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OpenDocument Gains New Fans
An anonymous reader writes "The OpenDocument format is gathering steam, as several influential companies seek an alternative to Microsoft Office." From the article: "The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell. That stepped-up commitment from major companies comes amid signs that states are considering getting behind OpenDocument. James Gallt, the associate director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said Wednesday that there are a number of state agencies are exploring the use of the document format standard."
as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft's desktop software.
That's because those alternatives do not charge you for a new visual theme.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Are the mods huffing kittens or something? Parent is not a troll. Overly pessimistic, yes. Troll? No.
When there's a -1: Pessimistic option, then he should be modded down. In the meantime, reread the moderator rules.
As to the parent, I can't say I agree that this will happen. I agree that Microsoft will try (RTF, anyone?), but long term I think that Microsoft just has too many anti-trust watchers breathing down their necks at the moment. Everytime Microsoft attempts to rely on their old tactics (no matter how sneaky they are about it) someone is going to cry foul. It may seem silly, "Them: Microsoft has a tiny incompatibility in their support of the format! Microsoft: It's just a bug! No bigge!" but such attacks can really screw with Microsoft's time to market and keep them tied up in the courts for a very long time.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Millions of dollars saved from purchasing copies of Microsoft Office. Instead of concentrating money in the hands of a few (*cough Microsoft cough*), poor or even mid-class people can spend that money in more important things.
It is amazing to see the reactions a certain group of people have to the surge in OpenDocument adoption.
This is one of those no brainer moves that would be unremarkable in any other industry. Technology makes the inevitable move to commodity status over time so companies can focus on competing in areas that actually give value to consumers.
But with Microsoft there is a strange group of people who can only be described as "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winner" believers. The computing world standardizing on OpenDocument in no way negatively effects them and the continued use of the proprietary Microsoft formats in no way benefits them, but they have become so emotionally attached to Microsoft they see it as a personal affront that anyone would ever dare to not use the obvious choice of whatever the Microsoft solution is.
Are the mods huffing kittens or something?
:-)
Several posts were bizarrely moderated. I think a very angry person got mod points today.
I agree that Microsoft will try (RTF, anyone?), but long term I think that Microsoft just has too many anti-trust watchers breathing down their necks at the moment
While I could imagine some division heads or rogue employees putting intentional "quirks" in, I think just as a nature of the beast OpenDocument isn't an absolutely literally interpreted format (e.g. it isn't an output layout format like PDF), so like HTML there will be some variations in the way it is interpreted. If Office becomes the dominant platform, it will also be considered the "right" platform, regardless of how correct or not that is. If you layout a document in a certain manner in Office, and it displays differently in a different client, then clearly the other client must be "wrong".
Honestly I don't think I was being pessimistic - in the Office wars I do think Microsoft has a vastly superior offering, and if it's just a matter of supporting this format to make some states happy, then after a brief resistance I think they will. Everything will go on just like it was, albeit with a new document format.
Sorry, that money will still be taken by government from the poor and mid-class people who would otherwise use it to improve their and other peoples lives.
Software upgrades are already figured into the budgets, and a government agency will spend their money on anything, not matter how silly, before they will let their budgets be cut by even a penny.
Near the end of every fiscal period, any money left over in the budget is very quickly spent, because if there is anything left over at the end the auditors assume that the department obviously didn't need the money and the next years budget will be reduced by that amount. This punishes efficient management and rewards sloth, abuse and waste. But this is government, and thereby I merely repeat myself.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Is there a reason that all OpenDoc stories must be filed under Linux?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Museum studies programmes are currently heavily focuesed on digital preservation.
...
And unfortunately storing a document is very complicated. It involves knowledge of software version, compatibility issues, bugs, etc
Many of these programmes are leanning heavily towards open document standards. Simply because the people involved are not, and have no desire to learn every issue regard software excuatbles and how to make sure they will run in 20 or 30 years.
Nevermind, you probably stopped reading this and labelled me in your microsoft for the win group, or whatever the hell you called it, right? I mean, if someone disagrees with you, why bother thinking about what they have to say when you can just put a label on them so that you don't have to do any thinking.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Does it matter when anything say gets you Auto-modded to +5
No wonder I could get rid of my MOD points!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Do we really want a standard that enables DRM? Is there such a thing as acceptable DRM? Why is this a good thing for OpenDocument?
MS is in kind of an interesting situation here. There's a risk that making more noise about how bad OpenDocument is will attract the attention of corporate types who otherwise wouldn't have noticed it at all.
