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Norwegian Minister: No More Proprietary Formats
Been on TV writes "The Norwegian Minister of Modernization today at a press conference in Oslo declared that proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communcation with government. He also calls for all parts of government to have a plan ready by 2006 for use of open source solutions. Taking great care not to mention the name Microsoft directly, but rather referring to 'the spreadsheet almost everyone uses' or saying this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media, the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."
This is a very good example for other countries to follow. This actually encourages competition and speeds up the embrace of open standards. The government should always be involved in iniciatives like this.
--MaxPowerDJ
Since .doc and .xls can be opened by just about every alternative to Office out there, just how closed is it...
Hardware? Where?
...since government is supposed to serve all people, not just the ones who use Windows.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Just IMAGINE -- being irrelevant to the GOVERNMENT of NORWAY!
The OASIS OpenDocument format is sooo 20th century man!
I wonder if he's been reading a certain letter from Peru?
or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government
Well i expect that Bill Gates will probably handle this one personally. Because the last thing that Microsoft would want to do is piss off the Norwegian's.
I was thinking along the same lines. At one time the phone service was a propritery format - does this mean you wouldn't have been able to call up the goverment using the evil closed format? At what point can the goverment say that they don't want this kind of communication. What if FedEX came up with a new closed secure format of delivery information - is this a no no? Broad statments from public officals should be taken lightly as they are just speaking to get votes.
In soviet russia, Redmond opens you up!
Oh yeah. .abw, .sxw, and the like are definitely old and outdated, too.
.sxw is.
Well, maybe
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
2004 figures:
Norway's GDP: $183 billion
Norway's Military spending: $4 billion
Microsoft's revenues: $36.8 billion
These numbers indicate that the best way for Microsoft to solve this issue is to simply raise an army and invade Norway. Don't be suprised if Norway is renamed to Billgatsia sometime in the next few years.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
heh .
I don't know though , PDF was a fairly forward looking format and seems to be doing ok (.pdf and OS X seem to be fairly great , well pdf is if its used properly as opposed to people shoving everything in a pdf)and nobody can fault a pure text document for its functionality
Not to mention the plethoira of open standard formats out there.
All i can say is , Way to go norway .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Something tells me that this is inconsequential to the big software giants, as most business does not come from the fjord-riddled lands of Scandanavia. Now if this were Washington, or the EU as a whole (neither of which are possible), then maybe this would be bigger news.
"Leisure is the mother of philosophy" - Thomas Hobbes
Office 12 will have open, XML formats, by default. We got the message. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7332 9
Of course you will. The whole reason that patents were introduced was to entice people to reveal their trade secrets to the world so they would become available as public knowledge. That's the opposite of proprietary file formats.
It's a nice thought to have government running something more open, but it'll take something a little bigger than Norway to convince Microsoft.
Including the one for the "spreadsheet that almost everyone uses"
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx
-Ryan C.
Well, it's not like Real Media format or QuickTime format are open standards. Embracing open standards is fine, but to do so at the expense of proprietary standards is stupid. More broadly, you can't afford to be idealistic in this industry; you have to be practical.
The Norwegian Minister of Modernization today at a press conference in Oslo declared that proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable
and he added: my sister was bitten by a prøprietary førmat ønce...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No, actually if you read the article he has decreed that all government communication will take place using chisels and stone tablets.
Doesn't he know that open communication formats that can be read without specialized proprietary tools have no place in the future?!
air and light and time and space
If you want to see lions, then go to Kenya.
This isn't about copyrights or patents, only about government information. It will have to be presented in an open format.
Basically, they're saying that you can't provide government info in a format that would require someone to buy software to be able to read it. Which, all in all, is a good thing - information is more publicly available with fewer differences in who can access it.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
They meant to type "Hard Sell"
...home to Nordic warriors and kick-ass ministers.
Why this is a good thing?
Not trying to be flame bait or a troll.. but
Why should some company spend millions of $$ in research to develop a product and then have to have it out in the open so that someone can just make a rip off of their product?
Yeah all these gov's want to go open source because they are saving money, but if you are involved in an open source project that saved them millions of $$ do they give u a tax break? Does open source put food on the table?
"I once had a pc
or should I say she once had me.
So I switched os's
isn't it good
Norwegian Minister"
Mod parent 'not troll'.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
DVI is not Linux only you twit. I use DVI files whern I compile my LaTeX files and that is on OS X and Windows. all you need is a DVI veiwer. and creating an OASIS veiwer is also easy to do and will be available in teh future.
OASIS files wil be the standard format for Abiword and Koffice.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
When CNN announced that hey were offering news video clips for free viewing I thought well good for them... Then I tried viewing one from my SUSE box and found that they were using Microsoft's media player :-(
I left a message with them and explained the problem but I think it will take a LOT of people (hint, hint) to email companies who use proprietary formats before they'll get the message.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Loosing? Please, it's 'losing'. Looking back on this event, would you say that they loost the contract?
--- witty signature
Sure, Norway is small.
It's also per-capita on of the richest nations in the world, with plenty of high tech business. And did I mention oil?
She also punches far above her weight class in international affairs with a long and distinguished history of diplomatic intercession and hosting, and could serve as a shining example to many other nations, particularly her European neighbors.
So, of course, it's easy to make disparaging remarks about a small nation, particularly posting on a site like this where the readership is predominantly USian (and, geeky or not, still subject to that typically USian fault of not knowing or caring about the rest of the world) but in fact this is a fairly prominent nation with some real influence, and it could be a turning point for MS dominance in other areas as well.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Well not the end but a good blow to Microsoft. It is basicly show the rest of the world that they can get along quite well without using MS products. And still loosing a country is a good blow. Yea it may not like be looing the US but it is a good loss, like loosing a major corporation like a GE or something.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
EXCUSE ME ?!?!?! What are you talking about ?
Even printers can understand PS. You don't need a computer for that. Postscript is widely supported on all platforms, Microsoft Windows included. You can even add a "Generic PS" printer on Windows, and print to a file getting a nice PS archive.
DVI originated with LaTeX (as far as I know) and yes, it is mostly used on Unix-like platforms. At least around here, mostly by Sun users.
Lets not forget SGML, the whole she-bang of XML document formats, and of course PDF.
morcego
The US gov. seems to have countless standards for all kinds of things, such as documentation, forms, procedures, hardware design, etc. So why is it so willing to get locked-in to MS proprietary formats? That's a HUGE mistake that needs to be righted before it's too late. Someone could probably make a good go at a business converting all the MS Word documents to whatever the accepted open format ends up being.
will have open formats that are not supported in any other version of Office, nor can it be purchased outside Norway, and will not install under any other locale of Windows. And costs more.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
What are the Norwegians going to do when the US or British governments, for example, send them a .doc? Tell them they have to redo it over again in a non-proprietary format?
Norway isn't really a big enough country for other countries to worry about conforming to its standards of documents. They're probably still going need Office, or OO.org atleast, to read files sent to them from other countries.
There are plenty of proprietary formats based around an openly accessible specification, notably the specifications for PDF files can be freely downloaded, and so an assortment of open source applications that can deal with PDF files are available, in addition to the official free reader.
The article doesn't make clear this distinction. Of course, an open specfication isn't quite an open format, but PDF does IMO have all the benefits of one.
No, but it doesn't seem to be specified well enough. IIRC the Abiword people have decided not to implement it, while the KOffice people are basically saying "here it is as best as we can, we'll tidy it up once OOo 2 is released and we actually know what the format is". I think rtf is, at the moment, the best way to do this. It's supported by just about everything, and can do most of what you need.
