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."

Comments

The French attitude

[Flying pig]

The French have a confused view of the US. On the one hand they like the style of some American popular culture and, contrary to what many people think, they were rather grateful to be liberated in WW2 (even now it's not generally appreciated that the Germans were progressively starving many of the French to death.) On the other hand, they still have a big thing about Francophone culture, and they absolutely adore standards (as a Frenchwoman once said to me at a conference, "My husband is a count, but I am in charge of electrical standards."), probably because Napolean was keen on them.

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.

Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil

[MojoRilla]

But what about innovation?

Ah, the Microsoft whipping horse. Innovation will be hurt by these pesky open standards and open source software.

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.

Buoyage

[Epeeist]

> 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.

Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil

[testadicazzo]

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.

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.