Linux Advocacy Town Hall

Following the OpenMoko talk, I attended the Linux Advocacy Town Hall, a meeting of various LUGgers from the Toronto area. One of the gentlemen spoke regarding and passed around a petition that is headed to the Canadian government (Parliament?). Others told of their success or lack of it in forming LUGs in their own area. Unfortunately, just as I was about to speak, it came time to move to the next session. I was going to say something about getting Linux in schools since many parents buy a computer just so their children have it for school work.

Open format war

The last session I attended before the keynote was a fantastic, well-researched, well-presented, and authoritative argument against the ODF vs OOXML movement. Jody Goldberg presented it, and often quite humorously.

Goldberg is quite qualified to talk about the advantages and disadvantages, benefits and drawbacks of both formats. He's implemented them in Gnumeric, an open source spreadsheet application for GNOME. He's also been on committees for both standards.

Most people believe that ODF is fantastic and that OOXML is evil incarnate. However, he believes that it's not so defined.

Proponents of ODF cry foul because the OOXML specification is incredibly long—some 5200 pages. The ODF specification is significantly shorter, at about 700 pages. The spreadsheet formats for either are a subsection of that, with 1100 pages for SpreadsheetML of OOXML, and 290 pages for ODF 1.0. However, Goldberg pointed out that Microsoft documented every little thing in the specification, including minute details and clarification of data types. The ODF specification is not as clear, and leaves a lot to the imagination.

He went on to explain that neither is a perfect standard, and that neither is entirely compatible with other implementations.

Really, Goldberg's point is this: "Microsoft is doing the right things for the wrong reasons. FLOSS community is going the wrong thing for the right reason." Microsoft is doing the right thing by releasing its specification, but is doing it because they want money and they want to satisfy the people who cry for open standards of data interchange. The FLOSS community is pushing the ODF format because it wants its completely open format to be used, when it should be pushing OpenOffice or Gnumeric, and highlighting interoperability via ODF as a feature. He feels that pushing ODF as a means of pushing OpenOffice is wrong.

Goldberg is a realist in the format world. He wants to see programs succeed and people be able to use whatever format they wish to use on what ever program they wish to use. "Talk about the program, not the format," he said.