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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."
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
Office 12 will have open, XML formats, by default. We got the message. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7332 9
Norway is a member of Nato - so USA will come to its defence!
:-)
USA has still a larger GDP than Microsoft
Just saying it like it are.
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
Here's why. And the article wasn't about open source. It was about open standards.
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
Eyh! I'm Norwegian, you insensitive clod! But seriously, Norway is the world's third largest exporter of oil. We influence *your* gas prices. We also happen to be pretty far ahead in the tech and telecom sectors. We're the second richest country in the world (GDP pr capita). Yes! That's right. We have it better than the Americans, *and* we have the Nobel Peace Price. Trolltech, the makers of QT, the base of KDE, is situated in Norway, and don't forget Opera software. "The Scream" was painted by "Edvard Munch" (pr. "Munk" not "Munch"), a Norwegian painter. So *THERE*! Once you know the above, the following references become completely unfunny: "I'd like to thank the Prime Minister of Norway" in one of the "Police Academy" movies. "Norway? More like Snoreway." in the Kenya Flash movie.
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.
Actually, Norway is exactly the kind of customer who can afford to be idealistic on behalf of their current citizens and on behalf of future generations. For a reasonable amount of money they can switch over to open streaming video technologiesand other open standards that rely upon no patents or particular software vendors, thus ensuring their data will be viewable, freely, by future generations.
Norway is a relatively wealthy, educated nation and I don't see why it would be impractical for them to make this sort of a move. They'll probably end up ahead of the game financially within just a few years.
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!
The_Petroleum_Fund_of_Norway : $170 billion
Norway has far more cash in his pockets in this fund alone than Microsoft in total.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
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?
I imagine a secretary will open it with openoffice and save it to a standard format. If they are feeling evangelical, they may do just as you have suggested and request a standard format.
Picture this, you're a U.S. ambassador and a foreign government that controls a fair bit of oil and is historically friendly to you and well respected by the rest of the world sends you a letter asking you to please resend the papers you sent them, but in a format that does not require them to buy special software from an American company. Do you A) tell them no; or B) tell your executive assistant to do it? The clock is ticking here. Gee, sure is a tough choice huh? For that matter if you have to do this a dozen or so times are you going to get pissed at the Norweigans or at your IT guys who can't seem to send documents in the right format (whatever the hell that is)?
The truth of the matter is Norway can easily dictate the format they receive documents in, and if other countries (ones we are less inclined to cater to like Peru) ask for the same, it is much more likely we will do so for them as well. Some U.S. government officials might even wonder what the big deal is, research the issue, and try to mandate the same for their department, office, agency or whatever.
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,
Read the FAQ.
We are acknowledging that end users who merely open and read government documents that are saved as Office XML files within software programs will not violate the license.
What this means is that they users that save the file will violate the licence? This is not an open format, is a format you have to pay. People change documents...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I believe it's still possible to have a 'personal army', at least in Scotland.
At Glasgow University, if you enter the examination hall with a personal army, you automatically get a pass, although don't take horses, otherwise you'll have to supply adequate water outside for them.
sorry the world just doesn't work that way. You don't just take your chips and go home because in the end you just end up hurting yourself. Most of the time idealism translates to stupidity.
Freeing the slaves was pretty impractical. Trying to coordinate voting across a huge nation instead of just having a bunch of little monarchies was impractical too. Police informing those accused of a crime of their rights is impractical too; 90% of people they inform either know already or don't care. Sometimes an idealistic solution is the right answer. In this case it is idealistic and practical and will probably save them money and time in the long term. The Norwegians are not running a business, they are doing what is right for their people and what they have announced is certainly something I would probably do were I in their place.
more 'open' language, like English?
What makes English so open? The amount of speakers? Perhaps you should then also change your language, because:
1. Mandarin - Number of speakers: 1 billion+
2. English - Number of speakers: 508 million
But I think that Norwegian is pretty open language. I even bet that you can buy or even get free dictionaries for the language and even study the language at schools. You don't habe to pay any licenses to be able to use it. How more open could a language be?
I'm not Norwegian.
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).
Perhaps the fact that we stuff it down everybody's throats through ubiquitous advertising? oh wait...that's voluntary.
How many English speakers live *outside* of the US/British Isles? quite a damn few
How many Mandarin speakers live outside of China? I'm guessing you aren't going to get very far with that.
No doubt that the China factor out muscles in terms of absolute numbers, but if you want to go anyplace *besides* china, I'd suggest you brush up on those English skills..assuming you want to actualy like *eat* or anything.
I find it ironic you can read "requires open formats" as "bad for open source". I find the statement of "outright removing a competitor" humorous. The customer demands a product, any fool knows that Microsoft can produce almost any product they want to. The issue is that they don't want to provide that product, thereby removing THEMSELVES from the market.
