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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.
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.
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
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.