I am trolling
Come on... it even takes less keystrokes to type "lose" instead of "loose"...
Reading this made me suddenly want to run some 400km west and hug the entire norwegian goverment. I just hope our goverment here in Sweden does something similar soon.
Why, oh why, cannot more sites do as the linked site did, and offer a layout that does not force the width of the article to some predetermined size, but rather lets me use all of my 1600x1200 display?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Come to Kenya. We've got lions.
Doesn't really matter anyways since MS is already going to open standards for the next Office.
Senere fannt vi ut af at nogen betalte Guido for at komme til hans døren med et baseball bat og knuse hans knæene
;)
Disclaimer: IANN
There once was a man from Peru,
who told Microsft to go screw,
he said we don't need your proprietary formats
with Linux we'll reformat,
And now they're doing it in Norway, too!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm all for supporting open formats. But is this more of an anti-Microsoft gesture or a true move to "open" formats?
and other document formats such as PS and DVI are Linux only
Odd. When did postscript and tex become exclusive to the Linux platform?
So unless Microsoft falls in, they will make sure the oil price goes to $75 a barrel.
the first Gulf war. Now its of the mentality that chooses to do "All Laci! All the time!" or "All Terry! All the time" or whatever is the latest dead, or nearly dead, body "du jour."
I have bothered to go to their site in a while. I'd rather go to BBC.co.uk
I would recommend that you do so if you want news.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That's some great momentum coming from skandinavia. It could have happened already 10 years ago, there were always small steps, but actually the ball never started to roll. Now that we have a rolling ball, we've got to *feed the momentum*, or it will die off.
Rethink how your personal way of dealing with proprietary formats. Incite discussion with your peers and in your company. If you're in a leadership position, come up with a plan and make it public.
If there are big news about this topic every week or so, the ball keeps rolling and might even break the ms-stranglehold on file formats in three years or so. Add your own momentum, and do it now!
The *format* will be open (it's just plain XML), but the data it contains (the binary thing) is not. What if that ASCII-encoded-binary-field contains key formatting data? How do you expect to properly view the document?
See the trend? Microsoft is continuously trying to charge access for your *own* data! Just like DRM!
Postscript is a language for talking to printers. Its been supported by every OS, and natively on a large amount of hardware, for decades. For a free ps reader for Windows, google ghostscript.
Also, I believe K's office suite and Abiword can also open OO files, as the spec is completely open. Even MS Office could if they wanted to.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Yes, in many sectors the parrots are pining for the fjords.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
Unfortunately, the OASIS format is modeled around the OpenOffice document model. There is no facility for extensions to the format, which means that it becomes impossible to use it if your applications feature set doesn't map directly to OpenOffices (or is a true subset).
Yes, it's XML and XML can be extended, but then it's no longer the OASIS standard document format.
And don't try to pretend that you can use your own namespaces to create your own functionality. Yes, you can, but since the OASIS standard doesn't require applications to maintain foreign elements, it's kind of a moot point.
It also doesn't address the issues of when you need to add something to a standard defined format because OpenOffice didn't support that feature. I mean things like a new border type, or a new data field format. Since the standard requires that anything you add to it be in a new namespace, you can't just add your own types and expect the document to validate.
I think OASIS severely erred on adopting one applications format rather than developing an open and extensible standard.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Microsoft's license terms prohibit GPL'd
software from implementing those formats.
I'd say that qualifies as stiff resistance to,
not embracing, open source.
It might seem so romantic to say 'OSS is the future! No more closed formats!' What is that minister thinking? Ofcourse, you can have OSS solutions for simple tasks like Word processing & spreadsheets.
But, what about things like Autocad/Microstation CAD drawings? There's no Opensource/Open format CAD programs out there that can even lick the ground these programs walk on. What are public works/consultant engineers/Architects supposed to do? Go back to wood drawing boards, T-Squares, paper & pencil?
I say to all the OSS advocates here on/. Open formats are all so well & just in theory. However, we're in an unequal world & closed formats DO have a place. The problem with CAD I have mentioned is not some theoratical problem. This was a discussion I had with a Linux proponent in my company. I'm a OSS advocate myself, but also a realist.
its open format..
I should RTFA properly next time..
Sweden IS doing a lot.
N3P is a new two-year college level training, financed and accredited by the Swedish Department of Education, in how to become a successful Project Entrepreneur in Open Source.
N3P
Norway: You must use open formats to deal with us!
;-)
Rest of World: No problem, how about you start by using a more 'open' language, like English?
No I'm not trollling for a flamewar, just thought it was rather humorous to have a country with a barely used language pushing for 'open' standards so everyone can read something...
So are you saying that Microsoft's current formats are cutting edge, 21st century technology. I don't know if changing you format every couple of years to screw with your competitors should count as staying on the edge of technical innovation.
I think that statement will be reviewed once they realise that switching to OSS has allot of problems. CERTAINLY when switching from excel to a product like let's say openoffice. It's in the extra's that their is a problem. Lots of documents use macro's, VBA code (doesn't matter if you like it or not)... but until theirs no perfect alternative, switching to OSS will come with many woes.
Surely there will be later revisions to the OASIS OpenDocument format if glaring errors like that are there? It's not a static process I assume.
"...become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."
More likely, the Norwegian Government will become irrelevant to everybody else, when their Word and Excel documents are rejected and sent back.
Honestly, this is like one of those tiny toy dogs yipping and snarling, not realizing they can easily be stepped on by the very creature they are threatening.
The "irrelevant" statement is nothing more than wishful thinking on a Microsoft Hater's part.
Loosing? Please, it's 'losing'. Looking back on this event, would you say that they loost a country?
...that we don't even have a Minister of Modernization. If we did, maybe our government would be thinking along Norway's lines.
How so?
What he's saying is, "The way software will compete in Norway is how it runs or interacts with the user, not how it stores information."
All it does is prevent being locked into a vendor because migration to other software is nearly impossible until|unless someone hacks the file format and creates a conversion program.
Here's a story from my background:
When I worked exclusively in mainframes and mid-ranges, the desire was to move from Data General's CEO (office automation): word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and calendars to IBM's PROFS system. DG wouldn't sell, let alone give the internal file formats. IBM's file layouts were open books. Management solicited quotes from local software whores and the best bid they got was a $50'000 retainer, 6-8 people with a minimum of 6-8 months. They came to me and asked if I could do it but without a firm schedule - to see what I could do to steam things open. The quality of the local DG customer service dropped dramatically as not only were they losing a big customer, but someone was hacking their secrets. But DG Sales stepped up the pressure to retail their pressence.
It was my first PL/I series of programs - I'd already worked extensively in at least a dozen other languages. (in order, the first few were LISP, FORTRAN, assembler, COBOL, BASIC). Once you've got a nice assortment, languages are languages - you aren't locked into a particular mindset but can also steal concepts from one and use them in another.
Anyway, I finished all three programs in less than three months without working overtime and without offloading my regular work. It was turned over to the migration team and it converted several hundred thousand word processing documents and spreadsheets, and hundreds of calendars flawlessly. No runtime errors and no reports of problems from any users during the years of use after the migration.
The gist of this is that if the file formats are open, you probably don't have to roll your own as there would probably be businesses which write & sell them. But application vendors don't want their customers to have the ability to move to anyone else at will. It goes against the grain of how they do business.
It will be interesting to see the status of this situation in two years - someone set a reminder and let's reexamine what's happening and what happens to this guy. The issue will die or he'll be swept by the wayside as this type of thinking is not popular in the business world!
