Slashdot Mirror
ODF Threat to Microsoft in US Governments Grows
Tookis writes "Another setback for Microsoft has cropped up in the space of document formats in government organizations. The state of California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement in the software used by state agencies. Similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota has added further to the pressure on Microsoft, which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007. The bill doesn't specify ODF by name, but instead requires the use of an open XML-based format."
Microsoft a Threat to ODF
If the text really reads "An Open XML-based format", then OOXML is as suitable a choice as ODF.
Yay! *Assuming Open means actually open and not just called "open". As well as assuming many other things. Furthermore this means if everyone else (Novell, WordPerfect) were to drop MS OOXML support California would have to not choose MS's OOXML. (the multiple vendor clause).
Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, California... anywhere else? I'm (happily) beginning to lose count!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think that history will point to the Massachusetts move to require an open format as the watershed moment, where Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry began to falter. Because that poor IT director who lost his job in the noise and tumult pointed out to the world that the Emporor, indeed, was not wearing any clothes. Generations from now, ODF will most likely be the standard for public document archives, and the culture and technicalities of documents drawn from our generation will still be available, thanks to the guts and drive of a single man who (ironically) lost his job for accurately identifying one of the most significant problems of the decade.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yeah, darn that government for wanting to be able to read the documents 20 years down the road.
The government is not forcing this on anyone. They have zero interest in forcing you or anyone else outside the government to use any given format. This is not Big Brother, this is a great case of the market economy at work! Microsoft's largest customer is saying that they they are in the market for a system that meets specific criteria. They don't care who provides it or where it comes from, just as long as it does what they need it to do. Now, the market decides who will provide them what they want.
1. Make laws that require use of ODF in government.
2. Charge extra for ODF format in MS Office.
3. Users too stubborn to use anything but Office.
Things don't really look too bad for MS.
I had been thinking that ODF was "obviously" a good thing until I read the rant by Opera's CTO about how shit both standards are (a memory dump between angle brackets), and how the correct way would be to go for XHTML with CSS formatting.
... but I'm concerned that standardising on ODF will come to bite us, the IT industry, in our collective butts sooner rather than later. We need something clear. Obvious. Simple. And from this some genuine innovation will come - remember that?
Like, seriously, why not? Have we not been here before, going "so we need to separate content from display" and was not the eventual solution actually rather good. It took ten years or so to get adopted, but nobody is denying that css has made the web a less obnoxious place. There are no technical reasons why it can't be extended to all aspects of "office" publishing/collaboration, and indeed a book has been published using XML+CSS.
I know that ODF is "here now", and it must be an improvement over Office's internal format
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I'm afraid that if Microsoft has it's way open documents will go the way of web standards, with the code being open but the implementation being so confused and confusing that to view documents "the way they are meant to be" you will need to buy Microsoft products.
I hope that the ODF takes hold, I already use it for all my own documents.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Tyrrany! The government of California is mandating things to... the government of California. One can only weep for those agile, efficient state agencies, hamstrung in their efforts to serve the public by the state legislature's document format demands.
Seriously, California's government is supposed to let each of its agencies choose (or not choose) its own standard for documents, so that one part of the government can't communicate with another? Talk about mediocrity.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Hooray for Government mandated mediocrity.
The only way applications can compete on merit is if they all use published standards to exchange information. No one can compete with secret formats and no public document should ever use one. Nothing but greed and fear of competition is keeping M$ from using ODF or inventing an equally well documented standard. Well, perhaps a little incompetence keeps them second rate.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is unwise to try to reframe the debate toward what proprietors value instead of what freedoms users need.
.doc formats (yes, plural, because there are more than one and they are not always upwardly-compatible) is bad. Many have analyzed OOXML and pointed out serious problems with it (Groklaw carries many pointers to these articles, from Linguists to more CS-oriented critique). We have a chance to liberate ourselves and preserve our documents for posterity by switching to open standards (one of which is ODF).
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on; letting some kind of popularity contest decide what format is "better" is also a bad idea because that boils down to spending more on advertising (which, of course, Microsoft would love to do because they can spend millions on ads that never discuss the shortcomings of their products). Microsoft's track record on their
We can't afford to push aside the importance to citizens here: people need the freedom to print, copy, and publish documents whenever they want (even if some government or corporation deems it inappropriate) without overcoming digital restrictions. Governments shouldn't be allowed to spend taxpayer money on documents that deny users these freedoms.
Digital Citizen
It's a very long way from introducing a bill to seeing it out of committee, surviving kill-based amendments, brought to the floor for a vote, passed, passed again in the other chamber, signed into law, and actually implemented. There is nothing at all here to get excited about yet, if ever.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Linux/OSS zealots aren't getting it... MS won't care if everybody uses the ODF standard, because at the end of the day, just like with Windows, people will continue buying their software in large numbers because it simply works better than the OSS/Free alternatives out there. People have been saying the same thing about Linux for more than a decade, and Linux hasn't taken more than a negligible chunk of the small to medium server from MS (most was cannibalized from other *nix variants), and virtually none of the desktop market. A free screwdriver is useless if you need a hammer to do the job.
People *may*, if this thing actually has any legs to it, end up continuing to use Office and saving docs as "ODF", which won't impact MS if the OSS/Free office alternatives remain distant runners-up in terms of quality, performance, and bells-and-whistles.
I don't respond to AC's.
I just want to say to the /. community that before you all start raving about the downfall of M$ with this think about all the other industries out there. A few state government industries aren't even a drop in the bucket for the number of licenses M$ has out there. Now all the Fortune 500 companies going to "open" standards would be a watershed prophetic moment, this is pissing in a volcano.
Remember in order for there to be developers someone somewhere has to make money selling software.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
An AC taunts:
46 to go.
OK, let's take that to Google.
