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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.
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it
Most Word users, I expect, want to write letters to their mothers, not recompile the application.
Hogsback
Isn't PDF a secret format too, eventhough there are readers for linux?
You don't need email with Word attachments. The problem is having such a format be so widespead that it interferes with normal communication, like email. I am a UNIX network engineer that has been bitten *many* times by the 'please send a resume as a Word doc'. That is difficult if you don't run Windows at all.
Though I generally feel RMS isn't an effective speaker, he definitely has a point here. Honestly, do people really need Word for the majority of text documents? Is everyone sending emails with tabular, image-embedded documents? I think not.
Open-source is already marginalized.
... not just Open Source advocates.
Word documents, along with other proprietary formats, especially ones which may or may not be able to be opened with future software, are a bad idea for information transfer.
It's a stupid, terrible, dumb standard which Microsoft revels in because it helps to ensure their position and sales.
It behooves everyone who uses computers to compose documents and share information to break the current standard
This, I believe, is RMS's point. The fact that he has Open Source advocates' ears is a fact of reality, not the ideal.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
I don't think that calling Word "a secret proprietary format" (true as it may be) will make much sense to the average Windows user.
A more general issue is that all of the examples provided are political in nature.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
Educating people about the political issues surrounding proprietary document formats isn't always appropriate in a business situation. If I need to ask a customer to use a format other than Word, I also need to be able to do it in a non-alienating way. I think that Stallman offers some good suggestions, but the specific examples he provides wouldn't work well in some social contexts.
That is, it should be possible to read and edit the same document with different open-source tools [since there is no chance that we all use the same] without loosing neither text, nor formatting or meta information (like indexes, cross-references, review marks etc...).
Ciao
----
FB
No.
RMS' main problem with Word format is that it is non-standard, and most people probably don't care. But that isn't the only problem that format has. The other major problem it has is the same thing you'll find in most MS formats: it contains too much power. In order to support Word format in a Word-compatable way, you have to support the scripting language and virus capability too.
And that is a Bad Thing, even if you don't give a damn about open vs closed formats. Getting people off Word format is a good idea for everyone except for anti-virus software vendors.
So if RMS' goal seems unrealistic because it's too idealistic, by all means, just be pragmatic instead. And the pragmatic thing to do is say goodbye to MS Word's file format.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How can it be a standard when nobody knows what it is and it keeps changing? If it were a standard, then there would already be "good, free implementations." Instead, software developers, open source and otherwise, have to keep writing almost-good-enough filters to load and save the documents. While RMS' political arguments typically make my eyes glaze over, it's stupid to author a document without taking into consideration whether the recipient can read it.
While the premise of your argument may be unfortunately true, the suggestion simply won't work because Microsoft won't let it work. That's why they keep changing the format and don't publish the spec in the first place.
This is a meaningless point. The fact that a specific subset of users, however large, cannot get at the source has no bearing on its importance. Even though I personally can look at and understand [some] source, I would never be able to look at it all. The value is that I know that there are multiple people looking at and improving the source that I'm not looking at, and doing it from an end-user perspective, not a software-producer perspective. I may not be a kernel hacker, but someone else with my hardware is, and I benefit from the improvements he or she makes to the kernel. "I don't recompile applications" is not a reason to not use open source software.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
It's obvious you didn't read the article.
RMS is suggesting that supporters of free software, when they receive an attachment in Microsoft Word format, request the attachment be sent again in a non-proprietary format such as HTML or ASCII text. He provides three boilerplate replies, mostly polite and one includes instuctions.
No where in the article does he ask people to stop using Word, nor does his suggestion limit their choice of wordprocessors.
In his suggested reply text, their is only a passing mention of GNU/Linux in the first and no mentions of Linux/UNIX in the other two.
Please take your ignorant posts elsewhere.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
That said, Stallman is proposing a particularly counterproductive way to go about it. When I receive a file I can't open, I send a polite message to the effect of, "I can't read that file format. Please save the file in RTF format (Select "Save As.." from the File menu, and then choose Rich Text) and resend it. In the future, please send me files that way, so I'll be able to open them right away."
That has the advantages of a) not confusing the secretary or supplier who doesn't even know that there are different file formats with some political rant about Kenya, the Microsoft monopoly, bytes and freedom, b) doesn't convince a more knowledgeable recipient that Linux users are rabid, socially dysfunctional loons and c) is the way a decent human being behaves.
Richard Stallman probably doesn't realize that when the rest of us receive a Word attachment, it's not from a reporter seeking our views on Free Software and appreciating his tantrums as a little added color for his article, it's from a coworker just doing what any normal computer user does.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why study software engineering? Because 90+% of software work is done in custom applications anyways. There are far more jobs available writing order tracking systems and machine control systems than there are writing commercial software, especially now that there are only four or five companies actually doing that.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
And by the way, you shouldn't be so quick to underestimate Microsoft's morals/motives. They're monopolistic and nosy and untrustworthy, granted, but they do make good products that are easy to use and featureful. It's naive to believe that they are into just screwing the customer over with every successful revision. If they really were that stupid and antipathetic towards the people paying the bills, I doubt they'd be the largest software company in the entire world.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
How hard can it be to find a computer with Word installed? Is buying the de facto standard word processor that much to be asked?
