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Danish Study Recommends Open Standards for EU
PDAJames writes "The Danish government has wrapped up a two-year study of open source's potential for the public sector, and has some pretty interesting things to say. For one, it says that tie-ins to proprietary software effectively eliminate competition for government procurement and are inherently bad. For another, it recommends a public sector-led effort to adopt an XML-based standard document format, either that of OpenOffice or a new one developed by the EU. Will they push ahead with these plans or is it just more talk?"
Why don't the KDE developer stop working on KOffice and support OpenOffice instead?
We need more people working on OpenOffice. OpenOffice is the only product that has a chance against MS Office.
Open standards are the best thing imaginable for the customer. The data that software manages is consistently orders of magnitude more valuable than the hardware/software that does the managing.
This wont open up things entirely, there are still patented feature sets, and purely proprietary technologies. It will at least let the best product win, not the company that got their first.
either that of OpenOffice or a new one developed by the EU
Just what we need: another XML document format. As if we didn't already have enough.
This proposal isn't against closed software, it's against close FORMATS.
Any commercial product which will support open formats will be also considered as viable alternative.
nice...if the EU uses a public open format, their economic power will force MS to have filters for the format!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Using an XML foundation doesn't assure openness of the file to other "interpreters", ie, other word processors. M$ may use XML as a basis for the layout of their docs, but they still fill it to the rim with closed, propriatory slop in an attempt to make it only renderable in Word. No good.
The desire for open + XML means that a document in this format would be fully transportable between wordprocessors. This is a good thing (tm), particularly in government. Anything else effectively gives ownership of all government documents to the company that supplied the closed, propriatory format. When that company goes under (ALL companies will die out at some point) it's file format dies with it.
Government documents belong to the PEOPLE for eternity, not to private companies. They must be accessible without artificial restriction (via propriatory, closed file format) no matter what happens to some vendor supplying the parent wordprocessor.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
However, the report recognised that establishing a existing alternative or a new format would be an uphill battle, given that Microsoft Office cannot read OpenOffice documents or other formats.
is real simple to correct. Start using OO format (via OO/SO) in government and M$ would be compelled by competition forces to support OO format...of be locked out of government. An OSS developer could also whip up an OO document "viewer" of small size so people could easily download this "plugin" and view OO government docs on their M$ systems (for those unwilling due to bandwidth constraints or obtuseness to simply install OO/SO).
It is wrong to essentially require people to spend lots of money for a specific, propriatory wordprocessor just so they can view government documents. It is another thing entirely for them to "have to" download and install a free-of-charge office suite to do the same (though a plugin would alleviate most unreasonable heartburn). Even if they didn't do either, the contents of the document are still fully available to them in a cluttered form if they simply unzip the OO document and look at the ascii contents. Can't do that with word docs.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Open Standards are all about interoperability creating a level playing field where companies can compeat to produce the best readers and writers of the standards. Consumers and Govs are free to choose which suits them best. This is one of the reasons the web took off as html was essentially an open standard, even though there were no open source browsers about in the early days.
Open Source is a different beast. I don't think the the benifits for a company to open source its products are as clear. Yes there are advantages with transpanancy for govemental use. Yes its great for hobbyiest, probably great for products aimed at developers. But the economic model is dificult, the viral licencing can cause problems.
In general I'm much more passionatle about Open Standard than Open Source.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
>I would require that the ability to export data
>into an open format be included.
It is not enough.
It should save data to an open format by DEFAULT.
And if you choose an alternative format, it should not pop up an annoying dialog every time.
And now we only have to wait for the FUD to come along from Redmond on this topic too ...
What could have been a good paper was, sadly, another example of researcher bias. Perhaps the the worst of it is their cite of a 2001 IDC comparison of Linux vs. Unix TCO. IDC claims that "Linux, which is open source, and Unix, which is proprietary"! Really? Haven't they heard of BSD? How about OSX? They really dig themselves into a hole further down where they explain this claim!
There's a table comparing Unix and Linix item costs. Somehow "deinstallation and disposal" costs 7x more for Unix (RICS/Unix) than Linux. This may be true for really cheap x86 hardware vis-a-vis mid to high end RISC, but a more realistinc RISC system like the Blade100 would be at most 2x its x86 analog. They completely left out Solaris x86, Mac OSX, and Linux SPARC? A monkey could see that this is comparing apples and oranges.
The Danish Board of Technology/IDC also indicates that "website management" administrative costs are 60% higher for Unix than Linux, among the other similarly biased garbage out.
The very next table indicates about the same level of selective garbage in for software cost comparisons. Makes you wonder exactly what they're smoking^H^H^H^H^H using.
It's too bad too. You'll never sell MS buyers on Linux or Unix, much less MacOS, with such shoddy and easily shot down "research". 5 to 10 SuSE funded the paper and supplied the "researchers".
r7
You've got a good point, but at the same time you're also illustrating mine :)
I'm not saying at all that any given document format sucks. What I'm saying is that XML starts to become a poor framework once the format grows powerful enough. A cool XPath query isn't really that cool when you still have to unpack the binary blob it returns! Bundles sound like a good document format, as do many of the other binary-based formats.
Don't get me wrong -- I am fully behind XML document formats, and quite enjoy the standardization that XML has brought to data interchange. I just think that any sufficiently powerful XML-based document format will end up working around XML for certain things, not with it.
It all goes downhill from first post