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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."
Unfortunately, under the terms of MS licensing these companies are prohibited from using MS Office to draft documents or emails discussing using an open document format.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Goo' ol' ASCII for text and figures.
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
Three years from now OpenDocument will be pervasive (the momentum is getting too great for it to fail now, especially when organizations face just as big of a transition to OfficeXML if they decided to go that route), and the #1 implementation, by far, will be Microsoft Office. All of the state governments will be running Office 12+OpenDocument SP1, and interacting just like they did previously. Of course a document opened in OpenOffice, or others, will be slightly different, and users will attribute it to quirks of OpenOffice, further marginalizing it.
Sidenote: That bloody PIX SPORTS ad does more to encourage ad blocking software than any counter-commercial advocate.
I know this has been speculated on many times before, but I'm convinced that Apple is going to pull something out of the hat with regards to this, may be as soon as next year.
Perhaps an Apple version of openOffice 2.0?
They have to really -- their reliance on Microsoft to produce a Mac version of office has had them in a vice for years, but their agreements are coming to an end and Microsoft's grip is slipping.
Who is James Gallt? Him? Why he's the associate director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.
Oh, JOHN Galt. John Galt. It's, "Who is John Galt?"
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Red Hat would be Doc Holiday.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
First rule of getting moderated: Don't talk about getting moderated!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
If you really would like to see Linux of any flavor, Apple, or any alternative to Microsoft's strangehold flourish, do what you can to open the eyes of management folks to open source software. Make a spreadsheet of the number of office employees in your office, multiple the number by the cost of the OS (XP Pro is ~$150) and the cost of MS Office (basic is ~$300), add it up, and show them what could be saved while retaining the functionality (and gaining in some places such as not giving certain employees copies of office on their computer to cut cost when they really need it).
Install Open Office on your workstation and show your boss how visually its similar to Microsoft Office so retraining for basic tasks (spreadsheets, letter documents, etc.) will be minimal. When the question comes up (yes it will) asking about opening attachments on e-mails from people still using Microsoft Office, show them it works and that you can even save in Microsoft's format to send to others.
Review the upgrade frequency of the software used in your office. If you upgrade operating systems every 3 years, explain the benefits of switching to another operating system such as SuSE or Ubuntu as far as your finances go.
I'm sure there are other ways to open eyes of management. If you can think of some, please reply to this and add it.
On a side note, not only will this open people up to alternatives to Microsoft, but the fact that they have stepped back and made a change will only make it easier to change if there is another alternative out there that would better fit the bill. It'll get them thinking.
Get paid to code OSS
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
Fair competition is always good for the consumer. A document created by a poor child for school under a freely available word processor on an older used computer will be accepted by the teacher. The idiot teacher will not be able to force the child's parents to trade a coat for a wordprocessor. Think I'm kidding, my niece had a science project fail because the document produced in Open Office didn't produce on his MS Word a lower margin of 1 inch, it created a lower margin of 1.25 inches, yes the idiot used a ruler. When he was told that the document was produced in Open Office, his response was "What's that? I said to use Microsoft Word!" and my sister who was an Airman Basic making $800 a month paid $399 for it!
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.
While it's nice that state governments are interested in OpenDocument, IMHO, this initiative will not seriously gain steam until the big companies around the world begin to adopt them. If GE, Walmart, Citigroup, GM, etc, etc, etc, made an effort towards OpenDoc, it will take off very quickly.
However, most of these big companies are locked into multi-billion, multi-year contracts with Microsoft, so I would be surprised to see anything happen soon.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I (foolishly) purchased a stripped down educator's copy of Office when I bought my iBook a few months ago, and Word has all ready corrupted five documents, screwing the formatting and replacing the quotation marks with funky looking i's. I used to run OpenOffice when I had a pc, and despite it's slow load times (which, really, who cares if you have to wait an extra second and a half), it was an excellent piece of software. Might be time to go through the trouble of installing X11...
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
There's a culture of corporate paranoia at Microsoft, and it's been written about before in books and essays. Everything is seen as a threat, everything requires a drastic response. For instance, Netscape and gave rise to tying Internet Explorer to the Windows shell and offering it for free. At Microsoft, you're always self-critical, and you're always paranoid about losing your market position.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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?
