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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
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.
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
Given that Norway is extremely wealthy due to the vast reserves of North Sea oil that they own, has one of the highest standards of living in the world and have "one of the most advanced telecommunications networks in Europe" (http://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/no. html) among other things,I think they might be a fairly important customer, yeah.
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!
What happens when the entire EU follows Norway? Will you laugh that off too because it's only countries from Europe nobody cares about?
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!
Cost is completely irrelevant.
The point is that proprietary formats -- by definition -- cannot guarantee free access to the information they contain, and free access is essential to the functioning of a democratic government.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And Norway is far more important than a single city.
The problem (for MS) is not that Norway is that important. The problem is that it sets a dangereous precedend.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Get a clue. That argument might have worked on some people 5-10 years ago but now that we have IBM and SGI making super computers with linux, you can hardly convince even the most naive among us.
Doesn't really matter anyways since MS is already going to open standards for the next Office.
The format is not so open anymore when you consider that basically all GNU software will be prohibited from using it. Without any real good BSD licensed Office software out there (as far as I know) what's the use?
Time makes more converts than reason
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
And when the other shoe drops?
You realize that only reason that many offices don't use something like OpenOffice.org is because they can't get 100% compatiblity when sending/receiving MS Office docs right? Now I'm not naive, there are plently of companies that would die without outlook and love sharepoint and Offices workgroup features etc. But and this is a big BUT, universities, consumers, small businesses, and even many larger business haven't sold they're souls to the Exchange demon. Your just going to let potentially millions of users just walk away from MS Office to OpenOffice.org OR any other office suite because your now a believer in Open formats? You'll pardon those of us who've been around a while from taking a wait and see attitude. Ms has wielded incompatibility as a club to bludgeon competitors for years. Why would they stop when they A)have a monopoly in the Office market B) have an MS "friendly" DOJ and president C) have so much to "lose" by working with others?
Let me guess, there is some sort of provision or scheme somewhere down the road where OSS and GPL software won't be able to use this due to patents?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It's somewhat more serious than that. Because if the government of Norway is going to be moving to OpenOffice.org formats (for example) then everyone that wants to communicate with the government (which likely includes most Norwegians) will have to have software that reads and writes those formats. That means that lots more Norwegians are likely to have a copy of OO.org on their machine. All of a sudden the file compatibility shoe is on the other foot and its MS Office that has poor compatibility with OO.org formats.
Not only does Microsoft lose the Norwegian government accounts, but it almost certainly will find it harder to sell to Norwegian businesses and individuals in general. If this experiment is successful then Microsoft is also faced with the negative PR of a Free Software office suite migration on a massive scale. Norway might not be much of a hit for Microsoft, but throw in a few more EU countries, and Microsoft would definitely start to feel the pain.
Besides, Microsoft still has a ridiculously high price/earnings ratio. If Microsoft wants to keep its stock price where it currently is then it needs to be generating new business, not losing existing business. Microsoft employees, and especially Microsoft executives, have a great deal of their personal wealth wrapped up in MSFT. The last thing that Microsoftees what is for Wall Street to reevaluate the MSFT share price.
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! --------
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.
Ah, would this be the same Office XML format(s) that Microsoft has been filing patents for in various patent offices around the world?
"Sure it's open, anyone can use it. Oh, there is the matter of patent royalties..."
-- Alastair
"You get what you pay for" doesn't say anything about what you get when you don't pay. Not to mention all the extra crap you get that you don't want, when you pay for some things.
But then, perhaps all this wisdom and logic is wasted on you, Anonymous Microsoft apologist Coward. Of course Norway's policy matters: that policy is exactly the kind of pressure forcing Microsoft to abandon one of its favorite monopoly abuses. You're going to have to find some other abuse to love, while supplies last.
--
make install -not war
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.