What's that 66/300, 22%? Better than 4/50 or 8% would suggest. California alone is better than 8%.
Don't worry, there will be more soon. States like NY, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, etc. usually follow the tech savvy lead of CA, TX and MA quickly. Sooner or later all of them do.
Microsoft will soon have to compete with something other than secret file formats and other dirty tricks. If Vista is the best they've got, it's over.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hooray for Government mandated mediocrity.
The government is mandating Microsoft Products?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
"Office Open XML (OOXML)" .. they might as well have called it "Open Office XML".
I wonder whether the intended the confusion.
Actually you have a hard time reading don't you?
Although the name of Microsoft's Office Open XML suggests that it would match the requirement, it is in fact a proprietary format that would fail the open standards test.
All of these bills I have seen introduced have a "implemented by multiple vendor" clauses in them
which kind of kicks word and ooxml to the curb now doesn't it.
Got Code?
> where we pay ever increasing prices for buggy bloatware.
... I'd rather give them something like Word 2003+ (which can enforce schemas) or come up with my own web-based word processor (I hope Google Docs adds this feature quickly).
... a famous problem is the ambiguity in the formulas, which effectively makes reverse-engineering StarCalc's formula engine a must to parse ODF properly, effectively making it a hidden part of the spec.)
Microsoft Office MSRP prices have been declining in even nominal terms (and of course in real terms) over the past 10+ years. Google News Archive search is your friend -- you can find old MSRP data quite easily with it. And re 'buggy bloatware' - while WordPerfect the word-processor is good (don't know about apps WP Office comes with), I *have* used IBM's SmartSuite, OpenOffice and Microsoft's Office, and give me MS Office anyday. And please don't tell me about LaTeX -- if I have to force naive users to generate well-structured docs, LaTeX isn't an option
> Ideally, a consumer should buy a new computer and have several choices as to which OS(es) will run on it
Do you think a consumer even gives a shit? Or - forget consumers. Do you think folk who purchase IBM big iron give a shit about which OS it runs (apart for needing to know what skills to check when filling HR forms for system administrators), as long as their payroll and inventory get done?
> For documents, the standard should be completely non-proprietary. The specs should be simple and brief, not 6000+ pages of M$ dreck.
The "simple and brief" attitude doesn't work so well for any sort of legacy system. There are two sorts of standards: blue-sky (TCP, IP, HTTP, etc) and those that build on what's already on the market. So unless you have any bright ideas for dealing with docs that *already* exist, be prepared to deal with messy specs (and it's not like the ODF spec is that brief
But hey
Go somewhere random
"Nothing." I say, "...except for a string of text...'Girly men'."
"Girly men?" He says.
"Yes," I repeat, "Girly men!".
"Well damn it!" he says, "In what context??"
Namaste
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on
The funny thing is that users only get the features they want if they are free to implement them. Quality software is a fortunate byproduct of free software. The same kinds of arguments were made two hundred years ago about the link between freedom and wealth and they are just as true today.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm definitely with you, philosophically at least, about the need for greater simplicity.
I don't know whether XML+CSS is it, because I'm honestly not that familiar with CSS and XML (when I stopped paying attention to web stuff, HTML was a fairly simple text-markup language), but it seems like there ought to be some middle ground between plain ASCII text and the massive complexity of the competing XML office-document formats.
While certainly ODF is a step in the right direction away from proprietary binary blobs, I'm made slightly nervous about enshrining a requirement to use it into law, because it might well be that, absent the spectre of Microsoft's formats making positively anything else look like a great idea by comparison, ODF might not be the "best way" to solve the problem.
It might, in fact, be that there are simpler formats that would suit most people's needs, particularly looking forward into a future where online and on-screen publication of data across various devices and platforms is more important than printed layouts. (You see this happening already: if you format your resume to look brilliant on the printed page, but don't give a thought to how it's going to look when someone does a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V to it, and dumps the text into a web form, you're a fool, because that's how most HR people at large organizations are going to read it.)
I've recently become quite taken with the idea of lightweight markup languages ('languages' is a bit of a stretch; 'conventions' might be a better term) like MarkDown and MultiMarkDown. Both of them provide ways of taking a document containing only ASCII or Unicode text with standard "plaintext markup" (you know, things like *this* or _this_ for emphasis), and transforming it into well-formatted XHTML, which can then in turn be converted to other formats (LaTeX, PDF, RTF, MS Word, etc.). It's really pretty slick. But the interesting point is that it derives its power and flexibility not by the format itself, but by the fact that the format is relatively lightweight, and is parsed into a well-understood intermediate format: XHTML.
If mandating ODF is the only way we can possibly break free of Microsoft's proprietary binary formats, then so be it: mandate away. The current situation is untenable, and might in the long run be disastrous, if a single company can essentially charge everyone in the country a 'head tax,' in order to read documents produced by their government, which they can only ignore at their own peril (or at least, competitive disadvantage; c.f. the case of government contracts being given out only to those who could go to an IE-only site and read DOC documents). I'd rather that the government just mandate JPEG scans of paper documents, or nothing but 7-bit ASCII, or hell, stone tablets with Egyptian hieroglyphs, than effectively hand control of such a large part of our society's creative output to one company.
A 600-page open format is better than what we've got, but I still think that it may be 599 pages too long for some uses.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Stop painting ODF as the big threat to Microsoft: No-one in the administrations who demand ODF want to stop using MS Office. Microsoft has an import/export-plugin for Office2007, and that's the end of it.
Remember in order for there to be developers someone somewhere has to make money selling software.
Nope. In fact most developers work for companies that do not make money selling software. Now, aside from those few that are losing money selling software (grin), I mean those companies (and other organizations - governments, universities, etc) whose primary product(s) is/are something other than software. (Take your Fortune 500 -- how many of them make most (or any) of their money selling software? How many employ developers?)