Norway isn't an OPEC member.
They do, however, have a lot of oil.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
correction: atm we don't plan to make ODT the default file format. Nokia however is working on improving our support for the format.
You can of course make it the default file format by tweaking your AbiWord profile.
Somehow I knew that someone would beat me to this line.
another government that gets it.
I hope others will follow.
I would like to see all formats widely used on the Internet to be open with readily available published specifications.
Doing so would help level the playing field since anyone could write software reading and writing the specifications without having to get permission from someone else.
TAKK!
If governments use a companies software that only supports its proprietary standards they are risking being denied access to their own data at some future date. Also as the world moves more toward software that supports open standards, users of Microsoft's products may have a harder time communicating with the world.
Thus far Microsoft has been using its monopoly power to hinder competition but the world is slowly coming around anyway so Microsoft isn't going to be able to dictate defacto standards much longer.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
You certainly aren't... how did you come up with that horribly bad translation, anyway? I wasn't aware of any English to Norwegian option for the fish.
Here's a correct version:
Senere finner vi ut at noen betalte Guido for å dukke opp på dørstokken hans med et balltre og knuse kneskålene hans.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Open and Free Government means no secrets, transparent.
You can't get more transparent than publicly defined specifications, paired with actual active use of them for all and sundry to see.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This is great news but are we ready? Speaking in terms of Office software, as an example, I've tried to use OpenOffice 1.1 and 1.9+ beta and unfortunatlely, It does not compare to the "other" brand yet. It is klunky and full of annoying glitches. I thought I could ride them out but I couldn't. I am confident that all these issues will be ironed out in the future but are OpenOffice and like Open Source alternatives for Office software ready for the average Joe?
I hope it is just a problem with my wrong usage of it.
[alk]
No more a2b, MP4, Liquid Audio and Apple Quicktime, Dolby Digital, EPAC, Windows Media Audio, Real Audio, TAC and TwinVQ for them...
PostScript... gone. They didn't need those printers anyway
Flash is just a bother, web sites shouldn't be using it
before Balmer realizes that his company is in deep doo-doo.
Nobody likes to be strong armed into accepting inferior crap at usurious prices and will willingly accept cheap 'inferior'er crap that does what they need, without launching them on an 'upgrade treadmill.'
Most of what people are doing doesn't require more than a Z80 with CPM client-side. The rest is eye-candy.
How often have people upgraded only to find that their spanking new hardware doesn't run that much faster than the one they just traded in because Windows sucks the CPU dry?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"[...]the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."
Umm... Off hand, I can't think of much that is more irrelevant than the Norwegian Government.
Now if the EU or the USA were to do this, then Redmond might get worried.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Microsoft market value today: $270,973,173,240
The (Norwegian) Government Petroleum Fund: $160,323,643,991
Should be enough to buy a majority share of Microsoft.
Bad investment, but....
This is excellent news, no matter how you look at it (except if you work for MS).
This is only one country, but you knw how it is in life: it takes only one dissenter to encourage many.
I will be watching my country (Finland) to see if they'll follow suit (I won't be surprised if not, Finns really like to be different from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, almost stubbornly).
Sigged!
This will pass with a bit of targeted persausion.
Given that they are a state-run Norwegian station, http://www.nrk.no/ should really consider to offer other formats...
Why not ask for the document on paper?
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Why not use Evolution or Thunderbird?
Hm. When I was a library student, I discovered that the issue of open document formats was an extremely important one; it wasn't so much because we needed people to be able to open documents in one program or another, but because we wanted people to be able to open documents, period. What happens when some documents written today can no longer be opened because (a) the vendor who created the format no longer exists; or (b) the vendor chooses not to support that format anymore. I've seen (a) happen plenty of times (used to work in a company where we had to spend a lot of time converting databases from ancient proprietary formats to something usable by modern databases). And documents I wrote in MS-Word 2 can't be opened properly by MS-Word 2003. And I have no software that can open the documents I wrote in WordPerfect 6 (though OOo 2 should be able to).
If all documents are created in OASIS format or some other open standard, then companies will have to find new ways to compete with each other; perhaps some will have better interfaces than others, or so on. I'm not concerned about that; when the market opens one door, a new niche for enterprise is opened.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
"...the chairman sent strong signals in the direction of Norway to pay up or become irrelevant to the Microsoft Global Empire,
and hence to the rest of the world."
surely, microsoft wouldn't ignore the norwegian goverment officials market.
this will really make microsoft open up their formats, this is going to make them lose about 50 users!
Norway is pretty used to open source compared to many other countries. Anyone who use or understand open source will also understand whats wrong with storing YOUR information in a format someone else has total control over. Its just not your own data in a sense. Forcing your citizens to use certain vendors products to function is not something the government should do either.
Demanding your own data to be readable by anyone without tullbooting to a certain vendor is so obvious it almost hurts. The problem is people really dont understand how it works, once they do they wont put up with it. Governments is in a perfect position to demand theese kinds of rules since they serve the public and not any perticular company. It cant be considered a trade hindrance either since there are plenty of free open formats for the propriarity vendors to implement free of charge in their applications.
HTTP/1.1 400
Let's see, Government regulations require open standards for documents. MS Office does not support such standards (except for .txt and .rtf). Lets sell a new verison of MSO.
Is his office next to the Minister of Silly walks?
Slashdot - Where the slash is most definitely to the left.
Fair market value will be given to the citizens, who will then be moved to nearby countries.
In other news, that's exactly what we've been doing in Iraq...
We've been moving Iraqi citizens to nearby countries?!?! Would that be Syria? Afghanistan? Kuwait? Iran? You would think news this big would hit the New York Times at least!
p.s. Okay, a *few* Iraqis have been moved to a country near the US, but such cases are for enemy combatants. While we may agree that this type of incarceration is unacceptable (no due process), it's wholly unrelated from the forcible emmigration you suggest. You're not going to persuade anyone towards your political views by engaging in ridiculous hyperbole.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
what about Poland? :)
Is there any reason to doubt that other countries will also take this position? Why should any nation be locked in by a company in another country?
This also has political imprecations beyond technology. It is a way for nations that are unhappy with US foreign policy to show independence. Anyone who thinks that these kinds of issues are not influenced by the full spectrum of international politics is badly mistaken. (Are there any fools/Bush supporters paying attention.....)
the Norwegian officials have found to solve their little piracy embarassment
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I have to wonder if this also applies to the Adobe Acrobat format...?
Seems as though most governments have picked this one up, after all.
-Alyred
and in support of the Government of Norway i no longer accept Proprietary file formats either!
WooHoo!
Yay Norway!
Population of Norway: 4,593,041
GDP of Washington State: 192,500,000,000
GDP of Norway: 183,000,000,000
So, like, Bill and Steve feel threatened?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Yeah because being a major oil exporter is so unimportant to the rest of the world.
They only produce 1/2 of what Saudi Arabia produces. And 1 1/2 times what Iraq does.
Surely we can neglect countries as insignificant as this.
what a country
(for-store doo nor-sk)
I once had a O/S, or should I say, it once had me
It showed me it's colors, wearing a hood, norweigan's should
It asked me to stay and where did I want to go today?
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a docking bay
I sat on the rug, biding my time, rebooting for WINE
I set jumpers until two, and then I said, let's put this to bed
It told me it worked for corporations and clippy started to laugh
I told it I didn't and crawled off to post my wrath (on Slashdot, of course)
And when I awoke, I was still stoned, but Linux driver support had grown
So, I lit my EULA on fire, isn't that good, norweigan's could (too).
