RMS: Putting an End to Word Attachments

sombragris writes "I've spotted in NewsForge a very interesting editorial by none other than RMS himself on the subject of getting rid of those annoying MS Word attachment that people send. The essay is worth thinking and doubtless worth implementing." I've found that KWord and Abiword both did a fine job of reading Word files - it's the being able to Save As Word where things get messy.

Comments

Bernie will sue

[CrazyClimber]

How can we get rid of Word attachments without incurring the wrath or Bernie Shifman? If he can't send out his resume, he'll probably sue...

because the mob is polite...

[eddy the lip]

We may be able to give "don't send Word format" the status of netiquette, if we start systematically raising the issue with everyone who sends us Word files.

What, you mean completely ignored?

OK , now what?

[crotherm]

I just cut and pasted the email reply suggestions into MSWord. Now how do I send it out?

Misreading the title

[Pac]

I've read the title too quick, and for a moment I thought Good Old Rick had decided to go all way and become a desert hermit, as in "RMS: Putting an End to World Attachments"

Re:unfortunate ?

[Sloppy]

Most Word users, I expect, want to write letters to their mothers, not recompile the application.

I would think that most Word users don't want their mother to catch a bunch of viruses. What kind of scumbag would train their mother to accept Word documents?!

Re:Microsoft XML

[bfree]

<font style='0010101' size='man' kern='385420' content='00101110101000111000000010100101010100'/& gt;
</style>
I can't wait

Re:damn microsoft word...

[Graspee_Leemoor]

Heheh, Mr. Troll, for someone who doesn't like Word you sure got your value-for-money out of its thesaurus features...

graspee

Re:Give as good as you get.

[PD]

Good idea. I just tried that with my boss. Now I have another question: do you know anybody that is hiring a UNIX/C++ programmer with 12 years experience?

Re:unfortunate ?

[Tackhead]

> Most Word users, I expect, want to write letters to their mothers, not recompile the application.

And while we're at it. Stallman's solution is " All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."

Sure. Why don't we "ask" them to stop top-posting, sending HTML mail, and clicking on "snow_white.txt.vbs".

(I've been saying "Sorry, I don't do Windows" to .DOC files for years. It hasn't stopped the lusers yet. The worst time was when someone sent me a list of names in .DOC, and then resent it as a column of cells in an Excel spreadsheet. No, they weren't being sarcastic, they were just. that. dumb. To this luser, Word and Excel were the only applications on their computer.)

Re:Give as good as you get.

[isorox]

A few months ago I was introduced to Latex.


Another geek gets laid!

:)

There is (yet another) decent way to handle this

[Srin Tuar]

If you really dont want to recieve or promulgate any word documents, set up your mailserver to filter out all .doc attachments and replace them with a small ascii note:

<<< Word.doc 900k -- file removed by VirusScanner 7.0 >>>

Then anyone who uses the server can honestly reply- "I want to get that document from you, but my virus scanner keeps deleting it, if you could send it as plain text or rtf... "

This directive will fit nicely next to the ones for *.exe, *.vbs, etc.

this is amusing...

[3am]

Okay, I don't necessarily agree with Stallman's point, and I definitely don't agree with his proposed responses to the problem.

But I did run into this ad while checking my hotmail account, and I thought it was pretty funny in light of the current discussion

Re:"a polite reply"?

[marsvin]

Yes, why can't RMS be more like those polite, well-mannered, superb debaters at slashdot?

Sheesh...

True Story

[Global-Lightning]

I once received a email with an attachment.
The attachment was a ZIP file;
The ZIP file contained a powerpoint presentation;
The presentation had a single slide;
The only thing on the slide was a BMP picture;
The picture consisted of a scanned image
Of...
a printed email message!

Re:This is an Open-Standards, not Open-Source, iss

[BluBrick]

The very day that Microsoft starts generating RFCs on the MSWord format, then I have no problem with it in email.

They have submitted RFC's on the MS WOrd format. Their submissions were answered with:

Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we are unable to publish it in its current format. Please resend the attachment as plain text.