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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
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.
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
After someone (or several someones) take time to reverse engineer the file format and then the next 'update' they're broken again. It's wasted time and effort because they're closed.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
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
They're not always opened correctly. People may have reverse-engineered the formats to a large extent, but not fully, and MS doesn't publish the specs.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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.
Including the one for the "spreadsheet that almost everyone uses"
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx
-Ryan C.
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
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
Of course, you could always just claim that it's not an open standard b/c microsoft hasn't released it... *note: we're talking the binary versions. (e.g. not OASIS).
And then there are other standards as well... for instance the ogg or XviD open standards, as opposed to .wmv or DivX.
"I once had a pc
or should I say she once had me.
So I switched os's
isn't it good
Norwegian Minister"
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!
And what is so impractical about XviD and ogg?
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
Well, my understanding is that they're talking about the document formats, not the software itself. Using open-source document formats allows for greater interoperability across diverse operating systems and document-creation software--or that's the theory, anyway.
It'd be kind of like each publishing company using a proprietary alphabet in its books. Readers would then have to invest the time and effort to learn each alphabet, or focus on one alphabet and lose access to all the other publishing companies' information.
And does it cooperate with open source? (Highly unlikely, but not impossible). To me, that is the #1 judgement of an open standard. Think of other open standards and you will see what I mean. Ogg, SVG, XviD, PNG, TCP, UDP, IP... e.g. if it doesn't allow other systems to interoperate, it can't possibly be open.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.em>
No kidding! Just how useful has ftp, http, and smtp been? We'd be much better off with proprietary standards!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
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
You are 100% correct. Ideally, you could count on 100% of the population to use the same software that the government uses to send documents to them. In practice, though, they don't so it only makes sense to choose an open, documented format for data exchange.
Pragmatism wins over idealism any day. Of course, my take on "practical" seems to be a bit different than yours.
I am a
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.
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
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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! --------
I thought MS's idea of opening up document formats was to use "industry-standard XML" with restrictive licenses.
Check out "Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License" Hell, the title says it all, doesn't it?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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-
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).
"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
- 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.
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
ftp://latte.com/NorwayOpen.doc
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)
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.
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
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 ---
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.
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...:-( )
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! :)
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 ...
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.
How poorly you grasp the consequence of open. Yes a 14 year old may well be someone who fixes problems, but by the nature of the licence he is not the only one who is able to. They are not relying purely upon a 14 year old, or a bulletin board, or whatever. They are free to purchase support contracts from companies who are qualified in maintaining this. This sort of support is usually paid anyway in large organisations, they just don't have to purchase licences and new versions of software simply because the developers want more money.
The important thing about the Free is the "Speech" not the "Beer" aspect. Free, open, anyone can use, non-restrictive software is better for everyone. If people want to pay for it, and pay for support, great, support helps keep people fed.