Stop looking down at yourself and the people around you. Most people are plenty capable of installing OpenOffice. Once installed it is not any more difficult to use then Microsoft Office and the install routine is actually less complex under most circumstances.
If you like the look and feel of Windows, however, that is a different matter. You might want to stop looking down at people like morons and stop assuming that most people can't install Linux because you can't.
Especially for governments, getting stuck with obsolote closed formats for their documents must be a really Bad Thing that should be avoided at all costs.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This appears really great for OSS on the surface... but how long before Microsoft is in Norway trying to buy back the Norwegian government, and will Microsoft make them an offer 'they cannot refuse'?
Microsoft buys out Norway; Norwegian minister found dead in home...
the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government.
Should say:
the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond that we want a better deal on your software, and once you drop the price a bit we'll keep using your formats Everyone here keeps getting wide eyed when a country makes some claim like this, but as long as M$ drops their price they all seem to fold fast.
Error: Sig not found.
Norway is a member of Nato - so USA will come to its defence!
The USA will initially rush to the defense of norway after the invasion. However rather than repelling Microsoft's invasion force, the US military will surround the the Microsoft private army on all sides, capture their leaders, and bring the invasion to a halt-- then suddenly announce a "settlement" by which a truce is called under the terms that Microsoft gets to rule norway, and doesn't have to give any of the land back or disband their army, but must set up an internal review board to prevent further invasions from occurring
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I didn't post that to try to get at your personally. I'm sure your actually working towards an open format. But somewhere way above your head the lawyers and Ballmer have got together and made a plan on how to integrate this move with their long term strategy to destroy the cancer that is Linux and harm OSS in general. That is the nature of MS afterall. And last time I checked that hadn't changed. :(
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Is a published format proprietary if only the original developer can determine how it evolves or if it does at all?
Is a published format proprietary if published in a standards organization but the license of which is not free (as in free beer)?
By extension, define "non-proprietary". Define "open".
Anyone knows what those terms mean to the Norwegian government.
Because depending on the answer they might have very few choices.
You don't have to buy software to read .docs either. There's plenty of free and open source text editors capable of opening .docs.
Open Source is not very important. Open Standards are. That is what it should be all about. Open Source is in fact totally irrelevant, if all of your data is locked inside proprietary files. Somebody will sure start to reverse engineer the formats, but it almost never works 100% right.
/picz
Right now I'm looking at an OS browser showing HTML with CSS. There are som jpegs around and some png's as well. If Microsoft or other company had their way, all of those formats would be secret, closed and patented and the software should be licenced from them.
Open Source is nice and efficient way of writing code, but real freedom is inside open standards.
As it is now, every government and every company has a lot of unreadable documents sitting around on their disks. They only become readable, when a licence is paid to MS or Adobe etc. And who knows, how long these companies will be around? And what if they choose to abandon old platforms and try to force everybody to use the newest Longhorn 2020 Ultra Plus for $499 pr. licence? This is not freedom.
What if I work for some government office and would like to make a nice, indexed and searchable database of my Word documents available to the public. Where is the innovation, when the standards are closed and secret and unreadable for my programmers
Knowing what's inside your own documents is essential. Specially if you are a government.
I hope that EU will look at Norway and learn. There's not much hope for the US I'm affraid. Too much corporate influence inside the political system.
------- Look mum! I have posted another Slashdot comment! --------
Can anyone tell me what they will use other than Windows Media that is open with no licensing fees. Apple and Real are both propreitary. MPEG 4 is licensed through MPEG LA group and is the most expensive...What are they going to use... Also they better pull down all Adobe files because Acrobat is not open sourced.
Does any browser use tarfiles of mixed content?
.html.tar.gz file
In other words:
- browser gets a
- uncompresses, untars
- open $tmpdir/index.hmtl
The tarfile can contain HTML, images, SVG, PDF, etc.
It is great to see large organizations moving to open formats. Just remember that these are not necessarily altruistic OSS-loving freedom-loving folks doing it because they want compatibility. They may be doing it to promote the local economy.
Microsoft is a US-centric company feeding money into the US economy, while using *nix environments and open source promotes their local economy. That is a good reason, but these officials could just as quickly change their mind if Microsoft decides to open an office in their country and promise them 10,000 new jobs.
on the left. This is being hit on the head lessons. Now say "waaaahhhhhh".
a team of Norwegian investigators has found documents revealing where Saddam hid the WMDs.
.doc format :-(
Bad news, the documents are in
... if by competitors, you mean people who take their formats, rip them apart, and try to make software based on it. I call that copy-catting.
A competitor would put forth a product of their own merit, that would be good enough that companies would be willing to switch formats to use it. Now watch me get modded -1, flamebait for saying it (i dont care, I got karma to burn) but the proof is in the pudding: companies will pay thousands of dollars for Office, but won't use OpenOffice for free.
-everphilski-
Microsoft pulled this "don't switch to alternatives just yet, the next version of Office will have an open format" trick the last two versions of Office. And you're falling for it a third time? Don't you people learn from repetition? I think Bush said it best, or tried to: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"
There is no doubt that there will be something "non-open" about the formats when Office 12 arrives. Microsoft are playing this game of "we're moving the direction of moving open formats", the catch is that they will forever just be "moving in that direction" - they'll never "arrive".
I suspect that in a few years you'll be posting on slashdot again with "don't bother switching to OpenOffice 3, Office 13 is going to have an open format".
Microsoft will give up their proprietary formats when you pry them from Bill Gate's cold, dead fingers --- the core of their entire business model is that nobody else is compatible with Office.
... slackers
Ole and Lena had left for their honeymoon. They were partway there when Ole stopped the car and put his hand on Lena's knee. Lena said "you can go further" so Ole started up the car and drove all the way to their honeymoon suite.
-everphilski-
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Grammar Nazis cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Enough to say go f**k yourselves to the EU, and still stay relevant.
It will be a great day when there is a non-propriatary solution that is equal or better in every respect to today's popular propriatary ones. I just think it'll take longer than 6 months for that to happen. The report the minister gets in six months will no doubt have two categories: 1) Stuff we can use open standards for 2) Stuff for which there is no suitable open standard for. It's nice to see a whole country (albiet a small one) taking a stand on this issue.
"the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."
.pdf is a proprietary format. Gonna get rid of that too? And even then one has to ask why they are being used in the first place?
Sorry, but I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. "Open up"? You do realize what we're referencing here, right? Word documents? Spreadsheets? Text? It's not as if you need a proprietary reader to use them anymore in the first place. For all intents and purposes, these items are open, or close enough not to matter. So what "proprietary formats are we actually talking about?
Somebody else earlier on mentioned that this action will also promote competition. Again, we're seriously wading it it because whatever "mystery proprietary format" they're using now got that position for some reason, most likely because there WAS compeition and it didn't stack up to what they decided to go with and are using now. Or their is some decent amount of governemntal corruption in our righteous tale of open source, your choice. But don't even kid yourself; Outright removing a competitor is not promoting compeition. That's somebodies political cudgel at work. because if there really is something better out there, you can name it and replace what you have, not exile a company on the moral high grounds of open source just because it's not open source. it's a justification and an excuse, nothing more.
Sorry, this entire thing reeks of a political blugeon and if they're willing to exile MS, it can work the opposite way too for open source. Keep that in mind as you put MS to the fire.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I'm all for the Microslop bashing, but what does this mean for the *other* proprietary formats in use? No downloadable PDFs of tax forms, and no JPEGs? Just curious here--I work in publishing (with analysis of a lot of government documents), 80% of my source docs are PDF. I am just imagining downloading a tax table in .txt or .csv format, 800 pages would turn into thousands of pages.
