KDE's ISO Delegate Votes Yes to Office Open XML

This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".

The KOffice developers confirmed their support with Cyrille Burger saying, "The level of detail in this standard is very impressive, previous standards we had to deal with were less than half as expansive in their documentation. Working with a standard that makes such good use of previously established standards was also a main reason for the quick implementation in KOffice".

KDE founder Stephan Coolio was unavailable for comment because he was changing nappies.

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Comments

by Andrey (not verified)

Yes here in Costa Rica -as Fede said- it is called "El día de los Santos Inocentes" or "Innocent's Day" and for us is exactly like April Fools. I wasn't even thinking in April Fools!

by leo_rockway (not verified)

The day of the innocents is a religious day. It has its origins on the masacre by king Herodes I, who ordered that all babies borned in Judea be killed, hoping that he could get rid of Jesus. The babies are the innocents (which in Spanish also means gullible).

BTW, I read about ooxml in slashdot and didn't believe it, but I couldn't be 100% sure. Reading that KDE embraced ooxml made me realize this wasn't true at all.

by BrokenSoul (not verified)

At first it was hard to believe that the KDE ISO delegate dared to do that, but it's clear that he's been flirting with M$ since long time ago.

http://kiso.sourceforge.net/info_me.php

Sad. Very sad... :(

by Bobby (not verified)

For 10,000 dollars? Even prostitutes are asking for more :D :D
For April Fool's Day not bad but tomorrow it might be a reality, a nightmare that haunt us.

by Bart van Deenen (not verified)

Man, I really was worried for a moment!

by Adb (not verified)

...fools.

sucked.

by Bardok (not verified)

Come on! In Spain today isn't fools' day... I coudn't believe whay I was reading... I could only think: "oh god! that donation is a bribe! Don't you realise?". But thanks god I realised today is Aprils Fool...

by anon (not verified)

This is a very funny april fool's joke here, but it's also a blow to the GNOME foundation who actually supported OOXML standardization not long ago!
http://www.linux.com/feature/121930

by Kostumer (not verified)

GNOME = Politics (isn't that why the project was started in the first place? now they seem to be taking a move away from freedom, go figure. Politics are shady matters =))

KDE = Technology

by mimoune djouallah (not verified)

at first glimpse, i thought that kde is becoming more pragmatic and accepted the obvious, whether we like it or not, open xml is here to stay, no need to say that Microsoft has a near monopoly in office marketplace. i am just wondering how much time will take before we have a working support for open xml in koffice.

friendly

> i am just wondering how much time will take before we have a working support for open xml in koffice.

Well if you start now, and implement a whole page of the spec every day, you should be finished by 2024 (6000+ pages divided by 365 days in a year).

Good luck with that :)

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Probably 2048 -- you'd have to implement it twice: once the spec and once the variant Microsoft uses themselves but haven't documented.

Considering that GNOME and OOo already have functional OOXML support, does this mean that the KDE developers are incompetent compared to the GNOME and OOo developers that it would take KDE developers so long to implement?

Somehow I doubt you are correct in your estimation of how long it would take.

Incompetent? Hardly. Underfunded? Definitely.

by Cyrille Berger (not verified)

Please define what you call functionnal. And which spec have they implemented ? OOXML from MSO, ECMA OOXML or ISO OOXML ? All of them having differences and some incompatibilities.

Why can't we just take their code and just modify it. That's the spirit of FOSS. No need to reimplement everything.

I doubt you ever looked at OOo code, or ever actually tried to reuse a non-trivial amount of code that wasn't explicitely designed for that. I don't know about OOXML, but the filters for .xls and older word formats in OOo are known to be of unmaintainable code quality and complexity, not separated from the rest of OOo and often not even documented in English (but in German).

by BrettlMaster (not verified)

And thanks for KDE not going the 'Icaza' way with regard to OOXML

by Leiteiro (not verified)

This is unexpected, specially after his opinion some time ago http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-ooxml-as-standard-is-big-deal.html

What changed?

by Leiteiro (not verified)

bah, April fool... nvm.

by fhd (not verified)

Darn it, this made me realise how open I am to influence.

Reading the first lines, I was like: WTF. When reading on, I began to think: "maybe OOXML is not all that bad if dot people say so". The anonymous donation made me realize it's April 1st.