Besides which, that's totally irrelevant to open document formats -- just because the document format is open doesn't mean the application software has to be either open or free, any more than standardizing on a character code of ASCII or Unicode does. (EBCDIC, you're on your own.)
-- Alastair
The term "threat" suggests that something Microsoft legitimately owns or does is at risk. But this is no "threat", it's merely fair competition and should have happened a decade ago.
Microsoft can easily implement ODF. Microsoft will probably lose some marketshare, but they will do that anyway, and Office will probably still remain the dominant office suite either way.
So, let's go easy on language like "threat".
Apart from being able to put their name to the product is there any advantage for Microsoft in having their open format as the format? By definition as an open document format, there cant be any lockin to Microsoft, why are they so heavily pushing their own format (better or worse)?
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
And with an open document format, all those people can use whatever programs and formats they like, and export to the mandated format as needed.
Why must it be an Open XML format? It seems to me that the spirit of the bill(s) is to have something that is open, portable and understood - not to specify a particular technology. Particular implementation decisions should not be made by those that aren't well involved and understanding of the particular trade-offs.
Not really. Doc files have been implemented by OO.o and several others (maybe not fully complient with the 'spec' but near enough to count and I can't see OOXML being any different. The popularity of the Microsoft formats will increase by shear inertia and cause other programs to implement it, even if just by putting the OOXML->ODF converter on the front.
I have a problem with government mandating technology even if they are vauge. The govermnet is typically backwards when compared to real organizations that need to exist on their own merits.
The real problem is they keep so much of their data in word documents and excel spreadsheets. We should not be voting for or supporting fools that seek to continue this trend.
If you want to be disruptive and make everyone switch from word and excel (which everyone has converters for nowadays) then lets make government get real and use technology rather than mearly storing paper on disk drives.
There is one, and only one, advantage of using XML: You can reuse an existing parser, instead of writing your own. How to write a parser is probably the most well-understood problem in computer science, so this is not a big saving in time. However, there tend nonetheless to be slight differences between ad-hoc parsers independently written for the same language, so for interoperability reasons specifying XML might be a good idea.
Shocking! Do you normally dictate the delivery format to your client? If a publisher wants their images in Adobe Illustrator format, do you feel oppressed due tot he fact that they are not interested in some random format you found on the web? If a website you build is required to be compatible with IE or Firefox, do you rail at the injustice of not being able to use the latest code hack that only works in some obscure browser from 5 years ago?
The government, like any other organization, has the right to dictate the details of their work exactly as far as they can enforce them. No one is forcing anyone to work with or for the government. If using the document format of their choice is morally repugnant to you, feel free to take your services elseware.
There is nothing at all here to get excited about yet, if ever.
On the one hand we have a company which names it's format as "Office Open XML" but documents the specification in over 6000 pages, using words like Windows 95 compatibility etc. in that spec... and yet has the guts to call it Open.
And on the other, we have a bunch of companies who have realised it's no use talking to the 800lb gorilla.. and basically decided to implement a workable, truly open, truly interoperable format... that may or may not be superior to the MS OOXML.
Now, Opera's CTO might think (and I largely agree with him) that BOTH specs are way off the mark, while simple HTML + CSS can do the trick....
But I find it truly amazing that for more than 10 years, people in the US have been shelling out billions of dollars buying crippleware.... money that is now used to enslave them to sub-standard, bug-ridden, inefficient, unreliable software and formats...
And yet, a comment on Slashdot that says nothing might happen yet for Microsoft or the marketplace gets modded +5 Insightful!
Looks like Lincoln was wrong... in America, you can apparently fool all the people all the time.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
It isn't as much about who does business with them as it is who needs interact with them. This reason alone in my opinion outweighs any setback that someone making money from the government would have.
Sure they do, in both cases:
I don't see any of those being good at any of the others' tasks.
Yep. The important thing is to create *COMPETITION*.
"Open Source" doesn't create competition, open file formats do - by allowing companies to pick and choose which software they use to work with their documents.
The sooner people figure this out, the better.
No sig today...
So, there I am reading through the posts trying to get a feel for how others think, and I come across yours. It's marked as insightful, so maybe I should read it. Now, as an aside, when I set up my browser, I get it to display standard text at about the right size for me to read, clever huh? Why are your words so much smaller than everybody else's? No, I can't be bothered to squint or change my settings just so I can hear what you have to say. Please don't mess with the tags unless it actually helps to get your message across! /rant> ;D
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You don't give free choice in this matter. If a government organisation decides to do it's own thing contrary to what is being mandated then the rogue department's head is usually found rolling around on the floor. This applies to all Government Departments worldwide except that in some countries the "head rolling around" would be more than a figure of speech.
Standards are designed to work across everything and are agreed on by a respected group people from many different disciplines. In the case of ODF vs OOXML, Microsoft has had it's say (in fact a lot of say) in this this as well. The standard is then Mandated by an appropriate government agency. This can be local (State Government) or worldwide and can cut across all societies.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
And please don't tell me about LaTeX -- if I have to force naive users to generate well-structured docs, LaTeX isn't an option ... I'd rather give them something like Word 2003+ (which can enforce schemas)
The LaTeX macros are schemas. This is why you have to declare what kind of document you're making up front. It's possible to redefine the LaTeX macros within a document, but your hypothetical naive users won't know the TeX code necessary to make anything like that happen. This alone eliminates the unfortunate tendency to treat a word processor as a desktop publishing package, even though TeX is a full featured desktop publishing package.
If there are good reasons why LaTeX isn't suitable, this isn't one of them. Indeed, if there is a good reason, it's that modifying macros is actually kind of hard. If the LaTeX macros don't fit your house style, you'll have to hack around and define your own document classes, which can then be shared with the naive users.
