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Software Microsoft

UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle 166

Andy Updegrove writes "Long-time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF, for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and on Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It's called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short). How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there's price: Evermore's professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it's clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days' time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen."
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UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:31PM (#24296971)
    The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On the one hand, you have MS (anti-competitive, anti-freedom), and on the other, you have China (anti-freedom, police state). I guess which one is the 'friend' depends on one's POV.
    • by lgftsa ( 617184 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:46PM (#24297157)
      Rule #29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less.
      - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
    • by jesterzog ( 189797 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @07:30PM (#24297499) Journal

      The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On the one hand, you have MS (anti-competitive, anti-freedom), and on the other, you have China (anti-freedom, police state).

      I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?

      I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?

      Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.

      • by Mattsson ( 105422 ) on Wednesday July 23, 2008 @04:36AM (#24300909) Journal

        I haven't used the Chinese versions of MS Office or Open Office, or any other Office suite/applications for that matter, since I have a hard time reading Chinese.
        I've used MS Office to write in Japanese though, and it feels a bit retrofitted...
        But one might think it logical that a Chinese-developed suite would be specifically tailored to work well with the somewhat complex Chinese writing-system.

        Wonder what kind of accusations the creators of EIOffice throw at MS via China's anti-monopoly laws.
        And if, say, MS is forbidden to sell MS Office in China, wouldn't that make EIOffice a monopoly. =)
        But, of course, their anti-monopoly laws might only apply to foreign companies. Not entirely impossible.
        Many countries have a tendency to side with "their own" companies in any international legal struggle.
        Especially when there's a lucrative market to protect from foreign companies and lots of money to be saved on not importing something as abstract as bits and intellectual property.

    • Or more aptly put: The enemy of my enemy is my "friend".

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:32PM (#24296981)

    Coming soon from MacDonald Software [wikipedia.org], the Enterprise Interoperability Evermore Integrated Office release (E-I-E-I-O).

  • by pembo13 ( 770295 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:33PM (#24296989) Homepage
    I can't (yet) think of any reasons for them not to open up (properly) the format so that OO.org can read it.
  • Advantages? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JYD ( 996651 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:37PM (#24297045)
    Seeing as how both ODF and UOF is based upon open standards (based on Wikipedia), what advantages does UOF offer over ODF?
  • The Name (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They should have called it the Uniform Format of Office. UFO sounds way better than UOF.
  • by FlyingBishop ( 1293238 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:44PM (#24297127)

    I hope they also try to ram UOF down ISO's throats. The ensuing chaos will require actual government to step in and impose a standard by fiat.

    Or we could all just go back to using LaTeX. I'd be alright with that. Actually, I learned LaTeX after switching to odf, so I've always viewed LaTeX as an upgrade from odf.

    • by Paradigm_Complex ( 968558 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @07:16PM (#24297365)
      LaTeX, as awesome as it is, doesn't yet have a sufficiently capable WYSIWYG frontend to act as a drop-in replacement for the word processing apps used by a very large number of not-so-savvy people. I use LaTeX and I love it, but it's just not feasible for the masses.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by natebarney ( 987940 )
        There's LyX [lyx.org]. It's certainly different from your standard word processor, so that might be a bit off-putting for "typical" users. But it'd be a heck of a lot friendlier for them than vi/emacs + make. It comes with lots of tutorials that explain in detail why it's different from most word processors, and why that's better. If you haven't yet seen it, I'd say it's worth a look.
        • There's LyX [lyx.org].

          Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.

          • Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.

            LyX has it's own format, yes, but it can also output to simple legible standard LaTeX. It's not a drop-in replacement for things like Word as I was talking about in my original post, but it's most certainly not crap. It's got it's uses. For really complex math functions it gets a bit hard to follow while just typing the LaTeX source - a WYSIWYG for that is really helpful.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        LaTeX will never have a complete WYSIWYG editor, the whole point of LaTeX is that WYSIWYG is clumsy when doing the most detailed work.

    • by Narpak ( 961733 )
      Actually, I guess this is what is being done by the Norwegian government. They have decided that from 2009 all official documents shall be in either, HTML, PDF or ODF; depending on purpose. The idea behind chosing ODF, and open standards, as the official document format for administration and education; is to make information available in a format that as many as possible can read and that does not force the purchase of expensive software. This same principle also applies to students delivering papers onlin
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:51PM (#24297191)

    but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!

    • by JCCyC ( 179760 )

      but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!

      Egg-zaktly. Proprietary => no thanks.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        No one forces you to use a proprietarian office suite just because you use their open format.

    • by achurch ( 201270 )

      but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!

      Really? If it's free, I guess I might as well look into it, huh?

      (Hint: 1/0 == inf; 0/0 == nan)

      • For me, 1 / 0 is error CS0020: Division by constant zero

        On the other hand, 1.0 / 0.0 is Infinity.

        (The precise output might change slightly if you're using csc rather than mcs.)