And the really puzzling thing is, that the only reason why I visited the dot right now was to see wether there's an April's fool on :)

by Darkelve (not verified)

As an independent open standards developer, I find it sad that the focus is totally on OpenDocument and OOOXML.

My own superior standard (it counts 600.000+ pages and was written in a mix of a dozen dying languages, including that one in Mexico) which I submitted to ISO last year was never mentioned, despite obviously being of better quantity and quality.

And to think that I even bribed the stepdaughter of the hairdresser of the cousin of the baker of ISO's chairman.

The world ain't fair.

by April (not verified)

"despite obviously being of better quantity"

you made my day!

by uh-oh (not verified)

I certainly appreciate the humor, however given the way things have been going over the last few month, it is really hard to tell whether all of today's news are due to the date on the calendar, or some of them are actually real.

Like all those references to the approval that is supposed to be announced today or tomorrow. One would hope it's all just a sick joke, but knowing how things work in the business-as-usual world, it could all be for real.

by as usual (not verified)

"in the business-as-usual world"

In the end it would be a good thing when one could open an OOXML-document in Koffice and could safe a document as an .ooxml-file in Koffice. for the sake of interchange with the poor Windows-users. i mean, today i am exporting everything to .pdf. it is all about interchange. the spice must flow.

by Rafael Fernánde... (not verified)

LOL, nice. On our culture fools day is not 31 of March. Was funny though. :)

by Rafael Fernánde... (not verified)

I meant 1st of april, not 31 of march.

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

Timezones dude.

Timezones.

by Anony Moose (not verified)

Had me for 10 seconds wondering "what the hell" :-) I liked it :-)

by sim0n (not verified)

Nice one haha :-D

by freedomfighter (not verified)

That does it. I'm switching to GNOME now. I hope you guys are happy. Corruption ftw, eh?

by Anonymous Coward (not verified)

...Is highly overrated :)

by Odysseus (not verified)

...that we would sell out so cheaply, c'mon, it should be at least $12,000!

When you collect, just make sure they don't try palm off some worthless 3rd world currency on you like Zimbabwe dollars or Canadian dollars, and count your fingers afterwards. Say high to Bill and Steve for me.

John.

P.S. Can you put my cut in my Swiss account, you have the number from last time...

by Sebastian (not verified)

and avoid US-$ as well... :)

by max stirner (not verified)

Funny!!

Considering the dire quality of the standard, the pattern of national body votes could actually be considered a "corruptibility to US corporate influence" index and should probably be published as such!

APPROVAL - our Lords are in Redmond, consider us the 51st US state!

ABSTAIN - we're honest enough to -almost- say its a pile of shit, but we've read about Hiroshima in the school textbooks

DISAPPROVE - not part of the neoliberal economic order, some degree of sovereignty. At least as far as technical standards go..

by Moderator (not verified)

Insightful

by Max (not verified)

... that I hear it's true. OOXML seems to be on it's way to be accepted. :(

btw. that April fools was better than google's. So you did good Jonathan :)

by polrus (not verified)

that was a good one :) it take me a good while

by Ben (not verified)

I knew you were joking as soon as you mentioned $10,000 but I thought it was a clever satire on the OOXML process rather than an April's fools day

by RV (not verified)

Don't you guys realize that today in the US is April Fools? The hint was in the comment ""and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source...", implying that MS made the contribution.

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS

by TinHo Mak (not verified)

But the post is 31st March, not April, it can't be April's Fool.

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

Timezone of the Dot is Pacific Time, the story was posted at midnight UTC.

by Ronald Daniels (not verified)

I'm hoping that KDE now starts to adopt WinForms, Win32, and other Microsoft technologies, since then KDE would kick ass.

by Stalwart (not verified)

The only problem with this article is - it's not an april fool anymore. OOXML is ISO standart as of today =(

by M (not verified)
by Kapri (not verified)

The problem with these jokes is that they're funny because they are far from being real.

"Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said the approval of Microsoft's Open Office XML is a sad day for ISO and the computing public."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2222

Once you think about it, is actually really sad.

by Kapri (not verified)

The problem with these jokes is that they're funny because they are far from being real.

"Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said the approval of Microsoft's Open Office XML is a sad day for ISO and the computing public."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2222

Once you think about it, is actually really sad.