In a word, yes.
The only reason you would NOT use MS Office is ideology.
Oh, and ideology is such a horrible thing. Ideology is what prompted colonists to buck taxation without representation too. I guess you think that's horrible as well.
Pragmatism is not such a wonderful thing. You can thank pragmatism for corporations who would rather pay MS license fees than save jobs.
Then I got a job and learnt that tolerance instead of shitty elitism is the way to go. Too bad RMS never learnt that.
Asking people to send plain-text or HTML is not "shitty elitism" -- it's asking people to recognize that they are non-proprietary formats that anyone can view on any platform. How is that bad? Maybe you don't like RMS' phrasing, which is understandable because he tends to devolve into hippy-ish terminology, but the ideas are valid.
Asking people not to send MS attachments, politely, is not fanaticism. It's an attempt to change people's minds. You don't like it? Fine, but don't call it fanaticism, because it's not. It's simply a viewpoint that's different than yours. He has a right to express it. If you think differently, (that he shouldn't express it, not that you don't agree) perhaps RMS isn't the fanatic here.
You didn't learn tolerance, you conformed. There's a difference. Tolerance would be understanding that the world is not fully comprised of Microsoft Word users, and that there are people who do not want to be forced to use Word to correspond with the people who choose to -- or who simply don't think about it at all.
When you send them polite reply that they should send normal email in text format, attach only pre-written documents if there's no way to convert into another format that engineers can read. The next thing you know, you get a review of having a bad attitude and you don't want to cooperate. And you know where that comments come from, right?
It's a royal pain in the butt when you have one Windows machine shared between 20 engineers all working on Unix.
Nice argument, but it doesn't work here, because:
1) Cars require regular maintenance. Word processors don't (or shouldn't).
2) Cars cost hundred times more than word processors.
3) Amortization and used car sale.
More appropriate comparison would be with something like your coffee maker. Many of us use things every day, but we don't care what's inside.
Before you flame me for that subject line let me explain.
.DOCs not as just a unreasoned preference but as an intelligent decision.
Browse Slashdot at -1. How many of those trolls would you not need to beat with a clue-by-four within an inch of their lives to get them to post on-topic? (I don't mean just once or sometimes, I mean forever and always.)
My sister is like this. Every six months I get another chain letter from her ("Re: New Virus Warning" or maybe "Re:Great Internet Snowball Fight 2005"). I do not like chain letters. They are spam; I filter them as such. Each time she sends me a chain letter, I send a very polite "don't do this again; chain letters go to my trashcan"-style response.
Maybe I ought to take a clue from RMS; tell her that I believe chain letters consumes network resources, that massive numbers can become counter productive-- in short all the standard anti-spam arguments. If I present myself calmly and rationally I expect (from experience) that she will stop. If I do a really good job, maybe she'll change her opinion. Take this example from letter 2: "Receiving Word attachments is bad for you because they can carry viruses" is calm, well spoken, and provides a reason that the sender may never want to see another Word file themselves. Spoken in this manner they might see your "opinion" against Word
Something tells me that's the reason my sister keeps sending me spam: I've never really told her why I want her to stop (just been a prick and threatened to trash her emails to me, if in a polite manner).
Do you like Japanese imports?
RMS is a Free Software advocate. Free Software is political because it's about rights and freedom.
And the whole thrust of this article was not "Let's convince people to send us documents we can read" it was "Let's use the issue of not being able to read these documents to promote the wider issue of Free Software".
I happen to disagree with RMS but what he's saying is totally consistent with his beliefs. I would no more expect him to use 'non-political' examples than I would for him to call GNU software Open Source.
Look, I'm a consultant. Staying employed requires that I make my clients happy, and part of doing that is making them feel that doing business with me is an effortless task.
Clients, unconsciously, have a scale in their head that weighs how much they've put into me versus how much they've received back from me. Every little thing I ask them to give me or do for me reduces their perception of the benefit/cost ratio, and reduces the likelyhood they'll use my services again. Really, clients generally want me to come in and pull a completed job out of thin air with no assets from them, and much as they technically understand that they have to give me stuff to work with they don't actually like it.
So, I make a point to bend over backward for the client on the little stuff so that when I do have to ask the client for something, it's always something that's really important to the project. Convincing them to support free software does not constitute "important to the project".
I can just imagine telling a client I can't read their Word file. They'll think I'm incompetent for being improperly equipped and replace me.
Like it or not I'm stuck with Word unless a court breaks up the Microsoft monopolies and businesses start using more of a variety of software. I can give my clients PDFs, but that isn't going to change their file habits anytime soon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This question ranks up there with, "Well, if the problem is that it takes a long time to download stuff over the Internet, why doesn't everybody just get DS-3 lines to their house? Duh."