Here's some background information. TeX is a Turing complete (well, as much as, say, C is) domain specific programming language. The LaTeX macros are basically libraries for this language. There are others, and you can make your own. When you say \documentclass{article}, you're importing the article.cls file, which contains TeX code implementing functions (like \section{}) that you can then use in your program/document.
A simple LaTeX document might look like this:
\documentclass{article}
\author{poopdeville}
\title{A Simple Document}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{The Section Name}
A bunch of text. Blah blah.
\section{Another Section}
More text, and so on.
\end{document}
Parallels can be drawn between the relationship between LaTeX and LaTeX documents and the relationship between CSS and HTML. But TeX is far more powerful than CSS, which lets the macros deal with a lot of boring details (automatic section numbering and the like) while maintaining a consistent appearance. This idea is very powerful, since if you maintain a consistent API to your macros, you can change the layout of all your documents with a simple recompilation. The 'amsarticle' class is an example of this. It re-implements the LaTeX API (though it extends it a bit), turning a standard LaTeX document into one that fits the AMS journals house style.
After all, I am strangely colored.
...Check out the dupe!
No jokes, please
Rich Text Format (RTF) was developed by Microsoft as an "open" document interchange format. A standard was published, and WordPerfect among others rushed to implement the standard. Microsoft implemented RTF, but there were several glaring bugs and hundreds of minor problems with Microsoft's non-standard compliant implementation.
When WordPerfect generated RTF documents did not open correctly in Microsoft Word, WordPerfect was blamed. To this day, RTF implementations struggle to be bug for bug compatible with Microsoft's original buggy implementation and the stadnard is next to useless.
No real OS (i.e., not a research OS) will have one feature to the complete exclusion of the other because running different environments in production is a pain in the neck, e.g., Solaris in addition to great security (Trusted Solaris) provides good perf tuning. By a similar process all OSes in a given market reach feature parity (in other words, no mature realtime OS is much better than its peers) over time, at which point they compete on the interesting apps available for the platform, which is of course influenced by the developer environment for that OS, market share, etc.
Because of this, users in mature OS segments tend to look at apps (including legacy apps, if any) more than the OS features (unless they are a tiny minority that need cool_feature_X *now*).
Go somewhere random
Can anyone recommend a good ODF word processor? I've tried recent releases of OpenOffice, ABIWord and others and frankly, with the exception of ABIWord that handles menial word processing good enough for a high school student writing a report, they're all quite crappy.
I am looking for a word processor that can handle transitioning between 4 written/spoken languages (English, Norwegian, Spanish, and Hebrew) at least as well as Word does. When I switch between these languages in Word, the spelling and grammar checkers adapt to what I'm writing quite well. In fact, it even handles inserting single words or phrases from other languages pretty well.
The text/graphics quality in Word 2007 is amazing. I can manipulate tables extremely easily and it responds like lightning. I can find everything I need without looking very hard in Word 2003 and 2007 and I've never really bothered trying to "Learn" them.
Recently I needed to alter 2500 word processing documents in a batch to make a correction, I was able to write a script that did it painlessly.
When I develop applications that need to produce forms, I use Word since I can just use OLE Automation to control all components of the program.
When I make graphics using Visio, I can drop them into a Word document painlessly. In OpenOffice, it really destroys all my scaling by scaling some objects but not others.
So if anyone can recommend a word processor capable of competing with Word on these fronts, I would love to hear it.
Now regarding the document format? Well, as long as Office allows me to write scripts and use OLE automation, I can't really imagine a reason that I would need to deal with anything else.
For exchangability, well RTF is as good as anything else.
Oh.. and if anyone actually needs to read the document that doesn't have Word, I'm pretty sure there's a free viewer or I can send them a PDF
Although I agree that open file formats create competition, I would also say that Open Source does create competition in the sense that if a company (or state) uses an Open Source program it can put several contractors in competition for the maintenance/development of the program.
Open source, like socialism, is often appropriate, like for public roads and schools. You, however, seem to be confusing open source with open standards. Not all the software that uses the ODF format is open source.
The revenue model for most open source software, is to give the software away and provide support at a premium price, or place ads in the software.As someone who has worked his entire life at companies that worked on open source software, but who never worked at one that tried to survive on support revenue from them I find your comment to be misinformed. Support is not the most common revenue model for open source software. Are you sure you understand how most open source software is developed?
Who thinks a government agency can create software that will be reusable, upgradeable and secure?What does the government have to do with it? The whole point of the open source model is that companies and governnments and organizations pay only for what they need and that no one else has needed. Assuming my company were to standardize on OpenOffice at work, but we needed it to be able to import one of our proprietary XML report formats, we might make some improvements to the import routines, maybe building a plug-in system so we did not clutter up the main product. We could do this using our own employees if we had the time and expertise or we could hire someone else. Our company is only acting in our own self interests, but at the same time our work benefits others. A thousand companies all doing this same thing and a hundred thousand using it and just reporting bugs and that is the common open source business model. Most open source is not developed by one dedicated company that is trying to make money off the software itself, rather it is created by the community who are trying to make money doing business which that software happens to facilitate. The only problem is when someone who does not understand this model starts calling it "socialism" and confuses people even more. The confusion is understandable because it is an application of common property, but it is very much part of capitalism, developed and shared for profit by the users, not out of some sort of selfless hippy idealism.
MS needs to back off a bit and to allow a universal document format.
MSWord is a good program with many features. I would use it by choice, but what I don't like is that it's output by default is a non standard proprietary file.
That is what worries many people and organizations.
If MS is confident about MSWord and has faith in it, then really there should be no problems in a standardized doc format. It is bad policy to force a format onto the world, and forcing other developers (like Open Office) to comply with MS docs.
