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Belgian Gov't requires ODF From 09/2008
An anonymous reader writes "The Belgian government has decided all government agencies will be required to use only open document standards from September 2008 onwards. One year earlier, they should be able to read them. In practice this means only ODF will be supported, although OpenXML will be considered if it becomes an accepted standard, and enough applications use it. According to a Belgian Microsoft-spokesman, Microsoft is considering supporting ODF (article in Dutch)."
Four little words. Cold day in Hell. Some reason will be found in a few months to delay the decision until Microsoft's format can be considered instead. When it comes to governments, money still talks
of course, I'd LOVE to be proved wrong, but where is the great German Linux migration, hmm?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
You can tell they've definitely made up their minds !!!
Who needs a
MS is "considering" supporting ODF. They will continue to "consider" it and will go so far as to "almost promise" that ODF support will come. Once the Belgian government signs another contract with Microsoft based on the "near promises" and "strongly worded statements indicating that MS will indeed support ODF," Microsoft will decide that it's not feasible. They simply won't have the resources to devote to such a task.
This guy's the limit!
You know what that means, right? It means that not accepting MS Office files is just the tip of the iceberg. It means every other format the government uses will have to be open too, including audio/video codecs, and -- best yet -- CAD FORMATS!
As a civil engineering student and Free Software advocate, this is really exciting, because right now AutoCAD has a near-monopoly on CAD for civil engineering applications, to the point where governments often require its native format (.DWG, .DXF) for contract proposals and such. Don't get me wrong -- AutoCAD isn't a bad program, but it's a Windows-only one, which makes me constantly frustrated at work. Mandating use of an open standard format might give a boost to competing, cross platform, software.
Incidentally, I ran across this website that has a lot of good information about this: the Open Design Alliance. From their FAQ:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
As MS employee, I can promiss we will not only support ODF, but extend ODF to many new ways our customers are excited to experience.
839*929
What is needed is critical mass. Having a USA state and a few small countries (same size as a USA state) move to this is no big deal to MS. Yet.
What is needed is a country like Japan, China, or EU to move to this. Then the party is over.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here you go guys:
Government bans Microsoft-documents
From September 2008 onwards all digital office-documents of the federal
government wil be ODF-files.
ODF or open document format is a file format for office documents that
was officially accepted last month by the international
standards-organisation ISO.
It concerns an "open standard", that can be used at will by software
developers to create applications. ODF is therefor a potential
concurrent for the own file formats the software giant Microsoft uses
in its office software Microsoft Office.
The federal ministrial counsel took the radical decision last friday to
make the ODF-standards obligatory from September 2008 onwards for all
federal governmental services. One year earlier all services must
already be able to read the ODF documents. According to the magazine IT
Professional Belgium is the first country in the world to take such
measures, and thus de facto forbids the usage of the Microsoft formats.
However the door isn't entirely closed for Microsoft. The company now
has the choise: either they open their programs for ODF-files, or they
develop a standard themselves that can be used next to ODF. The most
important candidate for the latter is the by Microsoft designed Open
XML.
But according to Peter Strickx, who is responsible for software
standards at the federal government, Open XML has to be first
officially recognized and there have to be enough applications
supporting the format. According to Microsoft spokesman Frank De Graeve
they also consider supporting ODF in the Office software.
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
As much as I am ashamed to admit it, however, I use OpenOffice but save in the .doc format.
Maybe what we need is a support group to expand odf. Let me start.
"Hi, I'm Andrew and I have been using .doc for ten years."
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Here comes the deep discounts to Belgium for MS Office
./ bots to mod down my comments about MS.
Here comes yet another bad business practice for MS stockholders to suffer at the hands of WalmartSoft.
Here come the
Agreed. It's sad, but true. Very few stick to their guns on these issues. MS comes in with their welcome wagon and gives away so many deals they are actually being paid to use product x. Then it doesn't become about idealology anymore and more about free money. I wish it weren't this way, but it is.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
It's not though. It must be clear, even to Microsoft, that the world needs open and standard formats. It must be evident, even to them, what it is costing government and industry to retain the current closed, proprietary formats.
What they have to weigh that against though, is that every hour they can delay the inevitable change, they bank revnues in excess of a million dollars. Every day they stall competition, they rake in almost thirty million dollars.
One day Microsoft will have to compete on merit instead of format lockin, but until then, every hour of delay they can engineer is a million dollar win for them.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This is a big step forward.
The Belgium federal government might not be the biggest government in the world, it's still a big (read rich) government.
