OpenDocument supporters respond to Burton Report

"There have been a few good responses to the Burton Report (you must register to download), the document that debates the relative merits of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Ecma 376 Office Open XML (OOXML). While this document is supposedly “unbiased,” a few writers found reason to contradict that stance."

http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/opendocument-format-response-to-the-burton-report.html

For example

"1. Page 5 says “…[L]ibraries and large businesses, faced with storing and using years of Microsoft Office legacy documents, will prefer OOXML, as OOXML can more faithfully recreate the look and metadata (such as spreadsheet formulas) stored in Microsoft’s binary file formats.”

This statement confuses file formats and applications. Surely, OOXML cannot faithfully recreate the look of anything. It is a file format, not an application.

Microsoft Office is the application that interprets OOXML, and it can also render legacy binary file formats, except when Microsoft decides to remove support for them, as Microsoft recently did with Office 2003 SP32. There can be further problems when Microsoft decides not to support legacy features, such as when they removed support for Visual Basic scripting in Office 2008 for the Macintosh3.

The authors fail to note that no other application supporting OOXML has been able to faithfully or fully recreate the look of Microsoft’s legacy binary documents. So the statement that OOXML – a file format – is the solution for rendering legacy documents is simply false." "