MSWord is not perfect by any means - there are too many bugs in it, but it shows what a good word processor is capable of (not discounting XL), if only it would work well.
I get different MSword docs sent to me - and when I open them, they often never appear as they are intended. The margins are wrong, the page size is wrong, kerning is incorrect, fonts are different, styles don't import properly, units vary (cm/inches/ etc), spaces/tabs stops are awry... the list goes on and on.
So I implore MS to back off and to help develop a consistent doc format that not only works between WP apps, but within different versions of MS office apps as well.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
There are so many nice features in Office that aren't available in OpenOffice
..
Name them
Open source is a nice idea, but so is socialism
I made a bet with myself that the thread would be seeded with such nonsence as the above statement., looks like I won.
was Re:Compelling
davecb5620@gmail.com
Dude use OpenOffice Draw for mathematics formula write up... works great.... here's a sample:
.odg documents, it's free yea know... Don't let them hold you back.
http://www.nbritton.org/uploads/unit_circle.pdf
I'd like to see you do that with LaTeX! It works best when you setup OpenOffice Draw/Math to use the same fonts and sizes, I used 'Trebuchet MS' to make the sample document above. OpenOffice Draw offers complete typesetting, layout, and style control. It's ok to give your coworkers a copy of OpenOffice if they need to edit
If it's not a threat then why is Microsoft 'partnerning' with Novell to get SLED in the door at Wal-mart, in the process giving Linspire the big heave-ho.
..
'By dropping software from Microsoft and avoiding "Intel inside," retailer Wal-Mart Stores is offering a $199 computer it says is a hot seller on its Web site', Dec 2002
Microsoft and Novell Alliance Embraced by Wal-Mart, Jan. 22, 2007
'MS won't care if everybody uses the ODF standard, because at the end of the day, just like with Windows, people will continue buying their software in large numbers because'
How do people get to choose their software when the OEM contract with Microsoft prevents them from selling any other OS, else they are penalized with higher prices. The last time DELL tried to get into the LInux Desktop market MS moved very quickly to shut it down.
'A PC dealer in Europe has begun selling Dell desktop computers equipped with Linux, but Dell has distanced itself from the announcement, saying that the systems were customized by the dealer, and that it is not the first time a reseller has loaded Linux onto Dell computers'
'Questar claims that in the 24 hours since it began shipping the Linux computers, which can be delivered to 20 countries in Europe, its Web site has received over 200,000 hits'
'The question remains, why devote 150 staff to a business unit, spend millions investing in start-ups, only to can the exercise a few weeks later?'
'Lewis Mettler sums up the story from trial documents'
'Microsoft held a series of meetings with Dell in regard to Linux'
'Dell in June of 2001 informs Microsoft that Dell has canceled their Linux business unit'
was: Not necessarily a "threat" at all (Score:1, Insightful)
ps: I'd prefer to be a 'zealot' rather than a bought and paid for media whore like you
davecb5620@gmail.com
Dear Microsoft,
Today I want to go to any of the following states: Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, California. Should I expect any chairs thrown in my direction along the way?
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
>Microsoft Office MSRP prices have been declining in even nominal terms (and of course in real terms) over the past 10+ years. Google News Archive search is your friend -- you can find old MSRP data quite easily with it. And re 'buggy bloatware' - while WordPerfect the word-processor is good (don't know about apps WP Office comes with), I *have* used IBM's SmartSuite, OpenOffice and Microsoft's Office, and give me MS Office anyday. And please don't tell me about LaTeX -- if I have to force naive users to generate well-structured docs, LaTeX isn't an option ... I'd rather give them something like Word 2003+ (which can enforce schemas) or come up with my own web-based word processor (I hope Google Docs adds this feature quickly).
:) Good point on the other Office packages though. I've also tried several of them, and I always come back to MS Office, because the others have limitations that I find unacceptable ("missing" features, obscure interfaces, etc). For me, MS Office just works for what I need an Office package to do, and I don't have to worry about any silly rendering incompatibilities, etc when I send documents to my business clients, friends or relatives, because guess what, they are using MS Office as well.
So, you just point to some magical list and ignore inflation. Nice. There went those supposed cost savings from the prices being lowered
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Dear Mr./Ms./ Assembly Person of California,
I am a Louisiana resident who would like to ask you to support ODF as a standard file format for your state.
I do not reside in California, although I went there once for technical training and there was an earthquake.
I am not too eager to go back.
I assure you I will be writing my Louisiana assembly person about this issue in about 10 to 15 years when our state attempts to catch up to the rest of the country. Your state will be a role model for the rest of the nation.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It also wouldn't shock me if this initiative in CA, TX, etc. gets shot down thanks to massive MS lobbying efforts.
If that's true, it will be cheaper for M$ to give in and adopt ODF. If M$ starts throwing around lobby money, every grafty legislator in the country is going to figure out how to suck it up. You can expect every state and federal legislature to introduce multiple bills, everyone of them expecting a pay off. Smear campaigns won't work because the clever little monkeys will find fall guys to sacrifice while they collect the cash for defeating threats to M$ business and innovation.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft lobbyists stampeding to California to convince them that OOXML is actually "open".
If that's true, it will be cheaper for M$ to give in and adopt ODF. If M$ starts throwing around lobby money, every grafty legislator in the country is going to figure out how to suck it up. You can expect every state and federal legislature to introduce multiple bills, everyone of them expecting a pay off. Smear campaigns won't work because the clever law monkeys will find fall guys to sacrifice while they collect the cash for defeating threats to M$ business and innovation. As soon as one bill is defeated, another one will pop up and it will pass when M$ gets tired of spending money.
