China launches UFO document software
Anything to be different, or something
MAINLAND CHINA'S government will promote home-grown office productivity software in at least six ministries this year that uses a uniquely Chinese document format standard.
China calls its new document format standard the Uniform Office Format. The office software uses XML and has been developed entirely within mainland China. It is available in two software packages, Evermore Software and Redflag 2000.
Although China's new office document "standard" uses XML like the already ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF) standard and Microsoft's still unimplemented (and very likely unimplementable) but wanna-be ISO document format standard Office Open XML (OOXML), it is not an internationally documented or accepted (much less ISO approved) standard. So, rather than calling it UOF, we'll just call it UFO, as in, Unidentified Flying Office documents.
The first three Chinese government bureaus that will deploy China's as yet nonstandardised UFO document software are the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPC (roughly, China's Foreign Ministry), the Ministry of Commerce, and the State Archives Administration.
Ren Jinhua, an Information office director, described some of the Chinese government's bureaucratic machinery for deploying the UFO software. He reportedly also said that it might in the future become mandatory for other Chinese users.
Readers are welcome to speculate about why mainland China's government has apparently supported the development of, and is deploying, this UFO office documents software, which does not implement an ISO-approved document formats standard, is not easily translatable into any standard document formats, will likely tend to further the continued isolation of its Chinese users from international commerce, and will probably never gain much if any user base outside mainland China. µ
L'Inq
China
Tech News
Comments
No Chinks in China's Arsenal
"Readers are welcome to speculate about why mainland China's government .."Added advantageous internal security springs immediately to mind, Egan, and an advantage with which they can leverage external value.
Why?
Well, maybe it's because the Chinese government doesn't give a rat's a** if they are interoperable with the rest of the world, and besides, with the Western "democracies" settling on a common format, using a different format will ensure that the "intelligence" agencies of the West will be unable to handle the Chinese format because it won't be in the "proper" format. :-)Why should the Chinese care? There are more of them than there are of us.
Hmm . . . .
. . . developed in mainland China using stolen source code, thats my guess. Probably OO with a new UI and a smattering backdoors. Needless to say, but I won't be using this software if it is ever marketed.get the picture?
Maybe the same reason they have been making secret military bases, practiced shooting down satellites, dumping weapons in Africa for genocide, putting lead on our children's toys- they want to take over the ice cream industry?What about asking them?
The reasons? Instead of dumb speculation, why not try asking them? Too much effort when slagging off according to accepted prejudices is all that is required of reporting about document formats?Hint: the reasons the Chinese give are 1) in UOF the element names are in Chinese and therefore are useful for developers, and 2) there are many Chinese features which Western software (particularly ODF but also OOXML) do not support yet. I don't know how the UOF people can be faulted with either of these.
Why is UOF seen as a failure of the Chinese rather than a failure of ODF to support Chinese requirements adequately yet? Or a failure of OOXML? And why see it in terms of failure at all, rather than just as a shortcomings or steps along what is a very long road?
The problems that non-Westerner stakeholders have have in participating in Western forums such as consortia (and even ISO, even though it is utterly geared towards formalized internationalism) are serious and difficult, and shouldn't be dismissed. International standards are difficult. (And I wouldn't include having a Chinese person who works for a US multinational as necessarily representing non-Western stakeholders!)
By the way, your aside about IS29500 OOXML being unimplementable is not really supported by facts: for example, Alex Brown's smoke test found only one problem with so-called conformance mode, which was an attribute that required "true" or "false" rather than "on" or "off": that is hardly a difficult implementation problem...
If it's like everything else that comes from China
then we will all probably be using it and thinking it's pretty good. And cheap too.Rock on China, please keep the good times rolling and the prices low.
China "all your code are belong to us".
Stolen Technology
Microsoft gave the Chinese Government the source code in good faith to show China there were no hidden back doors for American intelligence agencies. How does China repay Microsoft? They STEAL the code and now will attempt to market their software world wide.Readers are welcome to speculate ...
Well, I would imagine it's because it does not implement an ISO-approved document formats standard, is not easily translatable into any standard document formats, will likely tend to further the continued isolation of its Chinese users from international commerce, and will probably never gain much if any user base outside mainland China.But that's just my opinion. ;-)
Future-proof
Maybe the format is especially suited to compile personal info on citizens, in which case the NSA and us government will probably adopt it too.(And no, obama, if elected, won't stop the NSA, they will overwhelm him with vague necessities and he'll fall for it all and will start to support even more spying.)