So, in less than 90 days, using just your spare time, you mastered PL/1, cracked the arcane data storage formats of multiple proprietary applications, and wrote three bug-free programs to convert the data to some other proprietary format?
My question: Is Redmond irrelevant to Norway, or Norway irrelevant to Redmond?
- "OSS has allot of problems" : Lots of software used nowadays has a lot of problems.
- "It's in the extra's that their is a problem" : Now the writer switched to singular
...
- "Lots of documents use macro's" : How do you know what the Norwegian government does or doesn't.
- "but until theirs no perfect alternative" : always ignore whatever follows such a strong hypothesis.
Stephanhttp://stephan.sugarmotor.org
And in another news, the Norwegian Government has just announced a $4bn deal with Microsoft to upgrade all Norwegian publicly owned computers to run Windows Longhorn and Office 12 with its well known open APIs and open XML based document formats.
- 4r0g
We're always hearing about countries (Brazil, Germany, Finland, USA, EU, DOJ, Norway, etc.) that are going to "get tough" with Microsoft but they always wind up closing their mouth and quietly shuffling away to cut new some purchase orders for their local Microsoft distributor(s) once the Microsoft guy pays them a visit...
Microsoft guy: If you do that BAD thing, it's going to make Bill very, very angry.
Government person: What do we care?
Microsoft guy: If Bill gets angry, he won't let you use Windows any more.
Government person: Uh-Oh! That WOULD be very bad. Hey, just tell Bill that we'll forget the whole thing, then. As a favor, though, could you ask him to play nicer?
Microsoft guy: Hey, you got it. We did the same thing for John Ashcroft.
I think he means he wants Redmond to open up the wallet.
So what do you suggest? That a commercial office application developer wait until OASIS gets its act together and supports what they want?
Certainly a developer can work with OASIS, but OASIS doesn't move quickly. That means you tie your application to the release schedules of a standards body rather than your own.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
In norwegian:
"For å få til brukerrettede tjenester via Internett eller andre elektroniske kanaler, må løsningene kunne virke sammen. Standardisering, spesielt innenfor kommunikasjon og datautveksling, er viktig for å få til økt elektronisk samhandling. Offentlige virksomheter skal bruke åpne standarder i sine IT- og informasjonssystemer. Avvik fra dette skal begrunnes. Der det er behov for å fastsette tverrgående standarder for hele eller deler av offentlig forvaltning, såkalte forvaltningsstandarder, skal de baseres på åpne standarder. Det skal etableres forvaltningsstandarder for bl.a. utveksling og presentasjon av tekstlige dokumenter. Standardene skal inneholde krav til tegnsett som dekker de offisielle språk i Norge (norsk og samisk).
Short translation: yada, yada yada. Government bodies are to use open standards. Any deviations from this must be reasoned.
It doesn't really say anything about open source.
This is not copycat behaviour , this is compatability.
OO.O promotes its own open formats , but it has the compatability to resonibly render Word documents , it is not yet perfect but it is rathe rgood.
Companys are not willing to switch , mainly due to retraining cost.
OO.o is not put forward on its compatibility with Word (its just one of the many features) , its put forward on its functionality and open nature.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
But application vendors don't want their customers to have the ability to move to anyone else at will. It goes against the grain of how they do business.
Alright, but suppose that they gave you the software at a lower price in the first place because they knew that you would not be able to switch vendors easily? It could be argued that this should be disclosed up-front, but even if it had been you know what would have happened...some middle manager would have siezed upon the opportunity to save a buck now in exchange for a problem which may or may not occur in the distant future. The point is that portability is going to cost more money, which might squeeze some smaller customers out of the market entirely even though they are wiling to take the lock-in to save money. This is why software is broken down into enterprise, professional, standard, and other editions so that each firm can decide what is important to them and pay only for the features that they want (mostly).
- it has lots of money, and
- the Government controls much more than it does in the U.S. -- for example, private schools, universities/colleges and hospitals are nearly nonexistant. Heck, even the largest ISP in Norway is largely owned by the Government!
Now, for years, the Government has been spitting out money to Microsoft to purchase licenses for Windows and Office in all schools, universities, departments, hospitals and the like. Each and every high school in Norway has Windows and Office readily available for its students, many of whom have Microsoft Word and Excel as a part of their compulsory curriculum. A middle-sized high school in Norway spends up to 15,000 USD on Microsoft licenses alone.So Microsoft has done very well in Norway. In fact, Microsoft's Norwegian division did such a good job at dragging money out of the Government, that its CEO got promoted[link in Norwegian] to be the CEO of Microsoft Russia!
Fortunately, certain groups and politicians have realized that the money spent on Microsoft could be spent on more important things, and have objected to pouring out money to Microsoft, and Linux has been tried out in several schools throughout the country, with largely positive experiences.
The Government has therefore finally realized that the continuous flow of money going to Microsoft is better spent elsewhere, and that there are cheaper and better alternatives. And with this statement from the Minister, Norway is one step further on its way to stop this terrible waste of money.
Perhaps because as far as I know none of the open-source really uses it all. Of course the implementation in MSIE still is buggy and inconsistent (got documentation at work from a vendor in that format once and of course it didn't work properly at first try)
It's available somewhere under the File menu, "Save whole page" or something similar, IIRC. I've seen requests for it in Mozilla's Bugzilla, but as far as I know it isn't going to be implemented anytime soon - a pity actually.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I wouldn't count on it. They are even voting for the software patents in the European parliament, the only other swedish political party doing that is Moderaterna (conservative/liberal for you non-swedes)
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
The Norwegian Minister of Modernization today at a press conference in Oslo declared that ESPERANTO would now be the only language used for official government press conferences...
I like microcars
For once I actually feel proud of being Norwegian and living in a country no-one knows about..
Why dot we just buy Microsoft, and open source everyting? It's not like we do not have the cash to do this...
Error #13: No coffee. Operator halted. Please place boot device at bottom.
ftp://latte.com/NorwayOpen.doc
It's good to be the king!
Sorry for answering myself, just remembered the name of the format though, it's MTHML.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
There once was a man from Peru,
Who told Microsoft to go screw,
"Because of your formats,"
Our docs. become doormats,
Your license bill we'll then eschew!"
Maybe, someday, we'll have openness in the U.S.
Microsoft looses all 25 sales to the government of Norway. Actually I am glad to see this but to change Microsoft policy it will take the entire EU. Frankly I would love to see the US DOD require all open formats.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You can already save files in formats that *nix machines can read, from Excel, Word, etc. It is hardly Microsoft's fault that the USERS are too stupid to use formats that you want them to. I use DOC files because I have no need to send anything to the Linux side of my network as no one is doing anything over there in terms of office work. If someone was, I'd send it as pure ascii text and let them format it however they want.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
It won't even come close to working. This is as silly an approach as saying the entire government must use Microsoft. Peopele should be free to choose what is best for them. That very popular spread sheet really is the best on earth. So let's go to a less capable spreadsheet, after all we don't need to look too closely at our data we're a government. When in doubt raise taxes.
Does anyone really think that the Norwegian government spends enough money each year on software to make it worth Microsoft's time?
I would be happy to see Norway drop all commercial software from PC to mainframe go open source for 5 years and then release a study on whether or not open source was cheaper.
1. Just because an application can open a secret file format -today- doesn't mean one will be do so legally tomorrow.
2. Just because many people overpaid for software so they all can share the secret files it creates doesn't make it "open" to anyone but your fellow consumers.