    • by anarxia ( 651289 )
      Strictly speaking it's +Inf.
  • by Lazyrust ( 1101059 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @06:58PM (#24297247)
    So I take it the UOF standard will allow you to write anything as long as its not political, anti-social or anything about human rights? I wonder if it has its own version of Clippy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy [wikipedia.org]? "I see you are writing an article on human rights. Would you like to see a list of government agencies that are watching you?"
  • 1. Get a team of programmers and sponsor them with big chinese govt. money
    2. Put them to work to get rid of Microsoft
    3. Profit!!

  • I know this is being considered by standards committees, but I was wondering if there's a national security angle to this? Could you slip anything subversive into a standard? I mean, from the defense angle I can see dependence on a U.S. corporation as a huge deal, but other than that...?

    I can see a future where English-speaking users struggle through Chinese software that's badly translated but free and effective nonetheless...
    • by Narpak ( 961733 )
      Well if it is an open standard at least the code can be searched. Which is one of the reason for why some politicians in Europe call for using Open Standards in Administration. If the code is open then the government can make sure the software they use to handle confidential information is not leaking; among other things.
    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      If the standard is open why not READ IT if you are so afraid of it?

      Also you don't need to use their chinese software just because you use their data format.

      But on the other hand if you are so afraid of chinese technology good luck with your next movieplayer, mp3player, tv, receiver, ...

    • by fritsd ( 924429 )
      Sure. You could try to destroy the economy of the country using the standard and Sarbanes-Oxley lawsuits ;-)

      Rob Weir's blog post on YEARFRAC() [robweir.com]

      or faulty mathematical functions:

      Proposed Disposition We agree that, as defined, the CEILING function does not follow the generally accepted practice for negative numbers. However, in order to maintain compatibility with the corpus of existing documents that use the CEILING function and rely on its current behaviour, no change will be made to Part 4, Â3.17.7.

  • by speedtux ( 1307149 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @07:53PM (#24297669)

    It's called "HTML" and everybody is already using it.

    • Isn't HTML really really incomplete? And what about the reference implementation? And the fact that every browser out there seems to interpret it slightly differently?
    • by Bob The Cowboy ( 308954 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @08:35PM (#24298039)

      I just threw up in my mouth a little.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
      It's called "HTML" and everybody is already ...

      Sure. If you believe that I have a fifth: ASCII plain text.

      90% of business documents oculd be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.

      But the PHBs want to use Comic Sans and paste movies into their memos.

      • 90% of business documents could be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.

        But only if they use American English. Or would you please point me towards the cyrillic characters, or the Greek characters, or the mathematical symbols etc within the ASCII specification. I do not think that documents written in English account for 90% of business documents in the world, although that figure might be an accurate estimate for your own country. However, I suspect that your suggestion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and merely offered as a rebuttal to 'HTML'. If I'm wrong and you were seriou

        • by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
          But only if they use American English.

          Or Australian.

          Okay then make it Unicode.

          However, I suspect that your suggestion is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and merely offered as a rebuttal to 'HTML'.

          Yes. HTML is pretty horrible as far as character sets go too. I live in Hong Kong and often have to manually change the default character encoding to be able to view a page in the intended character set.

        • People seem to be constantly using ASCII as a synonym for plain text, not the actual character encoding. So, just imagine the GP meant Unicode instead.

    • Since when has html allowed you to write and format on A4 represented pages. What a stupid suggestion.

    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Except it sucks and doesn't do WYSIWYG, stupid web designers tend to belive it does though.

  • State level NIH (Score:5, Informative)

    by gzipped_tar ( 1151931 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @08:00PM (#24297743) Journal

    is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.

    Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email's encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.

    Usually the "invented-here" standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode

      This is the same around the world, and has nothing to do with NIH. Unicode did not exist until the early 1990s, so in 1980 when the Chinese government standardised GB2312, there was no way they could make it compatible with Unicode. Since then, GB2312 has been extended with som

  • by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 ) on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @08:05PM (#24297787)

    You don't get to be in a position where you're the CEO/President of a company who's standard is "blessed" by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough...corruption/nepotism...cough).

    More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101.

  • by tjstork ( 137384 ) <todd@bandrowsky.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 22, 2008 @11:54PM (#24299361) Homepage Journal

    What Microsoft could do is, start offering doses of opium free to the Chinese with purchases of Windows. Then, if the Chinese government tried to stop it, Microsoft could claim foul to our government, who would land troops and suppress the Chinese government enough to ensure that the opium was distributed so that people would turn to Microsoft for more opium.

  • According to what I've googled, this is based on what was originally called "RedOffice", the Chinese fork of OpenOffice.

    If UOF is based on a product derived from "RedOffice", that means the format is likely to have similar limitations to ODF and OOXML, both of which are based directly or indirectly on Word's document structure.

    The problem is that Word's document structure is awful. It's not a hierarchical format in any meaningful sense, the only nestable structure is the table, and the basic block is a full

  • Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law

    Does anyone else find it ironic that a (supposedly) Communist country has passed an anti-monopoly law?

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