That would be the worst bumper sticker ever. It would take up your whole bumper.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Ahh.. I see the problem. You might not be the MSFTW group, but you're still committing a logical fallacy. A perfectly understandable one that almost everyone makes. the "is-ought" fallacy. You are describing the way things are as if that is the way things should always be. The parent was describing the way things ought to be (according to him). The mistake is in assuming that just because those are the conditions that exist now, that they are the best possible conditions.
Pragmatism is all right when you consider all the ramifications. There are certain possibilities which some might weight more heavily than others that lead to Open Document as soon as possible being the more practical and pragmatic solution.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"To their credit it's been true up to this point."
Actually it isn't true. Outside of things directly tied to their OS, Microsoft has been a gigantic failure across the board. One of the reasons they are fighting so desperately with against the open office format is for the very fact that they have been so completely incapable of 'winning' at anything outside of their OS and office suite products and creating significant new revenue streams.
I agree that Microsoft's inevitable place in the market is a niche player mostly doing legacy support of their software. And from the actions of the execs at Microsoft over the past few years, I am pretty sure they feel the same way and are most focused on extracting as much cash out of the company before the stock price moves from slow decline to outright freefall.
Normally, IBM, Oracle, et.al. wouldn't be so bold, but when they see the big alpha dog showing signs of weakness, the rest of the pack suddenly turns on it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Let me explain it to you. You can go down to your local courthouse right now and look at deeds, birth certificates, etc., from 1905, or 1805. A hundred years from now, people will need to view documents from 2005. Open document formats facilitate that in a way that proprietary formats do not.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
... if Oracle moves off Office and to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. Sure, they don't have the features of Office, but who cares? Oracle sure as hell doesn't. Oracle doesn't run Exchange, they use their own backend mail server (based on Oracle) that is absurdly slow (I can download from the net at several thousand k/sec, but it takes me >30 secs to open an email w/ a 500k attachment), tends to lose mail, doesn't always let you know that there is new mail, has the worst webmail interface I've ever seen, and is just generally horrid (my previous two employers used Exchange, and it didn't have problems even vaguely approaching these). All because they don't want to send money to the enemy (MS).
Most employees access the Oracle mail backend through Outlook 2003 and the Oracle Outlook Connection Service (OCS), but they also pseudo-support Thunderbird, and they're paying for development on Sunbird (calendaring front end to complement TB). I suspect that once TB/SB are mostly reliable a corporate mandate will go out ending the use of Outlook and OCS.
Based on this, I'd expect that the next step after that would be to ditch MS Office all together. It doesn't matter that OO.org/SO won't read/write MS format docs perfectly, or that there are some features missing -- Oracle is the #2 software company, and sending revenues to the #1 software company doesn't make much sense. Particularly when you're in direct competition in several market spaces.
-- An Oracle employee
I have one question for those people who decide which category stories go into:-
Why is this article about OpenDocument format in the Linux category?
The OpenDocument format can indeed be used by software which happens to run on Linux but it's a *FAR* bigger thing than that. The OpenDocument format is architecture neutral and as such if you could equally choose to classify the article under the BSD daemon or the MacOS or even Windows.
So, surely, this should be under some other, architectural neutral label to do with digital freedom or open standards in general?
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
The commonwealth of Massachusetts has two big choices out of which it can choose. One is to stick to the ITD decision and be seen as LEADERS at a moment in IT history, while the world was at a "fork in the road" as for as document standards. They will be written into IT History as such.
The other option is to delay and dilly dally, wait for the rest of the world (cities, states, countries) to pick up the ball on Open Document format and eventually have it imposed on them either formally or by the market and go down in the IT History as "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" as for as document formats go, and be a Harvard Business School case study on leadership (on what not to do), inspite of all the excellent work done by their ITD.
Choose carefully, MA!
HTML + CSS is not the most optimal solution to that as HTML lacks semantically quite a whole deal compared to what one would want to have in a word processing document. A word processing document is after all not quite the same thing as online hypertext documents, therefore it is more sane to have an own XML format with semantically descriptive tags for word processing.