3. Phrases like "for all intents and purposes" just make your assertions sound less problematic than they really are.
Competition in Office Suites? Really? are you serious about this? What's the viable alternative to Office then? Not Open Office, not Corel.
4. Microsoft has a monopoly that includes their Office product. As a result of their monopoly, they demand artificially high prices, additional profits and can deliver an inferior product. Then they penalize any competitor by simply lowering their prices to eliminate their competitor. They extend their monopoly by linking in other products in areas where no competitor is allowed. Outlook and their mail-server backend is a good example.
6. I agree with you that the government is playing hardball with MS. They really don't -want- to convert everything. In the future don't turn it into a "freemarket think" speech.
How does it make you feel to hear you have overpaid a monopoly for inferior software?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Said the government minister to
Steve Ballmer, with regards to Peru:
"Take your high fees and shove 'em,
for it's we who will govern!"
And here's Norway to second that view.
Make me!
Let's see here...this guy posts about some good work he did, and you have to immediately jump in and be a jerk. Why don't you just give him the benefit of the doubt and say something positive like "nice job!" or, at least, keep your mouth shut? Sad life much?
That means no more Java! They'll have to go to an open standard, like the ECMA C# language.
Best Buy can have you arrested
NRK ogg
The official streaming is in the windows media format though...
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Seriously, how big of a market is Norway? Also, are they just talking about Microsoft formats or others as well. Do they expect every company to either open their formats or switch to open formats for Norway alone?
The real question is whether the Norwegian market is large enough to sustain and develop a good competitor, and give it market exposure and testing. Sure, MS won't miss the income - but is it a large enough market to give a good proving ground for a significant competitor? That's what should worry Microsoft.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
There once was a slew
of slashdot posters who
apparently wouldn't understand meter even if it were shoved up their ass.
This development is so progressive, I must register my respect and admiration, as an American, for this forward thinking decision on the part of the Norwegian government.
I know it may come as a surprise to some Norwegians, but we Americans really do educate ourselves on the history and culturesof other nations.
Hats off, Norwegia!
Last time I checked, the United States of America was part of North America. There is also a South and Central America, or so I am told.
Hence, I must ask: what gives USians the exclusive right to the label "American"?
When I was traveling abroad (especially Britian) I often found myself saying "No, I am not an American, I am a Canadian". But I would often get a puzzled look, because people don't always differentiate between the two. It's not intended as an insult, they genuinely don't see why someone from the US and someone from Canada shouldn't both be called "American".
It's like the word "European": there's a European Union which many of the Euro countries belong to, but would you say that citizens of a non-member country (say, Switzerland) are somehow less European?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Merkins think of themselves the only people in the Americas, considering their average knowledge of world geography.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
What the do you think? Diplomats in English speaking countries already go through the trouble of translating their work to Norwegian. Translating to Open Office would be easy next to that. It's probably easier to do the Norwegian write up on OO than it is on Word anyway. Microsoft Locals are notoriously bad.
Norway isn't really a big enough country for other countries to worry about conforming to its standards.
Spoken like a real Softie. That's why M$ language support sucks.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Ballmer and his top managers has travelled around the world trying to stop even cities from switching to open software.
Microsoft seems to be scared of a domino effect.
You are either an idiot or working for a Redmond company? :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
MS calls his new "open" document format METRO. The faq is at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/metro_F AQ.mspx
There is support for it Avalon.
Okay, a *few* Iraqis have been moved to a country near the US, but such cases are for enemy combatants.
Oh no no no. Be very careful here. They are cases where somebody claimed that they were enemy combatants while offering no proof and no way for those people to defend themselves from those charges.
There is a world of difference between those two things.
Don't forget our PM is a Lutheran priest! So we're just like Iran - ruled by the Theocracy! Yet another reason to "liberate" us! :)
That's just the production & export.
Check out the Reserves.
Norway comes in at a whopping 8 billion barrells.
Canada has 178, Venezuala has 77, Russia 60, Iran 125, Iraq 115, Kuwait 101, and of course the king: Saudi Arabia - 261. Hell, even the US has more oil reserves than Norway at 22.
Besides, is that really anything to be proud of??
Shouldn't Norway get on another high horse and proclaim that they'll be free of all fossil fuels by 2009 or something?
Kudos for their efforts with taking a stand, but we'll see how long it lasts.
The EU is already rolling over to the smell of MS greenbacks.
Let's hope you're talking about OASIS OpenDocument format, because if you're just talking about another shitty WordML, you can go fuck yourselves.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I think he was talking about code that might circumvent Microsoft's DRM. In the US we have a wonderful law. The DMCA which gives corporations the ability to stop me from using my fair use rights. I don't know if this plugin does circumvent Microsoft's DRM but if it does it's a problem.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
In fact, Microsoft's Norwegian division did such a good job at dragging money out of the Government, that its CEO got promoted to be the CEO of Microsoft Russia!
Not sure, if I would call that a promotion ...
>but is it a large enough market to give a good proving ground for a significant competitor?
OpenOffice and linux distros have been around for years and still cannot get enough of their act together to have more desktops than Apple does.
This is a very good example for other countries to follow.
No, this is a very good example of how you solicit free golf.
How do you do that? An open and extensible standard, which different apllications can add whatever feature they make into, and it should still render correctly anywhere? This is obviously impossible, without making the entire rendering logic part of the standard, and anticipating every possible future expansion while making that logic.
While it certainly failed your expectations, I prefer a standard which actually can be used before we have analyzed every extension to a word processor in existence.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
You're right of course. We are forcibly emigrating the entire Iraq population to Guantanamo Bay. Thanks for clearing that up.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
In the Linux community, RH and Mandrake are kind of at odds, but Mandrake (sorry, Mandriva) users scoff at RH/Fedora due to its heritage. Debian-heads dislike Mandrake because URPMI is slow, Gentoo-niks scoff at all of them because they get a source compile for free with emerge (where as the others are typically binaries), and they all hate MSI packaging because it's Windoze. And Windozers will scoff at all Linux because of its presumed complexity.
This sig no verb.
So, why do I need a computer to open up any document. They should make sure to send a paper copy of any documents in any language that I would want it in to my house, upon demand, for free. Why should I even NEED a computer or TV or Radio to get their information. I DEMAND complete access to Norway's information!!!!
You're right of course. We are forcibly emigrating the entire Iraq population to Guantanamo Bay. Thanks for clearing that up.
Well, as it's pointless to attempt to have a reasoned conversation with somebody entirely lacking in reading comprehension skills, I'll leave you to your delusions.
how about linux?
there is allready a project named skolelinux that is developing a debain-based distro for use in the schools, both for servers, workstations and thin clients (perfect for classroom and library computers).
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Two weak beats interspacing three strong,
Anapesticly marching along;
While lines three and four,
Have two and no more;
Stick to this and you will not go wrong.
It worked so well for the USSR, why not software and government communications.
while this might seem all good at first, it got me thinking...Imagine how many jobs are lost because of this. Instead of maybe 50 they would only need 1 or 2 now, because they just take the rest from the freeworking public.
Actually, previously some schools in Norway complained that MS Office was not available in the second way of writing Norwegian (don't ask) and was pushing the Norwegian state to only allow Write programs that were available in both languages. The schools were using Norwegian language laws to push this initative. Because of the (political) pressure, MS released a New Norwegian version of MS Office, I guess mainly to not lose the Norwegian market to OpenOffice. This, even though the so-called New Norwegian language is used much less than most languages in the world (it is not even used much in Norway), and less than many languages not supported by MS Office (like all these Indian dialects). It seems like MS values the Norwegian marked, and I guess they think it is worth fighting for. Especially now when OpenOffice wants to develop new markets.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Likewise, every version of Word could save in HTML since Office 2000. Does anyone use HTML? I think a few folks out there may have applications capable of reading an obscure format like HTML.
