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French Government Recommends Standardizing on ODF
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "From the InfoWorld article:
All French government publications should be made available in OpenDocument Format (ODF), according to a report commissioned by the French prime minister. The new report
also suggests that France ask its European partners to do likewise when exchanging documents at a European level. It is recommended that the government will fund a research center dedicated to open-source software security as well, adds the article."
But what about innovation? If we cry foul that monopolies stifle innovation, then we should also be decrying standards that may not adapt easily to future problems.
You're confusing a product with a business method.
A monopoly is created and maintained through business tactics (i.e. flooding the market with (initially) cheap product to kill off competition, strongarming resellers and OEMs, etc).
An open standard, on the other hand is just a tool. If a better tool is made available, there's nothing preventing the market from switching over to the new tool and phasing out the old one (i.e. the transition from ISA to PCI)
Push Button, Receive Bacon
While that may become an issue in the future, at the moment the only thing stifiling innovation (and competition) is microsofts memory-dump file format. The ODF is a standard composition format; Any well written program should be able to read ODF files, and should be able to write out an ODF in a similar way that photoshop or your favorite graphics program can output JPEGs. The resulting file may be slightly less useful, but it's a platform.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
So France is actually a pretty good place to promote ODF. It checks all the boxes. It's a standard. Any particular Francophone bits of it, the French government can influence by providing support. It is not anti-American but it is independent of America. Work on French support for ODF brings together France, Belgium, the doms and toms, Canada and Francophone Africa - so it is another small step in building links in the French speaking world.
And ODF should be relatively easy to sell to the bureaucracy. Gentlemen and ladies, this is a French solution to an international problem. No longer will we bound by the constraints of the Anglo-Saxons...
The only negative is that, in accordance with the immutable rules of French abbreviations, they will want to call it FDO.
Pining for the fjords
"Change is always forthcoming, except from a vending machine"
I don't think the main reason why this sort of thing (ODF and open source in general) is not more widely accepted is money (tco, licenses, etc) or political/economic pressure (gates/bush pressuring someone to spend their $ the right way).
I think the main reason why ODF/Open source/etc is not more widely accepted is reluctance to change.
To butcher a Dune quote, "They think in circles. Their minds resist squares"
A lot of businesses (and lets face it, government administration is a business) know that pdf/ms-doc works, they have been using it for a long time. They are used to the crappy interface, they are used to the updates/pop ups/etc. They are used to the fact that it works and they are used to the error messages that pop up. They and their accountants are used to the monthly charges for PDF/office software.
It is very, very hard to beat/argue against that sort of habbit. Yes, to us logical slashdotters (l0lz111) ODF makes perfect sense. Its great, we should bathe in it, eat it and breath it. It has word 'open' in it? great! More please!
But a lot of the established businesses/governments/organisations, it is not the same. An argument "but it is cheaper" or "but it is better" can be meat with "but what we have works well enough" and "but we have always done it this way and there has never been a problem" and then there is of course "why fix it if it isn't broken?" and "ok but what if we change over and it doesn't work?"
It is very hard to argue against established procedures/models/etc. What is plain to technical people is not always so to managers and accountants (often the same person). My point? More technical people in management.
So yeah, big cheers to the French government. they are definitely doing the right thing, in the right way.
That would be forgetting that the french state is a recognized monopoly in a lot of areas (in France), and that few French have an issue with it.
As for buying viewpoints in influencial circles, the french politics are far from the US lobbying model. Don't assume what works in the US works everywhere.
Is it going to spread throughout Europe ? I would hope so, but it is unlikely to be made a requirement.
TCP/IP is an open standard that has changed drastically over the past 15-20 years or so as the Internet has created a demand for new er application services like HTTP or SSH. By virtue of the fact that open standards are created by an open commitee, for any formal change to a standard, there needs to be lengthy discussion amongst everyone as to whether a change is of benefit to everyone or not - yes, those changes can appear to be slow to appear but I wouldn't call it "reluctance".
And as regards ODF, Microsoft have as much right as you or I to contribute to the definition of the standard and, based on their experience already with documents of various formats, can probably bring much "to the table" in ideas anyway.
What Microsoft don't seem to realise is that they cannot have it all their own way - on one hand, they want to now restrict piracy of their products (and good luck to them) but, on the other hand, by doing this they will force out a proportion of their user base (who simply won't or cannot afford to pay for MS products) meaning that the potential demand for ODF will increase. It strikes me as inevitable that MS will have to recognise and support ODF in the future, whether they like it or not.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I can't think of a computing standards process that has hurt innovation. Certainly there are plenty examples of standards that have succeded versus their proprietary counterparts (TCP/IP instead of NetBEUI or AppleTalk, the HTTP and HTML instead of MSN or Rainman (AOL's proprietary page definition language)).
If someone has a great new idea, why can't they get it added to an existing open standard? Or even create a competing open standard. If it is innovative enough, it will be adopted. Standards aren't a monopoly. Standards still have to compete for mindshare.