This battle is over, but it's going to be fun to see how badly M$ is going to fall for it. I'm not very good at math in situations like this. Is there anyone out there who can predict what $40 billion dollars is divided by fifty state legislatures and all of the world's federal governments? I keep getting zero errors.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Since XML is text based, it can be much more easily transported across platforms with different character encodings. A binary format is much more problematic. For example, using XML you could generate the data, or parts of it, on a Mainframe system which uses EBCIDC encoding and then FTP that data into to a server that uses ASCII and parse it easily.
2. Charge extra for ODF format in MS Office.
What, and risk government Office sales? That would sink them.
3. Users too stubborn to use anything but Office.
I suppose you mean, M$ makes it difficult to save in anything but their own formats with all the usual cheap tricks:
Sure they can keep playing those silly games, but it's going to cost them sales. People don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for software that tricks them and does not do what they want.
No, M$ is fighting this with all of their might, errr money and they are going to lose.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Naive users should try Lyx. Moving away from format considerations and towards content would be especially useful in academic environments, and anywhere else where there is a focus on what is said rather than how it looks. The process does shake one up a bit, though I would suggest that this is a very good thing :-)
You're a *shill*
... a famous problem is the ambiguity in the formulas, which effectively makes reverse-engineering StarCalc's formula engine a must to parse ODF properly, effectively making it a hidden part of the spec.)
The "simple and brief" attitude doesn't work so well for any sort of legacy system. There are two sorts of standards: blue-sky (TCP, IP, HTTP, etc) and those that build on what's already on the market. So unless you have any bright ideas for dealing with docs that *already* exist, be prepared to deal with messy specs (and it's not like the ODF spec is that brief
This is the exact kind of ambiguity littered throughout the OOXML spec. Stuff like, "This tag means emulate Word 2.0 for Mac System 8. This behavior should copy that of Word 2.0 for Mac System 8, which should be determined by running the same output through that system. The details of this implementation are too complex to define here."
That is *all over* the MS spec. That's a useless spec; no one other than MS will be able to implement OOXML, at least with output approaching Office 2007.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
OK, it is acknowledged that personal computer storage space and processing speed are increasing.
Ever wanted to open a document file on something perhaps less powerful than a desktop computer? What about an underpowered long-battery life machine like a PDA or subnotebook?
Why would you want to define something broadly that is unusable by large segments of digital devices? Do you have any idea how many competing Word->PDA->Word products there are out there? Partly this is due to an overly complex architecture.
* March 1987: An article by Nancy Andrews of Microsoft.
* 1.0 June 1992: Word (for Windows) v2
* 1.1 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.2 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.3 January 1994: Word v6
* 1.4 September 1995: Word v7 (Word 95)
* 1.5 April 1997: Word v8 (Word 97)
* 1.6 May 1999: Word v9 (Word 2000)
* 1.7 August 2001: Word v10 (Word 2002)
* 1.8 April 2004: Word v11 (Word 2003)
The above list happens to be more complete than any Microsoft document, for example way back in 2006 see here.
Openoffice 2.1 is out now.
I've been noodling with openoffice since 0.94.
I have a set of private roleplaying game documents which are about 10mb with hundreds of graphics (of dubious copyright if I were to ever publish beyond my little circle of gamers).
OO has always failed to open it or crashed on editing. Likewise graphics were wierd. It kept improving tho so I kept my eye on it (I really dislike microsoft on a philosophical basis tho they have treated me very well as a customer when I had problems).
They just released 2.1 and so I gave it a whirl and it's very close now. The table of contents and indices were imported as single column instead of triple column but that was easy to correct.
I moved around some stuff and cut and pasted to see if it was crash prone like 1.1 and 2.0 and nothing. I have to say it must be the automatic crash agent at work. I religiously opened and crashed every document and reported them so I guess mystery gnomes are working those import and editing issues.
The main issue I have now is the inability to select, cut and paste, or alter, an arbitrary column of text (useful for working with log files).
It's free and finally seems to be stable and solid editing large graphic intensive word documents.
Given there are some roleplaying documents I had to strip the text out of because I couldn't read them (.wrt files from win3.1), it is nice to know that ODT will allow me to read these documents years from now.
As an added bonus, the open document text is 1,272KB while the word document is 2644KB. There appears to be some kind of GROSS 1MB bloat in modern word documents. I open the same document in word 6.0 and save it, I get 1353KB. Same document- reopen it in word 2003, back to 2644KB. The content is not changing. Some kinda of container information constitutes that bloat.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Would you use Trusted Solaris on a notebook with data that you need secured. I would guess its lack of power management, bloat, complexity and lack of filesystem encryption would be major obstacles. Would you use a realtime OS to run your J2EE server? I don't think so. Current Microsoft's monopoly is obscuring the fact that yes, different users would benefit from operating systems with fundamentally different design. And if you just need to browse web and read e-mail, you could be served by a super-lean OS on solar-powered hardware with e-paper display.
Maybe they unencumbered by patents and license agreements that make it impossible to implement in Open Source software... You know. Truly open rather than just by Microsoft's definition.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I guess you can't either. Several translators already exist, with their companies' support behind them like Novell. Read ALL the news first to grok the topic, not just one article.
You're kidding, right? Or is this what "Trolling" means?
.doc formats. But now that I know that RTF was a microsoft standard, and then not even implemented properly by microsoft, and artificially changed by microsoft? What's that line again? "Embrace. Extend. Exterminate"
Plain text cannot convey any meta information. Nor can it properly handle non 7-bit ascii.
So lets say I want to indicate that formatting has [b]bold[/b] letters in my text. Clearly, plain text is 100% compatible with everything, right?
Or lets say I want to format for 2 column output. Do I assume 10 characters per inch, 8.5 inches across, and layout in a predetermined font -- the old "plain text" format? Ouch, that gives me line 1, line 33, line 2, line 34, line 3, line 35, etc. Text is all messed up. No good.