This is an outstanding course of action set by or Norwegian friends. This should increase competition, lower prices and raise quality. Win-win all-around.
--
l'obscurite
Seduction Home
office produces with it's "save as html" function is, it most certainly is not HTML.
If that's not a chance to sell hardware, I don't know what is. In many cases it will be cheaper to bring in a Linux or BSD box than it will be to configure an aging system. People who realize that will be earning a living while you bitch and complain.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Flame tasteless jokes if you want -- but don't just ignore the content.
You ignored my argument and just reiterated your original point (i.e. in the short term, all of Norway isn't important to Microsoft's profit).
I did not argue against that obvious fact!
Here is another examples of my original point with the same mechanism:
The (judged illegal) contracts Microsoft used their monopoly to force onto PC manufacturers that made it impossible to preinstall anything but Windows.
Gates said that they didn't want to give an alternative O/S a positive growth spiral (when BeOS offered preinstalls for free to manufacturers). It is the same thing with Norway; BeOS wasn't exactly big then...
This discussion is over. You made a stupid argument -- and then repeated it while ignoring the counterargument.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
IF it worked as designed though.. DXF would be great !
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Norway! Fuck Yeah!
Coming to save the motherfucking day, yeah!
Top billing in that crowd is impressive. So it seems Norway has more in common with Peru than meets the money blinded eyes.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Apparently sarcasm is lost on the left. Oh well. If you want to believe that the US government has declared eminent domain on Iraq and is currently evicting the populace, be my guest.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
MS has announced support for EU recommendations for interoperability of office documents, with perpetual licences:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/response.mspx
I don't want to read
Yeah, Linux itself may be free but a free kernel doesn't get you anywhere. You need an infrastructure of support. What happens in a massive computer system when the next version of OpenFreeWhatever has a bug in it? You think the company is going to go out to the bugzilla and submit a report to the 14 year old maintainer from God knows where who doesn't even speak their language?
terrible.
Neither is Canada, but they have lots of oil as well.
Sheesh, don't you know anything? :P
Open Office already can; at least on Debian. Opened a wpd of circa 396KB (92 pages) lots of complex, heavily formatted tables. WP versions 6-12 have essentially the same basic format. Supposedly MS Word can open a WP 6 doc? I still have my [bought from Borland] copy of WP 6.0c for DOS. I used it regularly until WP 9 had been out for about a year. Killer word-processor!
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Just in case anyone needs this:
There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who had a dick so long he could suck it.
He said with a grin, as he wiped off his chin,
If my ear was a cunt, I would fuck it.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Oh dear, we could lose 0.000000000000000000001% of the market.
And the videos on CNN.com don't have DRM. They're plain uncrypted WMV videos. Screw the DMCA.
But who owns the copyright in the specific implementation of the WMV decoder used in the mplayer plug-ins? Don't you have to have a copy of Windows in order to get them lawfully? And doesn't Microsoft own patents on the ASF container and other technologies in Windows Media?
top billing?? Haw, haw!!! Precious!
OH_MY_GAWD, Micosoft might become irrelevant to the government of fucking Norway... I'm sure Bill and co are jumping through thier assholes to make sure THAT doesn't happen.
Yes, I fucking hate Slashdot.
If Norway becomes too expensive to support with its own local language version of MS Office, then MS should drop all Norwegian language support.
Same goes for countries that allow rampant piracy and have a small population and thus a tiny amount of revenue for MS. MS should drop those languages.
You ignored my argument and just reiterated your original point (i.e. in the short term, all of Norway isn't important to Microsoft's profit).
I did not argue against that obvious fact!
So I noted your "point" as a trivial fact uninteresting for Microsoft (according to their behaviour). Which makes a liar out of you. Or an idiot. Or a troll.
The two well known examples I gave that Microsoft is scared of Domino effects do weigh heavier than your opinion!
(Hard to know what you think about the examples I base my opinion on, since you haven't discussed them -- just repeated your trivial "point" a third(!) time. That stupidity makes your opinion quite uninteresting, really.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I think the consumers of closed source software products are *deprived* of enhancing their products (features, performance and ease of use)
Wondering why doesn't government ban selling closed source software products?
Ladies and Gentlemen:
In this corner, one mega-corporation owning the monopoly on an essesential technology found in every business in the world and most middle-class homes globally. A company known for only employing the best and the brightest throughout the world, and having billions of dollars in cash to fight with...
and...
In the other corner... a sovereign state. A national government. Abet a rocky, mostly desolate, small country with 1/5 of its land located north of the Arctic Circle. But, blessed with a million or so intelligent, civilized, and organized people (with their own king). A proud and powerful Viking heritage...and billions of dollars in cash from offshore oil to fight with...
Well, I like Norway. Expensive as hell, women to die for, a language that will kill you, and fertile, livable countryside around Oslo. I even get mistaken for being from Norway by people who think that all white people look alike.
But my money's on Microsoft in this fight. The people in Norway are just too nice and law-abiding to just simply ignore Microsoft, refuse to give them any more money, and keep using Windows anyway like all normal intelligent people do in the developing world. No, the Norwegians will just give in, pay up, and shut up.
Remember, these are the people who tried to put one of their most brilliant 15-year-olds in prison for basically just watching DVDs. One of their own people, just because some greasy California record company VP asked them to.
Applications -- such as word processors, spreadsheets, photo editing software, and CAD programs -- all have one thing in common: They are tools for the creation of copyrighted digital content. Just like Hollywood has an interest in the ownership of digital content, so do we all. Because we all create it.
If software vendors frustrate interoperability with their native file formats, aren't they essentially expressing a proprietary right in the digital content produced by their software?
Consider an example -- There are literally billions of CAD files in the DWG format created by AutoCAD. Many of these files contain designs for buildings, roads, and products, and many contain maps of everything from local subdivisions to military encampments in Iraq.
The only way to view these files with 100% fidelity is by using software licensed from Autodesk. No, this is not speculation. Neither PDF, CGM, SVG, nor any other ostensibly open file format is sufficiently robust to completely and accurately represent the data stored in any widely used native CAD file format, much less DWG. Autodesk loudly claims that only their software can reliably access DWG format files.
The Open Design Alliance, a not-for-profit industry consortium, publishes a specification and libraries for its OpenDWG version of this format, and makes these available to approximately 2,000 software vendors around the world. The Alliance's libraries are very good, and getting better -- but they have the limits inherent with reverse-engineering.
Autodesk has resorted to subtle EULA limitations, surreptitious encryption, and even FUD campaigns to try to limit the effectiveness of the Open Design Alliance. If Blizzard v. BnetD (a case now in the appeals court) is not overturned, Autodesk may be able to finally prevent the Open Design Alliance from reverse-engineering the DWG format.
In essence, Autodesk is attempting to impose a "tax" of sorts, by creating a situation where people believe they must use only Autodesk software to reliably access DWG files.
Many DWG files are owned by companies and people that are not even Autodesk licensees. (Consider that many of Autodesk's competitors, to whom Autodesk won't license software, are in buildings for which the plans are in DWG format!) Governments are major consumers of DWG-based data. In their acquisition regulations, they often specify "unlimited rights" in this data. Which means they have the complete and total right to exploit and use the data in any way they see fit. Except... of course... that they can't do this, if they, or their citizens, must pay a perpetual tax to Autodesk.