The problem with open standards, for companies like Microsoft, is that they discourage lock in. If every word processor could edit all your files with full fidelity, you would have a lot less incentive to stick to Microsoft Word. If all server software worked perfectly with Microsoft Windows clients, there would be a lot less Microsoft server licences sold.
Technological Independence. It is almost like there is going to be a Bretagne Tea Party, complete with euro-geeks dumping crates of Microsoft software into the Atlantic
Amazing that this hasn't happened yet, though, isn't it? Europe's entire IT economy dependent on a single corporation somewhere in the US, and they don't seem to mind.
What if tomorrow US law causes Microsoft to make changes to Windows (say, to enforce the DMCA somehow), and Microsoft decide to keep a single code base in the rest of the world (less effort, since the changes are deep in the kernel)? If asking Microsoft politely for a 'clean' version fails, how would you prevent this scenario - legislation? Might work, but only partially (witness the fines from recent history against Microsoft in the EU). This is only one example, admittably highly speculative; but nations need to consider worst-case scenarios.
And this is to say nothing about nations which have a less-friendly relationship with the US. What if the US and China find themselves at war tomorrow, and Microsoft immediately stop releasing patches for Chinese IP addresses? Will the Chinese IT war effort be contingent upon successful hacking of WGA and so forth? Yes, this is a possible fix, but again - how can they not consider the worst-case scenario where this does not work very well?
Rather than assuming a cult of Napoleon and the Revolution, I would say they just are better bureaucrats. A lot of US political culture assumes the market "takes care of itself", and is almost ideologically against state intervention, to the point the US are the last country still using medieval units of measure because no one enforces the metric system.
In France (and most other countries in Europe) the government can own large strategic companies (Renault, for example) and that's considered alright; I do not know what US citizens would say if Bush tried to buy Ford for the government for "strategic economic reasons". Frenchmen are mostly fine with the idea of a state intervening directly into the economy.
Now that's true that politicians in charge of the economy can do a lot of bullshit, but so can CEOs (one word, Enron). The French system may be stiffer and less adaptable, but allows top-down decisions to trickle down better.
Probably FOD, "Format OpenDocument", as OpenDocument is a proper noun.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
> You'll notice there are two standards of Sea Mark (buoys) in existence globally.
True
> The french insisted on keeping their own standard when everyone else had a different one in place.
False. IALA System B is used in the Americas, the Philippines and Japan. Everywhere else in the world uses IALA System A.
Now if you had wanted to bring up prime meridians...
FYI - I teach the UK RYA (Royal Yachting Association) yachtmaster course.
The grandparent would seem to be a reasonably well masked troll, since the counterpoints to this statement are obvious and well rehearsed here on slashdot. But I'll throw my 2 cents into the pot.
In addition to the other fine comments regarding standards, let us not forget that this proposes an exchange standard. There's nothing stopping anyone from using propietary MS Word formats all the way until they need to send the document to someone in the French (and hopefully later the EU ) government. Well, there's nothing stopping anyone as long as MS implements the standard. Do they?
The problem with the current situation is the presence of de-facto propietary standard. Other word processors can't compete because everyone already has Word, and thus people buying new software want ot be able to read and write the latest propietary Word documents. MS exploits this, using it as a tool to ensure the eventual adoptation of it's newer version releases. This is good short term business strategy, but it's harmful for the rest of us. In that sense one can see this as the workings of the free market. If MS were a more benevolent monopolist, allowing open access to its document standards so other OS's and Word Processor developers could follow their standards, there would almost certainly be less anti-monopoly activity against them. One could say they are following, in tradtional corporate strategy, a greedy algorithm to formulate its strategy.
What does that have to do with the IT sector? Or do you mean that the entire economy is based on IT?
If it's the former, then that's wrong. IT is (or shoud be) just a tool that you use to get your work done. That's the same whether it's coordinating a fleet of taxis or running a governement or anything else. "making" and "selling" software is such a miniscule part of the economy that it's truly bizarre that it is such a focus of attention.
Pretty much every aspect of society and the economy nowadays is depended in someway on using ICT for most basic activities.
That's pretty scary when you consider that nearly each and every board room, meeting room and government office has a system that is exposed to the net with what amount to standardized backdoors into the system. Yes standardized, the same exploit working on 90% of the desktops can be called standard. In many cases there are even microphones built into or attached to the systems which can be activated.
That's really scary when you realize that no one outside of the original vendor can do code audits. It's the only one with access to or use of the source code. So in principle anything could be hidden there on purpose or by accident, by the vendor or by intruders. So called Anti-virus programs detect massproduced intrusion tools, but only after they've been collected and analysed. Custom or targeted intrusions using code that is not wide spread have a much lower chance of detection.