I want to have my text -- line 1, 2, 3, 4, etc -- and then format it in two column seperately.
And I haven't even mentioned fonts, margins, etc.
And then there's "How is this done?". Do we use control codes for formatting? Oh dear, we destroyed 8-bit clean / non ascii characters. And how do we represent those? Do we assume (horrible, horrible broken Java) that 16 bits will represent any character, and just double the size of plain ascii files? Do we use UTF-8? UTF-7? UTF-16? How about UCS-4 -- oh, wait, that just means that the "Universal" character format is only big enough to hold "earth-based" characters, and will fail when we join the galactic group.
Meta information -- formatting layout, fonts, etc -- CANNOT be done in plain text. You have to have some sort of extra information.
Up til now, I've always been recommending RTF to all my clients, because I knew about compatibility problems with
Oh, yea -- I've used three different styles of markup in this. All "plain text", right? 100% understandable everywhere, right?
Yea, sure. Preview tells me that the "Voice" tag I gave in there disappears completely. Of course it's compatible.
(it was "english-scifi" on the Dalek line)
I like OpenOffice and I think that's definitely the right way to do it. But I think the primary motivation and the wording of the bill should reflect the intent, not the technology. (I admit, however, to not reading the real bill so I could be mistaken).
The point is that we want a truly open standard that multiple companies, organizations, and of course free software folk can gain access to and write software for... worded in such a way as to prevent the standard from having lots of unsupportable bloat (ie. Microsoft's model). ODF happens to be a very good choice right now because of its wide-spread use and the fact that OpenOffice is a fairly mature reference implementation. But at the political level, the argument shouldn't be about the underlying technology.
If Microsoft had adopted ODF, they either would have had to remove features from their products [...] I love how Slashdot makes it sound like a big Microsoft conspiracy when, in reality, the reason they don't use ODF is practicality.
This argument doesn't wash AT ALL. Firstly, OO.o manages to be pretty full-featured using ODF as its native format and nobody has produced a list of MS Office features that could not be represented in an ODF-structured document. Being that MS is supposedly a participant in the OASIS organisation that oversees ODF the LEAST it could do is provide the standards authors a set of requirements to accommodate its products' functionality.
Second, what is stopping MS from implementing and supporting bundled ODF import/export in its office suite even if only a subset of features are supported? They don't need to make it the NATIVE format after all. To say otherwise is crap--MS already allows opening and saving RTF in Word and simple comma-delimited text files in Excel and Access and handles the down-conversion relatively gracefully (and warns the user of potential loss of information).
You're right--it isn't a big MS conspiracy, however it isn't a simple practicality issue either. To be sure, OOXML is a brain-dead specification thrown together with no thought at all by what appears to be the dimmest bulbs MS has to offer. It isn't unreasonable to conclude that MS ran its core-dump-binary formats through some thrown-together disassembly tool, then put angle brackets in the structs and called it an XML format. If they stopped at using this work-free activity then you might argue practicality. However MS then proceeded to DOCUMENT this nasty monster and submit the thousands of pages of junk to standards bodies for ratification. That had to be a HUGE amount of work!
It seems to me that simply embracing ODF as an alternate file format by way of bolting on inport/export filters would've been easier than the route they took from a technical practicality standpoint. This is purely a shrewd business decision. Windows and Office are MS' ONLY dependable revenue generators and MS knows that the only way to keep these products in a market-leading position is to put barriers in place to limit interoperability. Microsoft nearly missed the boat when it let HTML and related standards get established, however they succeeded in quashing that threat by bundling a browser with its OS to shut down serious competition, then putting in non-portable extensions like ActiveX and nonstandard implementations like its javascript-like VBScript and broken and/or confusing CSS behaviour to limit interoperability. This has been a tough battle for MS and they haven't even one the war yet (they tried to declare victory by discontinuing IE at version 6 but had to succumb to pressure and produce another major release).
It seems to me that MS is trying to head-off the competition before it gets established when it comes to ODF. Sure, MS could have embraced-and-extended ODF to some degree, however that would only limit competition not kill it (witness the persistence of competing web browsers) and MS couldn't "own" the format--it would have to put as much effort into implementing ODF as its competitors have to (and one competitor already has done so and uses it as a native format). OOXML lets MS have an advantage in that the format is tailored for its own products, being that it appears that it's merely a thin cellophane wrapper around the internal binary structures within MS Office applications.
Furthermore, success of OOXML would be of greater benefit to MS Office than the success of ODF would be to OO.o because it is an order of magnitude more difficult for third-parties to implement OOXML. ODF is freely available, easier to read and much shorter and the source code to implement it is pretty easy to obtain giventhe most mature implementation is Free software. OOXML is a HUGE spec and difficult to read or interpret (with countless references to un-described behaviou
>> >Microsoft Office MSRP prices have been declining in even nominal terms (and of course in real terms) over the past 10+ years.
> So, you just point to some magical list and ignore inflation. Nice.
What part of 'nominal' and 'real' prices don't you understand? 'Nominal' prices do not correct for inflation and even those have been reducing -- a little -- with every release. If inflation is taken into account (i.e., 'real' prices) , Office prices have gone down quite a bit. Of course, this may not make GNU-types happy because they'd say hey, the price isn't zero yet. And Office prices haven't fallen as much as, say, chip or PC prices. But that doesn't change the fact that prices are falling, not rising.
Go somewhere random
> You're a *shill*
;-)
Oooh. You scare me. How old are you? 12? And nah, I'm not a shill. At least not a paid one -- just volunteerin' today, guv
So from what I see, at least the OOXML spec is honest enough to document that some of its mandates are based on legacy behavior. Whereas ODF does so anyway, with the added disadvantage of a) keeping it hidden b) bragging how clean the spec is and c) basing it on legacy behavior of an Office suite a tiny fraction uses and that hasn't seen any of the broad deployment in the real world.