Autodesk is not the only company that behaves in this way, but the impact of their actions on society is larger than most all, except Microsoft. Policies such as the one undertaken by Norway give some hope that there are people out there who understand the question of who owns their data is critically important.
blessed with a million or so intelligent, civilized, and organized people
That's pretty insulting to the other 75% of the population!
But the way the polls are going, he'll be out of office this autumn. And it is questionable if the red-green government (that's socialist-environmentalist, yep) of AP/SV will carry on his work. God help us all (at least all norwegians).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've been ridiculed at meetings in my office, because I've publically said that we should consider using open standards and free (as in freedom) software.
:-)
On the server-side of things we have used a lot of GPLed software to make our services integrated and good for our customers and ourselves. Then we merged with four other similar projects/businesses, and there was a clash of cultures.
At a meeting I was invited to one of the points on the agenda was "licensed versus freeware". I told my boss "this is not the issue, as a piece of software is considered a copyrighted work, and you need a license from the author to use it in a way the author finds satisfactory. Sometimes the author asks for money to give you a license, sometimes not. The interesting thing is what you are allowed to do once you have obtained a license." I gave a couple of examples to make things clearer, and then argued why we would use software with GPL like terms of use.
The agenda was not fixed in time for the meeting, which lasted all day. Finally, when there 5 minutes left, my boss said "Oh, you had this thing, what did you call it? Freeware?"
At no time, either in writing or spoken, did I say anything that was not factual or clearly argumentative. Statements like "I think we should consider alternatives, perhaps we can get a better price if they know we are comparing offers." is hardly below the belt. I sited Novell as a possible vendor. Yet, what did they do - they laughed at me, saying things like "Normal people use Microsoft" (I have that one in writing).
So I say thank you, Minister Morten Andreas Meyer, this really means something to me. It shows that my government thinks open standards and free (as in freedom) software/open source software is not some crazy loons idea, and in addition my bosses are in the enviable position that they must do as you ask.
Using XML does not guarantee that the data contained is non-proprietary. It only guarantees that the data structure follows the XML-standard.
The news about Microsoft Office to use XML is only about buzzword compliance and nothing else.
What retraining cost? Last I used OO.O (which was a few years ago ... we can't use it where I presently work) it was prettymuch a carbon-copy Word XP.
The real reason they won't use it is because the files won't be opened by the people in the other office who are using Microsoft Office... and that's a Bad Thing.
-everphilski-
But if you have no application to edit your files with (unless you use vi for everything) then you're not going to get very far. Proprietary applications aren't forced to implement open standards just because they exist, for example Microsoft Office doesn't support OpenOffice documents. You'd need to build an application to edit them, and then you're in the same boat as everyone else that needs that functionality. Why not cooperate and create a universal application instead of repeating the same work by each individual? That's where open source comes in.
The issue of "render correctly everywhere" is a red herring. Word Processors are not desktop publishers, though many people try to use them as such. Word processors, much like Web browsers, are designed to make the content look good given the constraints of the rendering environment, thus how it renders is irrelevant to the document format (other than obvious stuff like style definitions, and what not).
While I don't think it's possible to anticipate every possible extension, you should at least be able to anticipate common areas for extension and provide a mechanism to extend those. My examples of adding a new border type is a good example.
The OASIS standard is too tight in areas it should be loose, and too loose in areas it should be tight.
The fact that the standard requires anything added to it to be in its own namespace is way too restrictive. Yes, totally new features should be in a different namespace, but extending existing features makes that problematic, otherwise it won't validate against the DTD or Schema.
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See interview with the Norwegian Minister of Modernization at norwaylive.no. The interview is in Norwegian only, but in a proprietary format... ;)
A Svede never runs from a Norweeegian...
Let's see here... some guy posts a pretty tall story and you immediately believe all of it?
I believe the point was that citizens shouldn't have to have Windows and WMP to view the broadcasts.
How do you do that? An open and extensible standard, which different apllications can add whatever feature they make into, and it should still render correctly anywhere? This is obviously impossible, without making the entire rendering logic part of the standard, and anticipating every possible future expansion while making that logic.
No, what he means is you should be able to put stuff into an OpenOffice document with FooWriter that FooWriter would know what to do with, but OpenOffice would ignore.
The trouble is, apparently, OpenOffice will discard FooWriter content instead of ignoring and preserving it. So if you send a document to an ooOffice user, they can't make a change and send it back without causing you trouble.
His suggestion is obviously an oversight of OASIS. That's what v2's are for.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
.... standing behind politicians, on TV, photographs etc?
,er, translation, is so dumb that begs disbelief.
I'll give you a couple of hints:
-Each politician speaks his own language.
-Teh funny guys talk to his boss immediately afterwards.
I hope from here you can eluciadte what would happen with electronic communication.
The assumption that the Norwegian goverment is the one that would need to do the
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you think other goverments (initially in Europe) will not pause and take notice you have a very short imagination.
All those ministerial meetings are there to share ideas.
The next one attended byt the respective minister and his colleagues this will be a topic of discusion, and who knows, the next adopter of such policy may be Germany, France or Spain (not the UK, the poor sods Knighted Mr Bates, the convicted monopolist).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... that a left wing goverment would stop this measure?
That would show there is something terribly weird about Norwegian politics.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
15 years ago Linux was a little hobbyst project, only people in the fringes of the Internet would know about Open Source Software and no company would dream about using free tols to keep busines running.
Today billions, literally, depend on open sourced tools and open formats, Linux is installed in datacentres all around the world and is gaining acceptance in the desktop (damn, if I could speak).
And the MS fan boys can pretend they are in denail.
Good try, you should attempt something cleverer next time.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When a Norwegian king visited London in 1066, he tied his ships to London bridge. The Londoners wrote a song in memory of what happened:
London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.
Needless to say, the Anglo-Saxons did not appreciate that Harald Sigurdsson tore down London Bridge with his ships and tried to conquer their land. So the Ango-Saxon king Harold Godwinson had Harald Sigurdsson killed in a battle at Stamford Bridge later that year.
Even later in 1066, the grandson of an evicted Norwegian viking, the Norman duke William Bastard, landed in Hastings and killed Harold Godwinson.
What a year to remember.
'Norman' is of course the Norwegian word for 'a Norwegian' (the noun). The grandfather of William the Conqueror was a viking 'Gangerolv' that has been eviced from Norway by king Harald fairhair. 'Gangerolv' did not bother to cross the North Sea, and sacked Oslo insted of an English city or monastry. 'Gangerolv' means 'Ralph the pedestrian'. He got his name because he was so fat that no horse could carry him on its back. Gangerolv went to Paris, where he put the fear of God into the French. Gangerolv became duke of Normandie in exchange for protecting France against others like him.
Of course Norway is not a member of OPEC.
OPEC was established to counterbalance the so called 'Seven sisters', being seven large western oil companies who controlled the oil market.
As Norway is a western country it is not a member of OPEC.
Actually, I met a Norwegian girl at Dragoncon last year and we discussed politics at a bar. She mentioned that back home that all College is free even to foreigners. All you have to do is live there. I explained my disbelief and she stated that she knows a few people from the UK that live with her just for that.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
To bad that M$ will do the market research and say, "well, that means we can drop a virtually irrelevant market segment, and concentrate more time and money in our legal department to get case law made more favorable to our market design in other more populated and wealthy countries." I mean come on. Does anyone believe that Bill Gates is going to changes policy because of Norway?
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