I have worked in local governments for the last 8 years. This is exactly what they do and why open source has a hard time making inroads here. The thinking here is that we have to spend money or we lose it next year. So around here, we have the latest copies of Windows XP and Office 2003, but we don't seem to have any money to buy a decent office color laser jet that prints duplex. Where are there priorities? Obviously, not on production.
That, as Hunter S. T. put it, is the nut of the matter. And what *is* this? Do people develop emotional dependence on Texeco gas and get all zealotous when somebody mentions Chevron? Does KMart have loyal customers who sneer at Target shoppers as "communist"? Do HBO viewers stick to their "chosen" channel and deride Cinemax? Yet bring up operating systems, web browsers, programming languages...anything at all related to computers, down to such trivial choices as text editors: instant Jihad! I think we'd better add "computers" to "politics and religion" in the list of topics not to bring up at a table.
Man, I always figured if I'm going to put all that love into something, it's got to love me back. I just use what works for me, and don't really care what anybody else uses. Pity we can't all be shown the same courtesy.
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?!
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!
Office maintains is monopoly due to control over the format. If MS loses control of the format, then they will require a superior program at a much lower price to control the market. In addition, if they lose the Office monopoly, they will probably lose the Desktop Monopoly, but at the very least, will be forced to drop their prices all over (not just in targeted markets).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... 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!
At work I managed to tweak the msi for Acrobat 7 a bit to remove the useless plugins (eg: seach toolbar etc) and deployed that, used less ram and loads up a hell of a lot quicker. A quick google search should help you.
to: ceo@oracle.com ; ceo@google.com ; ceo@novell.com
subject: pissing in Microsoft's corn flakes
Dear sirs.
Would you like to lend your names to an initiative that will annoy Microsoft, and may eventually cut into their gigantic MS Office revenues? (Revenue they use to subsidize the parts of Microsoft that *your* company competes with.)
This initiative involves a segment of the software industry that none of you compete directly in.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely - Open Document Guy.
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.
> Think I'm kidding, my niece had a science project
> fail because the document produced in Open Office
> didn't produce on his MS Word a lower margin of 1
> inch, it created a lower margin of 1.25 inches,
> yes the idiot used a ruler. When he was told that
> the document was produced in Open Office, his
> response was "What's that? I said to use
> Microsoft Word!"
The office software being used is entirely a red herring here. Requiring specific margins is standard practice throughout academia at all grade levels, from the primary grades through to the post-graduate level, and one inch is by *far* the most common requirement. Students are *continually* trying to get away with slightly larger margins than are required (and slightly larger fonts than the teacher specifies, and slightly more than the amount of line spacing requested, and various other schenanighans) in order to "fill up" page requirements with fewer words; this, completely irrespective of software issues, is *always* grounds for downgrading.
On the one hand the teacher shouldn't be requiring a specific software product, but on the other hand the teacher doesn't want to hear inane and irrelevant comments like "I used such-and-such software" as an excuse for using excessively large margins. His response *should* have been, "You need to use software that supports setting the margins to one inch." (Which OO does support, of course, but the student implied otherwise.) So his response was not worded well. But, if you assumed that the student's bizarre implication were correct, it would ammount, roughly, to a paraphrase. The teacher also should have known better than to assume the student's implication was correct, but if he does take a student's remark at face value, the student really has no valid grounds for complaint.
Getting back to the software: I have wondered for a long time why the default margins in OpenOffice are so enormously large, but really it's neither here nor there. When you're doing a paper for school, you always need to check your margins anyway, to verify that they're correct. Not doing so is always grounds for downgrading, period. Trying to excuse it by explaining that OpenOffice was used is... well, let's just call it something the student needs to learn not to do and leave it at that.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Of course it is a stable format. The specifications for it are written down. On the other hand changes will eventually be made, but these will be written down in a new specifcation e.g. OpenDocument 2.0. Every file format will have the same evolution where things are eventually added. The base file format will be the same. In fact the MS formats seem to be currently worse for this sort of format creep.
ZDNet has said that a French tax office (80,000 desktops) is planning to move to OOo. MSOffice upgrade cost 29.5m, OpenOffice 200,000. See here.
And I wouldn't call MS's claim that they'd have to open-source MS-Word to implement ODF FUD. It's an outright lie .
Even more than that, OpenOffice is LGPL, which means that a company could compile in proprietary extensions to OpenOffice, (like SUN does to make StarOffice), and not have to open-source their extensions -- an opportunity that a small company would never have with Microsoft Office.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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
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."