Were the governments of the world to declare that they wanted only proprietary software, you'd probably find Open Source not in that market. Of course, the only way to argue for this is pretty much an economic issue. At this point, I think it's pretty obvious that Open Source provides a better value than Proprietary for a large swath of needs. Also increasingly obvious is that Open Source is scales better than proprietary. Increases in proprietary players are predatory, increases in open players are additive (assuming they are truly open).
There was a time when the existence of Mail Merge in an application was the same way. Sure, you could create your own mail merge, but in the end, the word processor having this functionality was the right decision for the customers. The same goes for open formats. Lack of "vendor lock-in" is the killer feature that drives Open Source more than anything.
The fact of the matter is that the free-program interoperability that you enjoy today exists because of millions of man-hours of work to achieve it. Say what you want about a "political cudgel", the cold hard fact is that a few million spent by Microsoft creates a few hundred million dollars of work just to interoperate with it (maybe more including the outside QA that goes into the products by the time they mature).
The investment by Norway in continuing to create this problem is not justified. As for PDF, if you ever have to implement a PDF handler, you'll be yearning for the coming days of SVG-P. It's like the bastard stepchild of PostScript and an early filesystem. Seriously, it almost creates a filesystem in a file (all kinds of block lists of irregularly sized blocks) and enough complexity to make it very difficult to parse (and impossible to recover when suitably corrupted). Adobe realizes this, that's why they're already knee deep in SVG (see the Adobe SVG Viewer if you don't believe me).
No, the sad thing is that so many people are so in love with the sacred cow of Capitalism (of which Proprietary software is apparently the posterchild), that they don't realize that Capitalism is still beholden to the Free Market. Every time I see someone crying about abuse of the proprietary model, I can't help but realize a simple fact.
It's all about demand. People demand what they want. They want software as cheaply as possible. It is no longer necessary that it cost very much at all. In fact, given the support/installation/development model that a lot of FOSS uses today, it can be funded entirely from people providing those very real services (instead of billing for bytes).
Face it, selling software as a business is pretty much doomed unless it is really that complex to write or your market is pitifully small. There will come a time when people really can't be fooled anymore. Software is not valuable. Time is valuable. When people are paid for their time and the software is open, everyone saves time--and every one thus saves money. Efficiency is what makes or breaks businesses (see Walmart, evil but dead efficient).
In otherwords, I'll gleefully revel in all of this as I put Microsoft to the fire, both because they would do the same for me and because this really is a victory for the freedom of developers and users alike.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
Anyway, every weekend, in the space next to ours, a group of sly chinese guys would setup their tent to sell those items you see on infomercials really early in the morning. They had different crap every week, but it was always "as seen on tv" stuff. Moving on...when their crowd was waning, or when they had lots of hesitant gaurded customers, on of their brothers that sort of hovered across the aisle, would walk over and show lots of interest and "buy" the products. All the other hesitant customers seeing these "buyers" would then go ahead with their purchases as well. I got a kick out of watching how dumb people are all day long (when I wasn't fixing Windows 95 on 486's).
I think, therefore I doh.
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 ---
I'll ignore your baiting and rambling and respond to the part of this that seems to actually attempt to make a point.
What I'm saying is that they can quit putting out documents in proprietary formats while still using the same software. They can, and they should, and the costs of doing so are, if not non-existent, certainly miniscule.
Would that behaviour be entirely harmless from Microsofts point of view? No, it would not. Because now citizens would be able to count on reading the documents of their government even if they (the citizens) did not buy Microsoft products to read them with. This would be a serious blow to Microsofts lock-in strategy. It would certainly result in people feeling more free to buy the software they choose, rather than feeling like it's impossible for them to use the computer for simple tasks without first buying Microsoft. This is the short-term benefit, or, from the point of view of MS, detriment, of this decision.
Now, I also posit a threat to direct revenue from the state agencies as well, in the longer term. Because the next time these state agencies would otherwise have sent money to MS for licensing, at least some of them may start asking 'just what are we sending them money for? Everything we do in Word we could do with Free Software instead.' In the long run this could lead to reduced demand for MS software inside the government as well as the broader populace. But it doesn't mean that they have to convert everything to GNU/Linux overnight, in fact it doesn't mean they have to do that conversion period, ever.
I suspect if it holds up, they will, but only because it will save them a lot of money in the long run.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
Just after the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act was passed, an elderly Norwegian lawyer commented only half in jest that he couldn't go to the US anymore, since he was officially a terrorist. He had assisted a sabotage action against the German occupation of Norway in the 1940s by transporting the dynamite used to blow up a place run by the occupants.