* Incompatibility between formats
* Studid users :o)
We are testing some simple documents and some complex documents (only text-documents) and they are tested in simple scenarios and complex scenarios. Some tests are trying to imitate an "in-office process" and some are trying to imitate a process that involves sending and editing documents across departments and software-bases.
Examples of this could be the following trail:
ODF -> OOXML -> DOC -> ODF
or
DOC -> OOXML -> ODF
or
ODF -> DOC -> OOXML -> ODF
Some of the findings are quite complex and for the ones we don't have an obvious answer to, we have set up two lab-test-weeks, where we will dig more in depth into these and try to figure out what is happening. We have actually already identified at least one bug in a converter ... so I'm quite optimistic.
:o)
Leif,
As you might know, the Danish national IT and Telecom agency has released their reports/recommendations yesterday to how the Danish government and associated branches could work with OOXML as well as ODF. This means that I have made the articles I have written about the tests public. You can find them on my blog
:-)
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