And HTML carries with it a great amount of legacy tags along with it. Not even XHTML is currently free from that legacy. It would just complicate things needlessly to try to make a sane document format by building it on top of HTML.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
> I've never had a problem with incompatibility
> between version of MS Office
Ah, I see you live in that portion of society where things are upgraded in a timely fashion, so that you have not experienced the pain of attempting to take a document someone sent you that was created with Office 2003 and help a colleague open it on a computer that still has Office 4.3. (If you suggest an upgrade, said colleague gives you a dirty look and commences ninety solid minutes of bemoaning the horrors the previous upgrade, with all the user-interface changes it entailed, and extolling the virtues of Lotus 123 for DOS. Eventually you tell the colleague to just save the stupid document on a floppy diskette, so you can take it and print it on a computer that's a bit more up to date.)
With that said, there *are* some concrete benefits to the OpenDocument format, not least of all because it's *much* easier to generate with custom software. For instance, if you've got a database on your intranet containing names and addresses with a DBI/CGI frontend, it's easy to add a "generate mailing labels" feature that returns an OpenOffice document to the user; you can easily spend more time choosing the font so forth and setting up the formatting in your template than it takes to write the code that plugs in the data and returns the result. No, I don't expect the average home user to appreciate this sort of thing, but IT departments might think it's pretty cool.
> The continued use of the proprietary Microsoft formats
> benefit me because that's what just about everyone is
> already set up for.
That's either circular, or more likely you misunderstood what the other poster meant by "the continued use". Perhaps you thought he was talking about *your* continued use; he wasn't. He was talking about the continued *widespread* use, i.e., the continuance of the overall situation wherein just about everyone is already set up, more-or-less exclusively, for proprietary document formats. If this situation changes to the extent that just about everyone is set up for an open format, the only *potential* inconvenience that could cause you is that you would need to upgrade to stay compatible, but that would happen anyway with a future revision of Microsoft's proprietary formats, as has happened numerous times in the past; indeed, it is already poised to get underway again with Microsoft's XML-based formats, which are intended eventually to supercede the binary ones, assuming something else (like OpenDocument) doesn't supercede both first.
The argument that the other poster was making, although perhaps he wasn't sufficiently clear, was to the effect that there is no benefit to you if the next format that "just about everyone" upgrades to (and you therefore need to upgrade to as well) is a future version of Microsoft's proprietary format, versus some other format. If you only use the existing MS format because that's what everyone else uses, then you are not part of the group he was arguing against. He was talking about people who specifically don't want any non-Microsoft format or technology to gain widespread adoption.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Remember. "cat" means "concatenate". If you're not concatenating, don't use cat.
This is such an obvious lie, that I wonder if someone could sue them for malicious misrepresentation, and unfair business practices.
Besides forcing them to stop spouting that garbage, I think it would also generate some interesting (and very useful) press.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Well, maybe that is because X11 is ugly, slow, complex, and obsolete?
Well, I'll give you this much: the X11 that ships with OS X sure is a lousy implementation.
Beyond that, since you wouldn't believe anything I say anyway, I suggest you do some benchmarks yourself and share them. You'll find that a good X11 implementation runs rings around Quartz.
The real question is, did the teacher say that the margins should be 1" in the assignment? Or was there a general rule at this school that governed the standard formatting conventions for all the classes? If so, then the student is at fault for not adjusting the margins according to the assignment. Otherwise, the teacher is at fault for failing to provide unambiguous instructions regarding the formatting of the paper. The GP's post did not say whether 1" margins were a known requirement; perhaps the teacher simply expected that the students would use Word, which (presumably) uses that margin setting by default.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
This isn't even funny. Sadly, even guys like Sen. Pachecho believe (at least spout) this BS.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I don't think that people do this over gasoline (well, somewhere, somebody probably does) but they sure do it over other products. There's the never-ending, epic battle between Ford and Chevy enthusiasts, for one. I've met photographers who were as zealous about Nikon camera equipment (and eager to convert everyone else) as any Mac or Windows user. (Not to mention Kodak film vs. Fuji...) Videographers go back and forth on whether Panasonic cameras are a better deal than Sony, or if the latter are worth the price. In most gun clubs or stores you can get a spirited argument going by suggesting that Smith and Wesson handguns are superior to Colt's. At a cooking school you could probably get your ear talked off as to whether German or French chefs knives are better, and within those which brands are best. I could go on and on.
The quick answer to your question is 'yes.' Whenever you get people who spend a large percentage of their life in one industry, they develop preferences that seem obsessively odd to outsiders. It is our own fixation on computers that makes us think that people aren't just like this about other things; but being a "geek" isn't restricted to computers, we just don't use that term for people whose interest goes towards other things.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."