MS Word flame war (was: Re: RFC archival format)

Douglas Otis <dotis at mail dash abuse dot org> wrote:

> The concern is about the application accepting document instructions 
> and text and then generating document output.  When this application 
> is proprietary, it is prone to change where remedies might become 
> expensive or impossible.

The implication is that open-source software is inherently stable and 
commercial software is inherently unstable.  That's hardly a safe 
across-the-board assumption.

> The evolution in hardware tends to force the use of different 
> operating systems which may no longer support older applications.

"Tends to," "may."  Sounds like FUD to me.  I haven't had any trouble 
using Word 2003 under XP to read documents I created in Word 95 thirteen 
years ago.

> IIRC, I did work back in the early 90's that contained Russian written 
> using Word 5.  Conversion proved difficult since proprietary fonts 
> were needed.  Document recovery then required a fair amount of work to 
> rediscover the structure and character mapping.  Trying to get any 
> version of Word to generate plain text outputs consistently always 
> seemed to be a PITA, that varied from version to version, and never 
> seemed worth the effort.

All work involving Cyrillic text was hit-and-miss fifteen years ago. 
Every word processor or other application had its own custom format. 
Many used KOI8-R, some used CP866 (or worse, CP855), a few used ISO 
8859-5.  PDF files depended entirely on the embedded font to convey 
meaning; copy-and-paste from PDF was useless.  Compatibility problems in 
the era before widespread Unicode adoption were hardly limited to Word.

> When people are required to input Word Document "instructions" into 
> their Word application, they might become exposed to system security 
> issues as well.

"Might be."  More FUD over security.  Has anyone suggested *requiring* 
users to employ mail-merge-type macros as part of I-D preparation, or is 
this just a general flame against Word?

> The variability of the Word data structures makes identifying security 
> threats fairly difficult, where many "missing" features seem to be an 
> intended imposition as a means to necessitate use of the vendor's 
> macro language.

Translation: I don't like Microsoft.

> Inherent security issues alone should disqualify use of proprietary 
> applications.

Hey, maybe if I say the word "security" enough times, people will get 
scared and not use Word any more!

> It would be sending the wrong message to mandate the use of 
> proprietary operating systems or applications in order to participate 
> in IETF efforts.

Who ever proposed to *mandate* the use of Windows or Word to write an 
I-D or otherwise participate in IETF efforts?  The proposal was to ALLOW 
users to prepare I-Ds using Word, and translate the output of Word into 
a format the IETF tools and RFC Editor can deal with.  Nobody ever said 
anything about *mandating* any of these tools.

> After all, lax security often found within proprietary operating 
> systems and applications threatens the Internet.

Pure and complete FUD, despite the real macro threats of a few years 
back.  The Internet will not fall apart if someone uses Word, feeds the 
output into a Word2RFC tool, and submits that output to IETF.

> Open source includes more than just Linux, and the exposure of 
> requiring proprietary applications or operating systems would affect 
> nearly all IETF participants that maintain existing documents or 
> generating new ones.

Nobody, but nobody, has proposed requiring Word or Windows for IETF use.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