Microsoft Investing In "Open Source" Lab In Philippines

jaromil writes "Following up its cozying up to OSCON, now Microsoft is launching its first 'open source' lab in the Philippines, paying for a huge media coverage. From the press release it seems they are also advertising the issue of 'interoperability' to outnumber one of the strongest features of open source in Asia: recycling old computers. Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far? :)"

Re:GPL

[Richard_at_work]

I hope not - there are other free software platforms out there that could be prevented from using anything if it was GPLed.

Re:GPL

[gbjbaanb]

this isn't a lab like that - MS has several similars labs, eg the performance lab I attended once.

This is a place where you can bring your open source apps and test them working against MS products. eg, if you made an Outlook clone, you could bring it in and test it against Exchange.

Of course, it also allows MS to have a sneaky look at the competition.....

Interoperability is not Open Source vs. MS

[harlows_monkeys]

There was an interesting study recently published on word processor interoperability. Here's a link to the abstact. [ssrn.com]. A download link for the full paper is there.

They found serious interoperability issues among open source programs, and serious interoperability issues among closed source programs. The best interoperability was between OpenOffice an MS Office, ironically.

This study tested two things. One test was to make a basic ODF word processing document in OpenOffice, and then check how well other programs (free and non-free) could handle that document. The other test was similar, but using an OOXML document generated by Word 2007.

Here is the conclusion from the paper:

This study sought to investigate interoperability for various implementations of ODF and OOXML. After all, to receive the perceived economic and technological benefits, there is a need for multiple independent, interoperable implementations. The results clearly indicate that both ODF and OOXML implementations need to improve interoperability.

This study only tested a small subset, basic word processing features, of what is needed for multiple interoperable implementations. Additionally, this test did not consider the writing performance of implementations, only the read or import function was tested. Nevertheless, the only implementations of ODF that provided good compatibility with OpenOffice were the Microsoft Office plug-ins. Similarly, the only implementation of OOXML that can provide good compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 was OpenOffice with the Novell plug-in. A number of other implementations of ODF and OOXML such as Wordperfect, Google Docs, and KOffice lacked good compatibility.

It is surprising and ironic that the best implementations of ODF are when using Microsoft Office. Similarly, the best implementation of OOXML is OpenOffice. (Pages provided similar results but lacks the ability to write OOXML, a needed feature for an interoperable implementation.) The domination of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is especially troubling for users of other operating systems, such as Mac OS and Linux. These users do not have a choice when using ODF or OOXML. The results here show that developers need to work together to improve this situation.

Our results show that while the best implementations may result in formatting problems, the worst implementations actually lose information found in pictures, footnotes, comments, tracking changes, and tables.

Supporters of both ODF and OOXML have suggested improved conformance and interoperability testing, there has been little progress on this front. Governments and other interested organizations need to encourage this testing. Without more pressure and funding for testing, the promise of ODF and OOXML will be lost. Instead, users of these standards will be locked into the dominant implementations of OpenOffice for ODF and Microsoft Office for OOXML.

There is still much research and testing to be done. Each of these implementations is continually being improved and needs to be continually reassessed. Future research needs to expand the tests to spreadsheets and presentations. Research also needs to test both reading and writing documents to determine if features such as styles and tracking comments are working properly. This work serves as a first step in providing empirical data on interoperability for ODF and OOXML. It is hoped that this will serve as a wake-up call to governments and developers to improve the current state of interoperability for document formats.

Überoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

Bill Gates, 1998, in a memo to the Office product group.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#proprietary-ie-capabilities [wikiquote.org]

http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf [slated.org]

Re:Why the Philippians?

[xtronics]

You got it - Linux is getting big in the Philippines. The school system has started using it.

link [computerworld.com.au]

link2 [google.com]