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Call for Asia to Adopt ODF
Malek Indiam points out an article on ZDNet Asia about a push for Asian governments to wean themselves from proprietary file formats. From the article: "An official from the United Nations has called for countries in the Asia-Pacific region to embrace the OpenDocument format. Sunil Abraham, manager of the International Open Source Network (IOSN) at the U.N., told ZDNet Asia that most governments in the region have already stated their support for open standards, through their respective government interoperability frameworks. He hopes that governments in the region will now extend that support and "seriously consider" the OpenDocument Format (ODF)."
Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates announce whirlwind tours of the far east...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
One might ask 'who cares', but the rising techological literacy of Asian countries, coupled with the increasing outsourcing of Western companies, means that these nations' policies might well encourage Western governments and companies to standardise on open formats as well. After all, if your Asian employees are already using it and it's cheap, why not make it company policy too.
Argh.
Why is the UN wasting its time on Asia-Pacific, when it could be recommending that Israel and Hezbollah "seriously consider" adopting Microsoft Office? The shared trauma of dealing with Office will surely bring the two sides closer, eventually leading to a ceasefire after Clippy the paperclip pops up one too many times.
About one half of humankind lives in Asia. If linux adoption is to be advocated continent by continent, I propse that we first take over Antarctica. The advantages are clear: 1) With the high proportion of scientists in the local population, linux is already in a good position to take over the remaining computers of the Antarctican continent. 2) Penguins.
"Fucking Asia-Pacific region is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that region, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Asia-Pacific region." * picks up a chair and throw it across the Pacific Ocean *
Well, see, the civilized world in the meantime has conventions against the use of cruel or unusual punishments. Just because some assholes have been shooting rockets at each other's civilian population, doesn't mean you can go and subject them to Clippy (the modern Chinese Water Torture) until their mind snaps.
Plus, hey, think of your own good first. There's no shame in that. Them bombing each other is one thing, but if you make them fly airplanes into the Microsoft buildings, you could be stuck with Dubya for ever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While the West maintains its position as leading the global economy and farming out labor to the inhabitants of various countries in continental Asia, and while the West remains largely in the position of mandating the usage of Microsoft Office's myriad Office formats, it will almost certainly be the case that business correspondence within these countries will remain in the various incarnations of DOC. It then will follow that as we see with Windows itself people will instinctively use the software at home that they use at work, and the employees of these businesses will spread the continued usage of DOC formats by inertia. It may frequently be the case that these people will simply be making use of Microsoft Office without proper licensing so the cost of Office or even the cost of a Microsoft stranglehold will seem like a quaint abstraction with no particular significance to their day-to-day lives. This may shift of course as Asia's economies continue to grow in prominence and they seek to change the power-dynamic with the West, but it does not mean that they will be susceptible to the idea of adopting a mostly Western-proposed standard like ODF when this occurs.
If the inhabitants of Western countries wish for pressure to influence the decisions of their own businesses or governments away from DOC to ODF, they cannot rely upon Asia to provide that for them. So while "we" may have reason to care about the policies of various Asia countries with respect to the adoption of ODF, we cannot rely upon it to change anything for "us."
Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen so long as there is no financial incentive. Software piracy being so rampant as it is in Asia, why would a company there bother to switch to Free Software?
Then again, Microsoft's grumblings about South Korea and the subsequent brouhaha might presage a new resolve to curb piracy (and with it, inadvertantly erode their global market dominance).
Find your friends!
I am all for the open standards that ODF has, but the one thing I dont like is that with any open standard, there are different interpretations of the same file. I will almost guarentee that when someone opens the same file with office 2007 and openoffice, that they will get different "versions" of the same file. Just something to think about.
Switching to ODF is like switching to the Metric System
The USA won't change.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Why should truly better technology need UN. If it is really better and has clear advantages, people will use it anyway (and if it is not, someone from UN saying something can't help it).
Open standards are better, but "maturity" of tools (ease of use) has its own importance.
... to which Asian countries reply: who the fsck are you talking to?
Asia is not one homogenous region guys, and can't be addressed as such. A call to specific countries would probably be more productive.
That said, Asian countries are going to be at the forefront of technological expansion (and by that I mean adoption of new technologies) in the coming years as a result of their increasing literacy rates and prosperity. It makes sense for ODF to squirm in before Microsoft gets a stranglehold on the market
Actually this isn't a sustainable position economically. The more work which gets farmed out the greater the economic development of the Asian continent, the richer they become. Funnily enough they're catching up real quick now. In the meantime the US prints money to finance a war in Iraq devaluing the dollar hugely and allowing them to catch up even faster.
Yes, the fact is that Mr Bush is making you poor, the amusing part is that most USians can't see it, think the fact that everything is suddenly becoming expensive is weird economic voodoo or something.
So leading the global economy... Not for so much longer. Especially when the oil producing nations get sick of their dollar reserves devaluing and switch to the Euro or gold as the currency required for oil purchases. MMMmm, interesting times.
Deleted
It's not easy to grasp what they are talking about from the title of the article. Abbreviations run little out of hands on slashdot...
I am almost reluctant to dismay you so, but I must inform you that the West includes Europe. This should come as little surprise to most seeing as the term refers to the cultural tradition started in Ancient Greece, carried out through continental Europe and later brought to the Americas, but I suppose inconvenient things like reality would make your diversionary ranting even more difficult for you to relate to the substance of my comment within your own mind.
It is so very, very true.