So making a backdoor for the one brand /model of system gives you a backdoor into not just part of the IT sector, but really a majority of the rest of the EU economy. France's move is a good one. Moving to open standards for government documents, will enable at the least diversification. Who knows how big the final gain will be. Few if any really predicted how (pre-spam) e-mail (aka SMTP + ISO-8859-x) would take off and drive advancement. Few if any really predicted that the WWW (aka HTTP + HTML) would take off and drive all kinds of improvement. However, everyone, even Chairman Gates' fanbois and catamites, is experiencing a need for document interoperability. Interoperability is something which we have seen can only be provided by open standards, in this case OpenDocument.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Unfortunately for them, Microsoft's money doesn't buy a lot in France. Recently, the whole administration switched to Firefox and Thunderbird. It started with the state police (300000 computers if I remember correctly) and then continued with the rest of the state employees (I don't have the number but it's definitely a lot).
Basically, and from what I heard, the idea is to first swith the Windows softwares the administration uses to equivalent softwares that do exist on other OS the ultimate goal being to switch from Windows to Linux when all the applications are replaced. I guess the ODF switch is just another step in that direction.
Government websites and web services are already all built on open source software. I'm happy to hear that my government is spending less on windows licences and I do really hope that they'll make it and that it will be used as an example for other European countries.
Iraq: war to save the U
No, no, no... If it's Steve Ballmer we are talking about it's a "500 pound gorilla with a chair" not cheese, a chair...
The first four you mention are all openly defined and stable, if perhaps encumbered with patents. They're implemented by literally thousands of small and large software applications. DOC is a messy unpublished format (I hesitate to use the word "standard") and it's a great effort for other vendors to reverse-engineer it, a situation MS is very happy with and is unhappy if required to use a less obscure format.
As for "it's what people have always used", you are obviously very green (well, in comparison with myself). In the early 80s, "everyone" used WordStar. In the late 80s, "everyone" used WordPerfect. Only with Windows did MS leverage its inside knowledge of the OS and its drivers to take a lead with WinWord. The early versions took great pains to be able to use WordPerfect files (which of course were also prorietary, but well-understood) and to emulate its features.
By all accounts, the DOC format is full of kludges and is not somethgn to be proud of or emualte by choice. I doubt I am alone in having Word documents corrupt spontaneously, or balloon unaccountably to gigantic sizes.
Microsoft has threatened to invade France to reimpose "order" on the chaos of the ODF. France has pre-emptively surrendered.
This idotic attempt at making fun should not call for an answer, but it is offensive enough that I'm making one. France casualties in WWI alone were higher than the total of USA casualties among all wars they fought, american civil war included, while our population ratio has been a steady one fifth of yours (sources : http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004615.html, http://europeanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/bl ww1castable.htm). WWII was a sad mess, we were thrown to war without adequate preparation by politicians who betrayed us, and we were beaten fair and square by Germany (which was a nation of strong warriorship traditions too). So, I don't think we need to take any lesson of fighting spirit from anyone, considering that after France liberation in WWII our Free French Forces kept fighting along with Allied forces all the way up to Berlin.
But if you still want to dig into this, let me just remind you that we're currently the only european nation with independent nuclear power with a worldwide strike capacity (usa included, in case you ask).
We are currently a pacific nation, and being perceived as harmless may not be bad advertising ; but don't get fooled by your own propaganda. We're not in the habit of making the same mistakes twice, and any hostile power would have a surprise trying to play fool with us.
I agree with your reply. Up until Napleon's final defeat, and later France's humiliating loss in the Franco-Prussian War, France had for centuries been one of the most successful warrior nations on the planet. Living as an expatriate in Germany, I am surrounded by historic reminders like Heidelberg's castle ruins of how France constantly defeated the fragmented German states in warfare for centuries. More recently, despite not being a formal part of the NATO's military organization, France has frequently been key allies of America, including important roles in the first Gulf War and in the Balkans. That said, France does sometimes repeat its mistakes in war. From the citadel of Bitche up through the Maginot line and later Dien Bien Phu, France took a very long time to realize the limitations of fixed defenses.
As an American who has always been treated well whenever I've visited France, I'm somewhat embarassed by the tired old "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes. I think that America's popular disdain for France stems from a perception (much of it quite valid) that France has recently adopted certain foreign and domestic policies that work against our interests. In fact, it is a common perception in America that many of these French policies were adopted for the primary purpose of frustrating what the French people perceive (much of it quite validly) as American hegemony. Let's face it, while France was correct in opposing war with Iraq, your prime minister's (then foreign minister's) world tour to oppose the war wasn't purely for altruistic motives; France wanted to test the waters to see if it could unite other countries in opposition to American foreign policies in general. Many Americans also view France's foreign policies as over-reliant on diplomacy without any real teeth, especially when one party involved clearly can't/won't offer what the other parties require. Of course, France's over-reliance on diplomacy isn't as big a sin as America's disgusting under-reliance on it. Hopefully one day soon American and French foreign policies and methods will become most closer together, and "freedom fries" and "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes will just be an embarassing footnote in the history books.