And you call OOXML useless. That's a matter of opinion. A good case could be made that a spec like ODF that ignores the massive installed base of documents out there is the one that's actually useless.
Go somewhere random
> And if you just need to browse web and read e-mail, you could be served by a super-lean OS on solar-powered hardware with e-paper display.
I actually do those a lot, and even considered getting a Nokia tablet. The reason I didn't is that the web+email 'lean' OSes forget that occasionally I need to do other things. Which is why Windows and Linux are popular on mobile devices (notebooks and PDAs/smartphones). Hardware is cheap. Making software 'lean' serves no business purpose (but it is technically satisfying, I know). Creating a capable OS means your users can do more complex thing *should they choose to do so*.
In short, lean OSes are a niche thing. OS manufacturers are forced to keep up with everybody else and add features appropriate to their market.
> Would you use a realtime OS to run your J2EE server?
We're comparing apples to apples here. The key is 'features appropriate to market'. I also wouldn't run my webserver on DOS, or Photoshop on VMS, etc.
> Would you use Trusted Solaris on a notebook with data that you need secured.
Heh heh. I wouldn't, because a notebook can't be secured (physical access to data implies control of data). But if had to run a "security-hardened" notebook, I'd just use Linux or Windows, both of which have ACLs, encrypting file systems and pretty good power mgmt and lots of apps for what I need to do (primarily IDEs, productivity and internal business apps, a good web browser and a VoIP client).
If my organization needed MACs (mandatory access controls), I'd use Linux because of SELinux (but then I'd be a niche because most orgs don't require mandatory access controls). But if Windows had MACs, the playing field would levelled from a features-checklist point of view and I'd choose my OS based on what apps I prefer to run.
The point is, only a small niche choose an OS for its random_killer_feature. Most people look at the alternatives and choose the one with the best app support.
Go somewhere random
Common hardware may be cheap in common use within developed world. Battery life or ultra light hardware are not so cheap. Even average users would benefit from being able to work at convenient times for a week without worrying about plugging in. For soldiers in the field, backpackers or international travelers it's a deal-breaker. Even OLPC with Linux is too heavy-weight in that it needs a pedal to be pumped regularly to keep it running. They could have slimmed it down enough to use solar power, keyboard press energy or motion charging ala self-winding watch, perhaps running FreeDOS and appropriate 16 bit hardware.
This memory dump can be understood by every program and even most people! GASP! Isn't this what XML is supposed to do? Tread a middle ground where the file is
If you do your homework right and keep the ODF documentation handy for the obscure tags (as in rarely used) you can EASILY, I mean EASILY make out what the documents say. Heck, the tags are so self descriptive its ironic that its being called a 'memory dump'. Really I mean like OOXML is also somewhat descriptive, the fact that Microsoft has (unsurprisingly) chosen to cripple it with references to old proprietary entities makes it much harder to use than ODF. Does look as cryptic as other memory dumps to you? Well yes it is a memory dump but tell me which type of memory dump would you prefer:
<ObscureTag> Plaintext</ObscureTag>
OR
0100101110101010001111001001010010111101010010101
1111111100000000000001010101111000010101010010101
0100101110101010001101001001010010111101010010101
111111110000000 0101011101011110000101010100101010010
0100101110100011110101001001010010111101010010101
1111111100000000010101110101111000010101010010101
"Sending Memory Dump to Microsoft, Allow or Deny?"
If there is no viewer available to me that is rendering my stuff correctly under ODF or OOXML or other XML files, I can rip out the text by hand from the XML document unscathed. Lets see you try this on the
Now let's see about those cries of XHTML+CSS being more suitable for the job. People of slashdot, have you forgotten that XHTML was itself designed to wean people off of the chaos of HTML? You are advocating using a format which itself is a planned step between HTML and XML? If XHTML is leading people towards XML, that means XML is the final format, right? Why use an intermediate format? Use XML!
As for CSS, please, it can't handle BASIC layout properly and you're telling me that I can create whole word processing and desktop publishing (I really want ODF to do this!) documents? If CSS was so good at defining the style of advanced layout, tell me, why people are still using convoluted layers upon layers (pun uintended) of nested tables? Its not for legacy support, you know. Its because TABLES, yes TABLES and 1x1 GIFs are better for precise layout than the mess that is CSS...
If you dont agree with me, fine. But I dont know why people are so much against XML that they want to use inferior solutions in its place. Come on people, XML does have its shortcomings and its being overused in places where it was not even meant to be used but please! Be rational! Oh yes and the obligatory, mode me down if you so will...
My last sig was ridiculed
And I guess you haven't heard about the parts of the OOXML "spec" that say something ot the effect of: "Word95Spacing - This tag means that document spacing should conform to that produced by Word95. That's too complicated to go into here, see Word95 for details."
Yikes! Here's a link I found with that and more examples.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sorry but it depends on the nature of the licensing of their plugin.
... er ... wait, all the other vendors could be sued easily by MS as we do know, specially if MS has been the instigator of the format and has "software patents" (read protection racket here please) over it.
If it is closed source, well yeah, it would be akin to a stabbin.
If it is GPLed
So yeah, Novell stab in the back.
Thanks guys.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Number of Linux distros: who knows, go and find yourselves. But I venture > 100 .
Number of Windows OSes: 1 (or 2 or 3, but ther is not much competitions left, is it?)
Number of closed source desktop OSes: 1 (windows) and perhaps Apple OSX or whatever it is called (before you rubish this, show me the imlementaion in Intel or Sparc processors, none? There you go).
Number of closed source OSes: Solaris is open now. So we have Windows, a few flavours of UNIX and 3 or 4 highly specialized ones that are somehow popular. Lots of variety and competition there as well buddy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.