The reason we're often dependent on the name to determine the type of a file is that so far, it seems to be the only thing that really makes sense. Requiring that an OS read the beginning of a file to determine its type isn't practical: consider the case when you open up a directory full of files, and every one has to be read in order to determine its type. Plus, any files you have that don't conform to your header standard - basically, anything that adheres to any other standard - won't show up correctly. And what do you do when the "file" is actually a block device on a *NIX system?
Using file extensions to determine the type of a file is a good idea in general, that was made into a requirement on the Windows platform. Maybe MS could have gone about it better, but I'm not going to fault them for the decision.
Oh, by the way: if you're really intent on escaping that "legacy" of DOS/Windows, just use Linux (or whatever). You can name executable files whatever you want. (although you may fuck up your terminal when you try to read it using "more". Been there, done that.)
So, my father, who's computer did not come with Office but came with MS Works, should go out and spend another $400 on Office so he can open one email attachment (yes, he can use a viewer, but in this case he was asked to make corrections to the attachment and send it back).
Or, he should steal it?
Isn't politely asking the user to send it in another format, one that they have in common, a better answer?
I use Word attachments every day. I couldn't do my job without them.
Is Word the best thing since sliced bread? No.
Is Word worth using? Yes.
The main thing I use Word for, besides all the fancy formatting stuff which is not even strictly necessary, is collaboration/reviewing. I write professionally, and I need to be able to track changes through several review cycles (editors, client, legal, publication). To my knowledge, no other widely-available word processing solution supports these features, at least not the extent the .doc format does.
But it's still not enough to make me use MSWord for all my editing (although I keep a copy in my VMware Win98 just in case). I use StarOffice 6 and love it. I really only have two qualms about it:
When I first switched to using Linux full-time for work, nobody at the office noticed. (I telecommute, so no one could actually see my desktop.) At the time, I was using Mandrake + KMail + StarOffice 5.2 -- the only one who knew about it was the editor directly above me, and he's cool with Linux. (Even he wouldn't have known if I hadn't told him.)
What I mean to say is: the Word .doc format has a number of very useful features I couldn't live without. But that doesn't mean I have to use Word. In Evolution, I can open Word attachments in StarOffice seamlessly -- and since StarOffice doesn't quite support VB, I've yet to find a document which could cause damage to my system.
I do agree, however, that you shouldn't use .doc files when something simpler or lighter (like plain text) would do the job as well. I'm involved with PR, and I've seen embarrassing things happen to clients when someone stupid converts a Word doc to HTML and posts it on their site. One page had internal tracking info in the title which actually referred to a different project which had been used as source material. On the website, this information was paraded across the title bar.
Tangent: why does Word include a "title" field in the document properties which it never displays to the user? Word's titlebar just shows the filename without path -- for me, a completely useless piece of informaiton, since I often have identically-named but very different files in separate sections of my file tree. StarOffice's title bar (which displays the contents of the "title" field) is much, much better... yet another reason to use .doc, and just not use M$Word.
Hey, sorry to ramble on like this.... just my two and a half cents.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
I run linux because I believe it's a better system. My computer doesn't crash, I don't have to upgrade my system every time a new version is released, and I have massive amounts of free (as in beer) software to play with. The fact that I agree with much of the ideology is a bonus, but wasn't enough to get me over to linux until I found that it suited my needs much better than Windows did.
I think that's why most linux-users use linux. I recall that the reason I first used it was because Windows 95 sucked really badly(crash, crash, crash. Even when I wasn't moving the mouse, even with a fresh, clean install. Call it hardware problems, but every other OS ran without any problems.)
Later I found out it was free and the code was available, and I thought "Cool! I legally own this software!", and it was a bonus.
The person above has apparantly never needed to pay for his software, nor does he have a problem with people being forced to buy redundant copies of software(I use lotus wordpro or Cetus WordPad -- why the hell should I be forced to pay for software I consider inferior, especially when it's so damn expensive?)
It's been a long time.
*sigh*
Elitism is not the same thing as disliking or even hating proprietary software. Please, for the love of whatever God you worship and the good of humanity, buy a fscking dictionary and look words up before you use them. It degrades the language when you don't use it properly.
(And that is probably a good example of me being an elitist language snob, which doesn't bother me in the least. I have a funny idea that people should be able to master their native language...)
RMS isn't asking that people use *Free* Software to send email, merely that they don't use proprietary formats. That's not unreasonable. Granted, RMS would probably prefer it if you did, but that's not the discussion here. Discussion works much better if you limit yourself to the actual discussion rather than trying to re-frame the discussion.
Yes, let's not be software Nazis. Let's all use software that can communicate in open formats so that everyone can use what they want. I agree with that. That doesn't discount Word, either -- it just means that they have to hit "save as" and choose text or HTML. Unfortunately, when someone chooses to send Word docs, they're forcing me to:
A. Give up my preferred program for reading email and open the attachment in another program. (I also despise HTML and PDF for this, but that's just a general hatred of attachments...)
B. Adopt a program I don't like and do not wish to pay for.
C. Not read the attachment.
Asking people to send a non-proprietary format is not unreasonable.
Asking that no one dare bring the topic up because it disagrees with your world-view and because you happen to think that everyone should just conform and use YOUR choice is unreasonable.
Liberty in your lifetime