You can bet your ass that many sotware companies are allready thinking of how they can make money out of this.
This will increase the amount of secondary support and software available for OpenOffice.
Also, if your biggest customer is the government (which is true for many companies), it would be logical to use the same file format. Especially if you can use it for free.
Thirdly, if the government publishes documents on it's website, they will now do it in ODF, instead of MS-Office. Which means that many civilians will install ODF compatible software, just to read them.
On a related note, I edit a well-established, peer-reviewed academic journal, and am presently putting together an issue on the ethics of open source software (to appear June, 2007). Anyone who may be interested in contributing is invited to email me, and I'll send the CFP.
Well if you look at the timeframe between the widespread of "word" for the "dummy" secretaries, and the time for ODF to be in use... It's what? 15 years?
:) Downloadable music and movies for cheap and no DRM, no M$/APPLE/SONY tax.
Plus concurrence is back. Word is buggy and the GUI sucsk. It's not hard to do a better job, but the bottleneck is compatibility with "word" format. So what? Well. Concurrence is again possible on the word processor market. Hurra!!
Same thinking for DRMs. they're just starting out of she shelves. Will it take another 20 yrs before we have legislations that outlaw them? 2026? Well.. I can leave with a 20yrs gap without a music-video purchase. But can the RIAA and MPAA?
It's good to see that sooner or later ppl get to understand technology, and can easily get rid of abuse in a few years..
I can't help but dream of the day with HDMI, DRM, zones on DVD, TV websites no longer blocked coz u cannot watch the program outside of the US
Well if you look at the timeframe between the widespread of "word" for the "dummy" secretaries, and the time for ODF to be in use... It's what? 15 years?
:) Downloadable music and movies for cheap and no DRM, no fucking M$/APPLE/SONY tax. No fucking Microsoft windows needed to watch movie, read ebook, play songs...
Same thinking for DRMs. Will it take another 20 yrs before we have legislations that outlaw them? 2026? Well.. I can leave with a 20yr gap without a music/video purchase. But can the RIAA and MPAA?
It's good to see that sooner or later ppl get to understand technology, and can easily get rid of abuse in a few years..
I can't help but dream of the day with all that crap outlawed: HDMI, DRM, zones on DVD, TV websites no longer blocked coz u cannot watch the program outside of the US
For many people Microsoft Word is a de facto standard, they wouldn't consider using anything else even though not that long ago they probably would have used WordPerfect and before that WordStar.
The point being that de facto standards can be toppled both from within the proprietary alternatives and the free software programs available. Microsoft has learned that to keep their users locked into Microsoft Office formats they have to do things we in the free software world can't do and wouldn't want to do—change the format, fail to document how the format really works, and provide no means of allowing others to improve upon any particular implementation of support for the format.
So don't get so lost in how things are that you fail to see how things were and how they can be better for users.
Digital Citizen
I don't know. The thing is, Microsoft's current business practice depends on forcing customers to buy MS Office. What usually happens is that someone receives a Microsoft Office document they can't open, from someone who has a new PC that came with MS Office already installed {which actually costs Microsoft a small amount}. They then get hold of a pirated version of MS Office, and eventually they might -- especially if they're a business -- get a paid-up version of MS Office. Given enough n00bs blindly sending out their space-formatted Word documents and added-up-with-an-idiot-calculator Excel spreadsheets in the newest versions, and enough people and businesses buying software rather than pirating it, this works well for Microsoft.
OpenDocument support would blow this sky-high. With the need to upgrade just to be able to read other people's documents removed, nobody is ever going to buy a paid-up copy of MS Office again.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Disclaimer: I don't know much about XML
:-)1 44611543
C onstraints
Because ODF is XML-based, there are fast standard techniques to verify whether a given document is 100% ODF compliant or not.
This would mean that a lot less "cheating" is possible than with a difficult-to-implement binary format.
To be fair, the same would hold for Office Open XML (that's what Microsoft calls their format -- i wonder why), so if that also becomes a standard you'd be able to choose
On groklaw I read a discussion on the legal and technical merits of both:
(DISCLAIMER: its written by people from the OpenDocument fellowship, so it's understandably biased towards ODF)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125
And this is what I could find on validation on the W3 consortium website (as I said, I don't know anything about XML):
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/#concepts-schema
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I'm not saying be a complete nazi about it, and I'm not advocating doing anything as stupid as sending your resume in a format someone might NOT be able to read (which includes Word IMHO). I'm saying that on occasion, you should consider if you can "help the cause" by sending out a document in odf.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm