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Pro-ODF Legislation Loses In Six States
ajanp writes "Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut which 'would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats.' A similar bill in Minnesota was changed to study the issue instead. There was heavy lobbying being done in private on both sides with one problem being 'the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath.' However, 'Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.'"
will determine the outcome. It's the American way.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
OK, I'm from Europe and don't know too much about the different states of America.
But when I read the summation of state names that rejected ODF it rang a bell.
Are these some of the most republican states?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
If McCain wins and puts Ballmer in his cabinet, I'm sure all this will get straightened out.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Write to your reps. Most of them are completely clueless and have been fed unhealthy amounts of FUD that programs like Microsoft Office couldn't be used. They can, in fact, be used, and if an entire state government were to commit to using them in such a manner, Microsoft would be forced to provide improved support or lose them entirely to OpenOffice or alternatives.
All they have to do is explain that getting Office to output ot odf is not part of office but requires a downloaded addon, follow that with a breakdown of the man-hours required to get it installed on everyones machines, then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt. It's a nice idea but its just not practical.
while government documents should not be locked away in a proprietary format, I think we can all agree that ODF is a turd that can't be polished. The fact that it's "open" doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally broken.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It will come up every year, and every year Redmond will have to shower cash on just enough local grifters to keep open docs on the back burner.
I've learned by watching the big money interests; you only have to win once. And once you've won, there's no going back. I saw it happen with logging and other environmental interests; the logging lobby wants to log some area, they just keep trying to get the legislature to allow logging, and one fine day, they do. In, out, and the battle is over.
ODF needs to do this, too. Keep it up and one year real soon, they'll win and it's over.
Best regards.
I think we should make a law that politicians are not allowed to legislate about anything that they have not taken courses on (and passed). This goes especially true for technology but could be applied to other things like medicine, economy, etc..
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Just like cocaine... hmm, I see, perhaps you are right. But, wait, when a cause is worthwhile shouldn't we at least try before giving it up as "not practical"?
(Taken from the intro to the Oregon legislation, not sure if the other states are similar or not.)
Why does it matter if it was developed or updated by more than one independent software provider? As long as it is well-defined and inclusive, and follows the other tenets (not encumbered by royalties, for example,) then does it really matter that it's developed by one sole provider? PDF is developed solely by Adobe, yet it otherwise fits the bill as 'open'.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
ODF is good, but not enough. In order to get to the ODF files, you'll likely have to go to a web site that only works in IE. They need to require that these be fully functional in other web browsers -- at least the top 5 or whatever.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they crack open a can of lobbyist whoopass and defeat your bill.
All kidding aside, what makes this fight different from the usual standards wars is that it's not between two companies trying to pitch different standards like Beta and VHS or BlueRay and HDDVD. In that kind of fight, whoever wins, the victor is still going to be a giant corporation. For the buying public it's truly a case of same shit, different pile. ODF isn't just a product being shilled by a single corporation and so there's no single company to bankrupt or buy out so victory can be declared. I think this is going to be more like guerrilla warfare than a conventional battle.
I predict that there will be many, many more defeats for ODF legislation, especially in the US. The question is whether there will be a victory or failure after all those defeats. Microsoft certainly has the dollars in this fight. There's the old quote from Vietnam, allegedly from when both sides were having a talk after the final peace was declared. A Col. Summers had a chat with General Giap. "You know you never defeated us in the field," Summers said. "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant," Giap replied.
No matter which way it goes, this war is going to be interesting to watch.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Ummm, how is it 'superior' to not be able to get your OWN data out of a file unless you pay X for program Y? I have had the problem where people have sent me proprietary files and well, not owning Office meant I couldn't get the data. (OpenOffice didn't have compatibility with the new versions.) On the other hand, I have had a corrupted OpenOffice file, but I extracted most of the data without being able to open it in OO. Oh and I used tools common to most operating systems. Are you talking about features? How much are you going to spend to be able to write pdfs? I do agree that Office usually outputs slightly better looking files on display. Print them out and I can't see the difference though. I am sorry if I don't know what it is that makes Office superior. Please enlighten me.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I have two words that will blow this particular argument out of the water; Two words that explain exactly why proprietary and popular aren't always "better", and that even though free or cheaper alternatives exist, not everyone will flow to them, perhaps simply out of brand recognition. Those words?
Norton Antivirus.
I think that speaks for itself, really.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
I really don't know if ODF is the best open office-document standard that we could ever develop (probably not) but it is certainly very good at doing its job so far. And I mean that it does both the "office-document" part and the "open" part. With regard to being a good "office-document" standard, it seems to support all the features a user would expect from a modern format. With regard to the "open" part, I recently discovered that you can extract all the data from an ODF spreadsheet using a few lines of python (unzipping and using mindom to parse it), which allows me to write scripts to extract data from spreadsheets, perform more sophisticated analysis (that no spreadsheet could handle), and dump the results back into the document. Needless to say, that would have been impossible using a proprietary, binary, non-human-readable format.
So, again, I wonder whether you can refer me to an objectively better format (that currently exists). Right now, in terms of office documents, I would argue that ODF is the best format, because it is open, it has all the required features, and it exists. Proprietary formats are fundamentally broken as long as it remains proprietary (it is, in fact, defective by design). And though there are other open formats (plaintext, latex, etc.) none of them can do what ODF can.
Do you people really want Government to have a hand in this?
You do realize that once they start "regulating" they start taking control?
Or, do you think Government should step in and make your decisions for you?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Not even considering the free pdf printers, Office 2007 gets a plugin to save as pdf the first time you try. Easy enough.
For the rest, the company I work for just finished putting together a php + perl script (they did, I'm not touching those with a 10 foot pole, mind you) to extract data from office documents to push it in a database, and thats with the pre-2007, harder to read format, and it was done -without- using any of the COM components made by MS.
So while there a re arguments about OpenOffice file format, and I wouldn't brush aside saying that its pretty good, the arguments you gave aren't really valid.
Yes, Microsoft's add-on is utter crap, but a few other people make them, too.
Also, you have to look at this another way:
* Are all our old-format Microsoft documents going to be accessible in 10 years? I mean, who has a copy of Word 1.0 these days? And no, the legacy support in current versions is NOT good enough.
* Aren't we going to go through the same damn trouble in the next new, incompatible version of Word?
Between those two factors, you may be saving some pain in the short term, but you're hurting yourself in the long run. Further proof of Microsoft's intensive lobbying, though. I mean, what's wrong with ensuring that you save your documents in formats anyone can read without being tied to a specific vendor?
But nooooo, that's only what the evil IBM lobbyists want you to believe! Gotta trust the Microsoft lobbyists if you know what's good for you (and your campaign funding).
Nothing, except approximately 120-150 seconds of my time, once. >> Microsoft Office 2007 Add-in: Save as PDF or XPS .
-AC
M$ spoon fed these people a load of crap and they bought it. The only people fighting ODF is M$ and there is no reason they could not use it. The only people who can use M$ formats is M$. It will always be this way because M$ is NOT RESPONDING and never has. They have promised something that they have never done so that people won't get the ability to use ANY software to read their public documents today.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The things that make MS office superior are, off the top of my head:
A few years back I peppered my journal with things that OOo did well and did not do well. A few months ago I tried recreating a custom spreadsheet from Excel in OOo. I paid $160 for the home version of Office, and I don't even have OOo on my PC anymore because using it is such a pain.
And let's not even get into the pain I suffered when I tried to get my friends & family to use OOo. Anything more than "here, it's free and legal" falls flat. If they aren't a Linux geek or aren't poor but honest, they don't use OOo -- because they have a superior product.
The "war on drugs" failed because it's impossible to identify and arrest every drug lord hiding somewhere in the South American jungles. In the case of office file formats, we know who they are and where to find the masterminds behind the stuff that's being peddled at the street corners.
Looking at the links for Texas, it appears that the two bills in question, SB 446 and HB 1794 are not "defeated", but instead just pending in committee. I'm not naïve enough to believe they couldn't be left there, but they've *not* been voted down explicitly yet...
Write/email your local representative!Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
OOXML is built in to Office 2007. The files are zips, if you unzip them, they're generally plaintext XML. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS ODF.
MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it didn't support some functions of legacy Office applications, they wanted a broader definition set, which led to the ginormous OOXML standard.
Now, you can complain (not without significant justification) that OOXML is a hugely bloated standard due to it's trying to be all things to all iterations of Office, but your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring. Also, I have no idea what you mean by "MS is not responding and never has"... not responding to what/whom? Whether or not you agree with their response, they've explained their problem with ODF (which is as I outlined above) so how exactly is that not/never responding?
-AC
Sounds like you're confusing OpenOffice (the office suite of applications) with ODF (Open Document Format) since all your arguments only discuss MS Office vs. OO.o. As people are quick to point out, there is nothing stopping MS from supporting ODF so that you could keep using those Office capabilities that you find so indispensable (although everyone I know seems just fine with OO.o) and others can deal with the same document in their office suite-of-choice. Is there some reason why that would be a bad thing (other than for Microsoft's monopoly)?
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats.
It's not a technical question. The issue is getting away from a single vendor lock in that limits choice. I'm a GNU/Linux user and I can't do anything with M$'s new "open" format. Mac users are in the same boat. The new format is not "open" and legislators should be able to see the issue for what it is. If they want their documents to be readable, they need to dump the bad apple, M$.
IBM were apparently deliberately disingenuous about the situation with ODF in Massachusetts.
Really? What exactly have they said that could be worse than the above facts?
There is no way a person with an open mind can equate M$'s utter bullshit with advocacy of real document standards, especially when those standards are royalty free and there are no cost implementations of them. Legislators who reject ODF are going to be wasting public money on the new M$ Office. That's money they could have spent on things voters care about. Every dollar spent on M$ Office is a dollar your state does not have for roads, schools, hospitals and everything else your state usually does for you.
Limiting choice to free things is a good limitation. Allowing things like slavery is bad. Yes, the difference is really that stark and the issue will not go away. Those who voted these bills down are going to be embarrassed of their actions soon.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Or you could explain to them they could get Open Office at no cost on any OS of their choice and keep their computers for the next ten years, longer if they virtualize the desktops like any reasonable shop should. Why limit yourself to M$ only options that cost more when you could spend the money on roads, hospitals, child care and the many other things voters actually care about?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Warning: Soporano's spoilers in subject line
I am increasingly convinced that this country would be much better off today if our founding fathers had extended the principal of separation of church and state to also apply to private enterprise.
Though one could also argue there is no fundamental difference between the two. If nothing else Scientology has certainly blurred the line a bit.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Incorrect. That study showed that helmets increased the risk of collision.
Once you're in a collision however, you're fucked if you don't have a helmet.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
You can do that with Microsoft formats too. For ODF you used unzip and mindom. For the Microsoft stuff, you just use Microsoft's interfaces. You could write an ActiveX object, then have Office Basic load it up and call it. The other way, if you'd really like this to be an external tool, is to invoke the various COM/D-COM/etc. interfaces -- effectively using Microsoft Office as a library to read the files.
No, you can't reliably write your own parser, but you didn't do that for ODF either.
As for ODF being a turd... yes, but not as smelly as the OO-XML turd. All this zipped XML stuff is very low performance.
Office 2007 gets a plugin to save as pdf the first time you try. Easy enough.
Wow, I'm sold, can you hear my wallet snapping open as I run to the nearest M$ vendor to buy Office 2007 so that I can finally print pdf? I don't care that I'll probably have to buy a whole new computer to get reasonable performance, that "free" pdf print out is just too good to pass up.
On second thought, I'll just keep my six year old computer which runs the latest and greatest Open Office without a hitch. Thanks anyway.
You know, if my individual savings were multiplied by the tens of thousands of computers my state keeps up, my state would save a whole boatload of money. Better yet, if my state moved to free formats me and Mac users would not be left in the cold when dumb ass state workers start using the fancy new "open" formats than no one else really has. That "free" pdf printing was tempting, but I'm afraid that I already have on that works and I'd like to share it with my state government.
This fight has only begun. There are hundreds of millions of dollars that will be wasted in each state if ODF loses. The fight is going to go on and on until free software wins because it's cheapest and easiest.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Can I get modded up as insightful now, please? Spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign and insulting people seem to do the trick around here.
An AC has the nerve to say OOXML is usable:
your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring
Show me working Mac and GNU/Linux editors. No, I don't mean the pathetic half done Word readers from Novel and M$, I mean full working office suits. It's not because OOXML is not really Open. The people who reverse engineered the previous generation of M$ DOC are more than capable of understanding and implementing this supposedly easier format, but it's not really easier and it's going to take time. This is because M$ is lying and there's no real difference between the new and old formats. It can and is being used as a binary container. The unzip trick no longer works.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My reading of Texas HB1794 and SB 446 does not lead me to believe that it is limited in scope to word processing documents and spreadsheet documents.
While it does say:
"Each state agency must be able to receive electronic documents in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file format for office applications and may not change documents to a file format used by only one vendor."
it also says:
"Each electronic document created, exchanged, or maintained by a state agency must be created, exchanged, or maintained in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file format"
While some may interpret "electronic document" to mean only word processing documents and spreadsheet documents it may be that other things such as emails, database entries, and many, many other state records kept electronically could also be considered "electronic documents" and thus fall under the requirement to be "created, exchanged, or maintained in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file format."
If this is the case then it greatly increases the scope of the bill from being a simple switch from MS Office to OpenOffice to a massive effort involving the definition of many new XML schemata, developing, testing and debugging software to handle the new schemata, creation of documentation, deployment of and training for the new software, etc., etc.
Things like tax records, court records, police records and so forth, and databases comprised thereof cannot be automagically converted from their current electronic formats into open XML formats in the twinkling of an eye by snapping your fingers.
So for a state to switch to open XML formats may not be as simple as it seems. Not just a trivial change from MS Office to OpenOffice, but instead a massive undertaking involving far more than choosing open sourced word processor and spreadsheet applications.
See, I think it really is a question not of why they knocked these bills down, but you figure the average user feels comfortable in MS's cozy Office suite. You thrown something like Open Office in front of them and the techs will spend more time training people rather than doing tech work.
/. reader knows how to run Ubuntu, but the average user likes Windows because it's cozy for them. Ubuntu is new and scary. It's simple.
For example, I just did a contract job where I had to upgrade a company's three computers (ha). The contract specified Vista because it's new (and shiny!). I built the three computers and had them up, runnning and networked in about 20 hours. I deployed them to the company and spent 30 hours just training the two users how to find things in Vista and how to run it. I think the g'ment would rather just continue to throw money at MS rather than have the techs complaining that they're being overburdened with stupid questions and the secretaries being overburdened with "I don't know how to use this".
It can also be compared to the Windows vs Ubuntu debate. Sure, the average
Whoops! Mistake on my part. Lost track of what you were responding to. Sorry about that.
But my point still stands: Is there some reason why customers (such as yourself) wouldn't want MS Office to support ODF? There should be little doubt that it's in the best interest of consumers and citizens for public documents to be available in a free and open format. So why do so many people with no vested interest in Microsoft seem to be so against a common format supported by multiple office suites? After all, that is the main subject of this submission.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
would-be laws were all killed off within the last month while being debated in legislative committees, following fierce opposition from Microsoft Corp. lobbyists
Heh... ActiveX on linux... yes, why didn't /I/ think of that?
Thank you for enlightening me as to the new features. I agree I was ignorant of the new functionality of Microsoft formats. At the occurrence of the complaint they did not have the OpenXML format.
1. 'Print View' = 'Normal' view. Full screen is a menu option under the 'View' menu and is easily made a toolbar button. Fair enough on your other points.
2. You win, I don't have much call for macros
3. Having used them side by side, I prefer OO.
I, as you pointed out, am to ignorant to qualify as a geek, but I do as a linux user. Not poor but honest. It would seem at this point, you are right and Office is superior. But proprietary is the clincher. It won't hurt now, but it will. Eventually.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
As for your link, it doesn't state that they can't unzip the DOCX .... blah blah blah
What it shows is that you can't get the text out, which is all the man wanted. How's that for Open?
Just stop while you are behind! Those "few minor obsolete" things are people's work that M$ should have translated for them not thrown away. But M$ can't do that because their formats are mutually contradictory. That's why much of their spec simply states do it like prints of the old versions without further explanation.
The OOXML propaganda is bigger and dirtier than Mnt. San Diego but will cost much more. You just can't wash this stuff and the truth will be out soon enough. Microsoft has wasted their time and money making yet another M$ only format and they should be punished by market rejection, not rewarded with state money.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because ODF is too simple of a file format to represent (or store), even older versions of word, excel, powerpoint, or access data. It'd be similiar to saying that we should all convert to a new and great "open" computer interface. Then trying to push the calculator as the interface, trying to force laws that government agencies toss out all their PC, and standardize on calculators only and wondering why PC users don't want it.
"As for ODF being a turd... yes, but not as smelly as the OO-XML turd. All this zipped XML stuff is very low performance." Any evidence of that low performance?
MS's Open XML is also intended to be a "free and open format". So then we have two free and open office document formats, and an therefore an ability to choose. Surely that's better?
PDF printing shows how slow and greedy M$ is and that's a good reason to ditch them. It has taken M$ till 2007 to get pdf printing and, despite what you say, people are going to have to upgrade to get Office 2007 working. This is the way the M$ upgrade train always "works". They are slow as all hell to add features because they want to sell a whole new stack every few years. Meanwhile, free software has been printing to post script and pdf for a decade. This is part and parcel of the non free suck. The M$ user is supposed to be so happy for this tiny new feature that they don't notice everything else on the treadmill is about the same.
after a few hundreds, Office comes at a flat fee for unlimited licenses.
I'm well aware of the usual double screw M$ gives to all but the largest of businesses and would like to give to everyone. First they are constrained to buy a computer from a large vendor, which also comes with a M$ OS and some kind of PIM/Office software. They don't get their money back for that software nor do they get to use it - they have to wipe it and load it with yet more software by the volume license. Lest you suspect volume deals are cheaper, you should remember these are the same people who sold "software assurances" for software they never released. They would love to have every one on a subscription and have done as much at LSU, where a significant proportion of tech fees goes to Tigerware, where you can get .... all the software that your computer came with anyway. No thanks.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ubuntu is "New and Shiny". Windows is "Old and Clunky and Plagued with Viruses".
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A lot of versions of Office has been Microsoft tacking on a new version number to try to get everyone to re-buy Office again - look at the differences between Word 2000 and 2003, for example.
But, when Microsoft has had a real competitor, things have improved. Look at the difference between the original DOS Word and early Windows versions and Word 6 due to WordStar and WordPerfect, and look at the nifty new version Microsoft made (2007) due to OpenOffice. Same thing goes with Internet Explorer - until FireFox came along, IE stayed pretty much the same for years, and love it or hate it, 7 is the first "new" version to come along in a long time.
Would I have spent $300 to upgrade from 2000 to 2003, or from 95 to 97? No. Would I have spent $300 to go from DOS versions to Word from Windows, or from 2003 to 2007? Yes. The bane of taking advanced classes is that professors like shiny lab reports, and there are (in my poor college-student opinion) $300 improvements between some word versions.
DATABASE WOW WOW
After all, we have the best legislators in the US that money can buy.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Please explain how to implement "autoSpaceLikeWord95" and "lineWrapLikeWord6". Microsoft's proposed 6000 page standard does not define these, along with many other parts of the specification. Even if you can reverse engineer Microsoft's products and determine how to implement those features, Microsoft's covenant not to sue does not "apply to things that are merely referenced in the specification". As you can see MS Office Open XML fails on all three requirements.
But then that's mainly because the Republican party abandoned it's principles back in the 1960s.
I'm no lawyer, so get one if you actually intend to try this, but so far as I know, the US government has something called Sovereign Immunity. What that means is that you can't successfully sue them unless there's a law allowing for it (e.g. a constitutional right being violated or something).
While you might be able to sue, is there any actual charge you could bring that you think would be successful? I'm afraid this is something that needs to be fought on technical and social merits. That is, by letting people know that ODF means we're not held at Microsoft's mercy, we and those we communicate can use whatever software *we* want instead of the latest version of Office.
Well, a Computer Science degree would cover this solidly in a course with a title like "Analysis of Algorithms". I'll summerize though:
Both zip files and XML files are data streams that must be read sequentially, like a typical tape. You can't skip around. There is no significant indexing ability. You can't skip to page 123 of a presentation, cell $12345$67890 of a spreadsheet, or page 1234 of a book. You have to read the whole damn thing into memory, doing a mildly expensive decompression operation as you go.
With something like *.doc, skipping ahead is done via a tree structure or hash. This is fast.
This isn't just a minor little speed difference. This is a difference that grows with the file size. Access time in zipped XML grows linearly with the file size. Access time in a decent file format grows with the log of the file size at most.
Note that the quality of the app can't improve this, though a bad app can make things worse. These performance issues are fundamental to the data layout.
The HTML as word processing format issues has been flogged like a dead horse for years. The outcome is always the realization that HTML is poorly suited to the task of word processing and a word processor would be poorly suited for writing web pages. HTML is for web pages and they're trying damn hard to move away from it for that too.
Let's not confuse the portability problem with the ability to programatically access the data. You damn well can script Office. (way better than OpenOffice too BTW) Portability is a whole different issue.
First of all, the use of "Extensible Markup Language" (XML) would lock us into today's misguided technology fad.
Second of all, "file format used by only one vendor" doesn't disqualify Microsoft's OO-XML. Remember, Novell will be supporting it.
Third of all, there is no exception for formats like MPEG!!! OMG, WTF!!!
Result: this effectively mandates that OO-XML replace PDF, with videos being embedded in OO-XML to acheive compliance.
Wow, by the same reasoning, something like 99.999999% of all existing human documents don't use Unicode, therefore Unicode is a dead standard. (Let's go to Netcraft to confirm that...)
What's important isn't how many old documents there are which aren't using ODF, it's whether new documents are being supplied in that format. In addition, it doesn't matter one bit if Massachusetts also supplies those new documents in 10 zillion additional proprietary formats.
So your statistics actually are relatively meaningless. And have no connection to your conclusion. Try again.
Actually, you can thank Adobe for this. Adobe wouldn't even allow MS to ship PDF support inbox in Office 2007, that's why it is a seperate download. Adobe is afraid that if everyone knows they can save PDF files with Office 2007 there will be no reason to buy anything from Adobe.
Why should I give any weight to this unfounded accusation? No previous version of Office required a PC upgrade and my present PC is running Office 2007 just fine. Office just doesn't have the history of requiring more resources with each new version that Windows has.
Not that I read the article, but the post seems to miss a big difference between "Pro ODF" legislation and "Pro open standards" legislation, which I would imagine both Microsoft and IBM would support. Microsoft backs OpenXML, which is an open, extensible document standard -- IBM backs ODF. Obviously, each company has preferences, but in my humble opinion, Pro-ODF legislation would do more harm than good. Instead, we should be encouraging all companies to continue to back more and more open document formats, which are extensible and usable by 3rd parties. At the moment, Microsoft Office 2007's OpenXML is just as good as ODF in this regards. As far as I'm concerned, as long as "open" is mandated, and not a particular _kind_ of open, then all is well in the world.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
The more you tighten your grip, the more power will slip through your fingers.
You may have won these battles, but this is not the end. It is only the beginning.
There are millions of us, and only one of you. We will never give up. We will not accept Microsoft domination. We will fight on all fronts - legislative, technical, ethical, financial. You shall not prevail.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
WMV support is built into Windows Media Player. The files are binary, if you look at them in a hex editor, they're generally plain numbers. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS MPEG.
Except not, unless you are a fucking moron. I'm sorry, but XML is not magic open interoperability pixie dust.
Nope. Nice try, though.
What actually happened was, MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it threatened their monopoly of Office applications, they wanted their own "standard" that they could control.
Or maybe they did it by accident. (Yeah, right.)
ODF was designed to be all things to all office suites. OOXML was designed to basically be an XML dump of MS Office documents, and from what I have heard (and seen), it's little more than a straight 1:1 conversion of the binary Office format into XML.
I suggest you go actually try to read the OOXML "open standard", and understand why it is neither. It has little to do with the 6000 pages, it's about how little is actually in that 6000 page document.
No. We complain that it is not a standard, and not suitable for implementation in anything but MS Office.
The problem is not that it supports all these various iterations of Office, and even older things (WordPerfect, etc). The problem is that they support these by creating some sort of tag or attribute or something which flags a section as being formatted for Word95 or somesuch, and then don't define how to do that. They basically say it's "beyond the scope of this document", and that you should emulate the behavior of the software in question.
And this is not the right way to design a standard format anyway. Suppose different versions of Word came with different default heading styles. You could just put <word95heading> tags around something -- or you could use a format that supports defining custom styles.
That's true, we can reverse-engineer MS formats, and have done so. Most open office suites (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc) support the binary Office formats quite well. But it's still reverse-engineered, and still not complete.
It would be entirely possible to make a document standard that is just as flexible, concise, and transparent as ODF, but support all of the crap that OOXML does. The difference is, it would be much more difficult for MS to support such a standard, and much easier for everyone else. As it is, OOXML is much easier for Microsoft to implement than for anyone else.
Consider that, in order to fully support OOXML, you have to actually go and buy all of those different versions of Office, plus random crap like WordPerfect, and reverse-engineer their behavior. So OOXML is not any better than the binary formats, because in reality, you may actually have to reverse-engineer MORE products in order to make it work.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Sure they will. In fact, they'll assume it.
Basically, they will either assume that they can't make it into a webpage (because it's a word document, and that's different somehow), or they'll assume that making a webpage is too hard for them.
However, if they have a nice WYSIWYG editor or CMS, they'll copy/paste from the word processor onto the webpage, and that will work. If they have FTP access, they can just upload the .doc file, and that might work for what they want -- remember that all their friends will probably be on IE+Office, which means it'll just open up in their browser.
It's not ideal, but trust me, real idiots will out-idiot your expectations. And the ones who are smart enough to realize they're being "conned" might actually find "HTML" in the file->save feature of their word processor.
Wow, I've just been conned out of... oh... $0! Zero dollars and zero cents.
Or would you care to clarify that?
I actually tried this, recently. I wrote a script to generate reports for some poor bastard who's stuck on FileMaker. It generates HTML and uses CSS and JS, and does almost everything he wants, except we can't control the page margins as well as he could in FileMaker. Yes, I know about the CSS margin properties, and browser support for them sucks, and even if you crank them down to zero, the browser likes to add margins of its own.
Point is, there are subtle and fundamentally different problems to be solved by each. Maybe someday they'll converge, but right now, word processing programs are designed to make it easy to physically lay something out on a piece of paper. HTML is designed to lay something out on a piece of software, often in a fluid way, with dynamic components.
Yes, it does. It's just the best we've got.
Should I even try to parse that?
I guess I should make gamers the game that is wanted by both Xbox/PC and Xbox/PC gamers?
Yeah, great. That's called a word processor.
That's great for the browsers, but sucks for the main point of word processors, which is: Printing! Yes! On paper!
Please explain to me how this is different or better than Google Office + ODF.
Oh, by the way: ODF and HTML+CSS are actually pretty close. Close enough that I've got less than 1k worth of Ruby code to convert between them, which includes all sorts of stuff that was specific to the last company I worked at.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Except OpenXML is not really open - the specification uses references to previous Word versions that only Microsoft has access to.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Yes, but when I was looking at documentation formats in '90s, there was quite a bit of interest around SGML - this was in the days before MS Word was ubiquitous. The HTML DTD was created precisely to provide a structure for documents which were to be rendered as web pages, and it was Netscape who "extended" the syntax of HTML to add elements and attributes which broke the SGML standards.
The problem was a lack of good and inexpensive SGML tools at the time - though in its Novell days, an excellent Wordperfect SGML edition was briefly around, which gave users the ability to edit documents in a structured way, yet see them as they were to be rendered. Alas, it was about the time that WP lost their way, and MS started hoovering up with their technically inferior product.
What grieves me is not so much that MS Word is so widely used for letters and reports, but that big companies and organisations use it for large scale documentation, for which it is *so* badly suited. If government want to use it for sending letters then I'm not too bothered, but when they ask for statistical returns to be sent in Excel format it makes my flesh creep.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
No you can't, because OOXML has shit like "<renderthislikeWord95>some text</renderthislikeWord95>" (among other things). How the fuck do you figure out what that means without getting a copy of Word 95?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
A possible solution would be that government limits its documents to using only the standardized features in MS Office Open XML.
Technologically that may be an inferior solution, as a 6000 page standard is probably unnecessarily complex (and in this case, reportedly skewed to accomodate known bugs in Microsoft Office). Which may be reason enough to reject it for lack of quality.
But it would fulfill the legal goal of having a format for which everyone may implement a reader. It would also disqualify MS Office for government use if it actually uses these unspecified features
C - the footgun of programming languages
Using a proprietary, custom-made API? Whoop-de-do! If that's your definition of "programmatically accessing the data," I could just as well say that IBM assembly code translated into Sanskrit and optically encoded into a freakin' JPEG is "scriptable" too, because I could conceivably build some software to OCR, translate, and decode it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
1. Breadth of features. OOo Write doesn't do list view, "full screen" view, or even the "normal" view. Last time I checked, calc has no "alt + ;" shortcut to insert the current time. And OOo's bugzilla is filled with other missing features. What OOo does and MS doesn't (word auto-complete) doesn't outshadow the inverse.
Huh? Do average users care? Do non-average users even care? I'm sure it's a useful utility to some people, and knowledge of such "esoterica" may be important for someone's livelyhood, but it has the faint reek of "bloatware". I guess it's one person's water is another's poison on this one.
2. Easy of extensibility: Anyone can fire up Office, "record" a macro, and see a native-VBA representation of how to do that in code. Do the same thing in OOo, and you get a series of function calls to an obscure "SunOffice" object model, in the language of your choice. Try and write a macro yourself, and MS gives you practially the full Visual Studio treatment: OOo gives you, well, code highlighting in the language of your choice.
An interesting point, which neatly avoids the real issue - that while it is reasonable for most users to want to record a macro, those users that want to write their own macros are more likely to be familiar with programming constructs to begin with - hence, different programming languages. It's a red herring from my vantage point, and while MS Office macros won't directly translate into something that OOo uses (touche') it's still not a showstopper for many people.
3. Usability: MS spends a few million dollars a year on their interface, and everything from the help files to the control layouts is chosen, adjusted, and re-chosen do suit the customers. OOo's interface is somewhat haphazardly thrown together, with part being a new plan, part being a copy of MS Office, and part just whatever the designer thought would work for now. ("Word Count", a rather frequently used metric, is hard to find in OOo. In MS Word, it's a single menu command or less away.)
Oh, by the way, in OOo, from the Writer menu, it's 'Tools' > 'Word Count'. One click, and one selection. Hardly a hard-to-find command. Must be a REALLY OLD version of OOo that you're remembering.
A few years back I peppered my journal with things that OOo did well and did not do well. A few months ago I tried recreating a custom spreadsheet from Excel in OOo. I paid $160 for the home version of Office, and I don't even have OOo on my PC anymore because using it is such a pain.
That was a few years ago, and 1.x series of OOo is, well, archaic compared to 2.2 IMHO. Give it a spin, you have nothing to loose, unlike the $160 you paid for MS Office.
And let's not even get into the pain I suffered when I tried to get my friends & family to use OOo. Anything more than "here, it's free and legal" falls flat. If they aren't a Linux geek or aren't poor but honest, they don't use OOo -- because they have a superior product.
Um, let's see, my wife is not a Linux geek, we're not poor, and we're honest; and she uses OOo 2.2 for our office suite. Because we have better things to spend our money on, like, our children, or us...at the end of the day, different people have different needs. Just because it's not a commercial product doesn't mean it's worthless. I can appreciate what you are trying to say, but I don't think you have a full appreciation for what the OOo folks are trying to do. Put another way: you're not OOo's target market. Make sense now?
The war on drugs failed because people want them. That simple. Even if you were able to identify and arrest every single drug pusher in the world, from the bottom to the top, the market for drugs would cause new pushers to appear damned near instantaneously.
It's a poor analogy which doesn't apply to document formats. What's important with document formats produced and required by government is that they are a documented standard which will allow interoperation between platforms and which will still be readable in 10, 20, 50+ years.
MS's format is a defacto, not a documented standard which cannot reliably be read after 10 years never mind 20, 50 or more. What makes removal of the Word format as a defacto standard difficult is that it engenders a strong network effect. You must have Word to read/write it and once everyone has Word (the situation now), you have to use Word to communicate documents with other people.
Breaking a network effect like that is extremely difficult.
Deleted
Personally, I find it easier to write documents in HTML+CSS with a text editor (and then print to PDF from a web browser), than to use any so-called "word processor" program, because they make it too hard to tell what's actually going on with the formatting.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Bullshit. Just because Microsoft managed to bribe or con somebody at ECMA doesn't mean the format is actually open. If it were open, it wouldn't be patented, require 6000 pages to describe, or have directives like "display this like some other random proprietary format!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
First of all, I don't see OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office, although it seems to be coming along quite nicely, there are several major factors holding back from being a good solution for me. For example, I use Microsoft Office as a full document processing system. I depend on either Office Document Imaging or third party commerical OCR plugins to perform a tremendous part of my work. Microsoft makes a full developer API as well as extensive developer documentation available to me with easily obtainable support from a centralized source. I regularly receive files that are 10-25 years old in document formats that either I'd have to reverse engineer or heavily research to read when Word and Excel read them just fine and give me all the APIs I need to access them.
.DOC support either.
.DOC support was just too limited at the time. Since then, when I experienced problems importing Word files into StarOffice, OpenOffice, SuperOffice, I just blamed it on poor quality software which was in fact the case at the time. Now that OpenOffice is beginning to feel like a professionally written program, I notice it less and less.
So, now seeing a nearly relgious style movement to try and force governments to use a different file format seemed a bit confusing to me. I tried the ODF support system for Word, it's not bad, but where's the support for Excel and such? Am I just missing it?
Now on the other hand, I exported documents as Word 2003 files and Open Office seemed to open them just fine. When I added scripting this appeared to be an issue, but from what I can tell, it doesn't work with ODF either, so there's still no benefit to ODF for me.
When I open both formats for the same document in a text editor, fact is, and I'm no stranger to XML, I feel that Office XML is a bit messier, but since it's really meant more to be a machine readable format, I don't see this being a big issue. Both document formats were clear enough. I won't make a huge check list, but I did feel that Office XML made less assumptions and therefore was more informative.
So why would I want or need ODF if OpenOffice supports Word just fine. I used AbiWord instead of Microsoft Word for 2 years with no problems with
The last time I actually noticed that I was having file compatibility problems with office packages is back in the days when I was diehard WordPerfect and
The way I see it is, it has to work both ways. Microsoft has released documentation to the Office document formats and OpenOffice.org is doing a great job of getting it working. The ODF import filter for Office seems to be coming along nicely, but still has a way to go, I'm assuming it's mostly an issue of trying to map features from one office format to another.
Also, before I conclude, last I checked, I still have support for importing WordPerfect 5.1 document in Office.
So, so far as I can tell, there's really little difference between ODF and Office formats, I would expect that for at least the next 20 years, OpenOffice.org would strive to support today's Word document format. I would also hope that for the next 20 years, developers are working to support the ODF format in each new version of Office. I'd also imagine that most other office packages would work towards supporting both and by reading source to OpenOffice could learn how better to support Microsoft formats.
So as a conclusion, is there in fact a need for forcing ODF over Office when in reality, cross-integration should be the key.
P.S. - Wouldn't time be better spent bullying governments into insisting that ODF support is shipped as standard with Office and made available as a critical office update through Windows Update? This would at least help support for the format propagate.
P.P.S. - Why not reroute some of the lobbying finances towards development of a small lightweight, cross-platform, ODF/Office viewer control so that applications like Office or OpenOffice wouldn't be required to read the contents of e
Except the number of documents that use features that do not directly map onto ODF features is vanishingly small. Your argument also does nothing to address the question of why we don't simply start using ODF for all new documents: they would obviously not rely on old Microsoft Word features, so the argument is invalid.
Except that the HTML generated by MS Word sucks. It's quirky and bloated with meta information.
What is really bullshit is writing documents purely in terms of appearance.
http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.
What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.
When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.
I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.
The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.
open document formats, which are extensible and usable by 3rd parties. At the moment, Microsoft Office 2007's OpenXML is just as good as ODF in this regards.
*cough* "Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement" *cough* "Emulate Word 2002 Table Style Rules" *cough*
OOXML would've been nice if Microsoft hadn't published 6039 pages full of "do as Office does". ODF uses 762 pages without such implicit definitions. I agree that having a decent open standard is more important than having ODF at any cost, but the OOXML standard is a steaming heap and I have pity with the poor souls who have to implement that behemoth.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
MS's Open XML is also intended to be a "free and open format".
Wrong. It is *advertised* as a "free and open format", but it is *intended* to fool standards organizations into rubber-stamping it, so MS can continue their monopoly. The 6000 pages "standard" only describes parts of the spec, the rest is locked up in Redmond.
Seriously? A guy who spells Microsoft with a dollar sign in the same sentence as he espouses open mindedness gets modded insightful?
Slashdot has reached a new low.
I'll withhold my judgement of Open XML until I hear whether it's *truly* open, meaning fully published and free to be implemented on any platform by any interested with party with no patent restrictions. If that's the case, then sure, I agree that more choice in the "open" market is good.
Unfortunately, history shows that Microsoft often says one thing and delivers something completely different. So we'll see.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Ok, that's an answer as to why ODF may not currently be able to completely replace DOC files. (Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But I'll take your word for it.) But that has little to do with whether MS can *support* ODF for the majority of documents. I've been using OpenOffice for a few year now to read DOC files, store them in ODF (or its OpenOffice predecessor), them read them back in and save as DOC to send to others. No problems with lost information or significant formating issues.
Now try answering the larger question: Why do so many people with no vested interest in Microsoft seem to be so against a common format supported by multiple office suites? As I said, there should be little doubt that it's in the best interest of consumers and citizens for public documents to be available in a free and open format. Customers should start demanding a more open format in order to drive a more open market.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
It's not too bad, with a couple find/replaces you can get plain text :)
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
what a painfully fucking bore you are. why do you lie and exaggerate shit so much? does bill gates pay you to make slashdot look more pathetic and shady than it already is?
Some kind of Fanboy persists:
You can easily get the text out of a docx file, just open the zipped file and look at the XML text. It's an open format. Are you making your point out of ignorance, or deliberately ... [insult]?
Read the thread yourself. He was unable to get text out by your old trick. There are a couple others where no one is reporting a way to deal with M$'s obnoxious new format. M$ has done it again and all of their talk about openness and caring is worthless. This is intentional waste at it's finest.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The trouble with this whole debate is that the pro-ODF people have become the very thing they claim to stand against. This is just politicking to try and push their own agenda and damage the competition. The Linux and OpenOffice crowd have failed to displace MS Windows and MS Office in a competitive market for years, and now they are resorting to FUD and back room politics, the very same things for which they have often criticised commercial, closed-source developers.
There is a valid point here, in that documents created by government should in general be freely available to the public. IMHO, the correct answer to this is that national (and, ideally, local) libraries should keep all of the reference material stored safely, along with any hardware and software necessary for a visiting member of the public to read it. They should be free to use whatever mechanisms they want to store the data, as long as the content is preserved and you or I can see it on request. If formats become more difficult to access with time, the librarians can migrate the content to something more future-proof, just as they already do when different kinds of hardware storage are obsolete. In the meantime, if they want to store it in a popular format that is viewable by many people over the Internet in addition to their basic obligation to preserve the information and make it accessible to anyone who wants to see it, then that harms no-one and helps many.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why do you americans keep using the politically correct word "lobbying" when getting something in exchange of friendly laws is pure corruption?
since it fits your needs. Pushing ODF, or any other open standard, has nothing to do with that. It has to do to with the ability of people which don't need the features of MS Office, or cannot afford to buy it, to access information that should be public. It also has, marginally, to do with the inability of MS crushing would-be competitors using its monopoly power. Since ODF is an open standard, anyone, including MS, can implement it. The right way, since unlike MS XML based format ODF is actually understandable.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
All you need is a free plug-in. I'll bet the plug-in works with older version of ms-office as well, which is more than be said of .docx.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Thomas Jefferson, 1812
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
> First of all, I don't see OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office
ODF has nothing to do with OpenOffice. ODF works just fine in ms-office with a free plug-in.
it less and less.
> So, now seeing a nearly relgious style movement to try and force governments to use a different file format seemed a bit confusing to me.
Nothing to be confused about. An open format means that taxpayers don't have to pay for msft vendor-lock. And it insures that documents will always be readable.
> So, so far as I can tell, there's really little difference between ODF and Office formats
ODF is truely open, msft is not. That is the difference.
> So as a conclusion, is there in fact a need for forcing ODF over Office when in reality, cross-integration should be the key.
ODF does not force ms-office out, as I have explained. However, there is a very strong need for a truely open document standard.
The covenant not to sue is based on implementing the entire standard (without granting any rights to things inferred but not spelt out in the standard).
So, even though you don't care how WP6 did it in Win95, you still have to work out how it is supposed to render and implement it CORRECTLY.
Else MS can sue you for "diluting the standard".
I guess if ODF is required by law to be used for government documents, it really doesn't mean a lot since all office suites can (will be able to) read/write it. I guess the idea is that there can be 'more competition' or something, but I'm not sure that 'standing on its own merit' is what a number of OSS projects will want to actually do.
It's actually kind of funny... the whole OSS office suite issue was started because the market had been cornered by one company. Of course, the best way to strike out was to poison the market to drive the margins to zero so IBM fell into the OSS side of things. In addition, companies get programming efforts for free and drop their support costs. I've never seen a group of workers so willing to poison their own job market. Companies are loving it, though, because it lets them make more money while all the zealots toil away to give them what they want... for free... while thinking they are working 'for the greater good'. Additionally, the developers are training everyone else in the world to compete with them. If it weren't so scary, it'd be one of the greatest comedic stories in history.
Your analysis is wrong is so many ways it displays a shocking amount of political ignorance.
he's independently wealthy and didn't have to sell out to any special interest to raise campaign money.
What you fail to comprehend is that the money for his campaign came from special interests. Moreover, special interests is how a representative democracy works. Ahhnold has as much personal baggage as the next politico, you just haven't heard about it yet.
As another post explained, Ahhnold had a very conservative agenda for a while, blew a boat load of State money on a special election, and lost badly on every conservative issue. He fired almost everyone and hired middle-of-the-road Dems for key posts. That infuriated the State Republican party to the point of they were going to run someone against him in the last election.
Please, learn _how_ the political process works, PAY ATTENTION to the political process, and at the bare minimum vote often. Better still, pay attention to some key issues and bug your Reps about legislation related to those key issues.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Riddle me this; how does Microsoft's behavior differ substantially from Lucky and Fingers coming into my store and demanding "protection" money? Has anyone looked at a RICO case?
The trouble with this whole debate is that the pro-ODF people have become the very thing they claim to stand against.
No, they simply say that government should not use secret formats owned a single company. M$ can play the game too, if they want. There are no royalties, patents or anything unclear about ODF. There are many editors that use ODF now, and plenty of choice.
It is wrong for the government to patronize M$ by using their formats. People should not have to purchase M$ to use public services.
The Linux and OpenOffice crowd have failed to displace MS Windows and MS Office in a competitive market for years ...
And for years M$ has failed to co-operate. It was as anti-social as it was intentional, they deserve to lose money for it. They have failed to anticipate a significant market evolution and then failed to adapt to it.
[blah blah blah] .... In the meantime, if they want to store it in a popular format that is viewable by many people over the Internet in addition to their basic obligation to preserve the information and make it accessible to anyone who wants to see it, then that harms no-one and helps many.
Nope, fuck that. No one should ever be penalized by their government because of their choice of software. It should be just as easy for GNU/Linux and Mac users to exchange information with the government as it is for MickeySoft users. Government should demand this and the free market has developed the means. If M$ won't play, they are out.
In fact, I'm reasonably sick of government wasting money on Word and friends. It costs more and locks them out of non M$ choices, despite what non free advocates like you say. There are no usable Mac and GNU/Linux OOXML viewers, so this is not the open format M$ claims. They have really screwed the pooch with this latest "upgrade". The format wars have always been wasteful. M$ needs to quit and get with the program.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
While some may interpret "electronic document" to mean only word processing documents and spreadsheet documents it may be that other things such as emails, database entries, and many, many other state records ....
Now that you mention it, there's good reason to use free software for everything. Binary formats have their place, obviously, but non free ones like pst and M$ email formats need to go as well. Thanks for noticing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So locking people into "open source" alternatives and formats though litigation is better then them using closed source by choice or the choice of their managers?
I think government agencies moving over to an open source format that could still be used by other agencies that have to transfer files between one another would be great, and would over time cause more to move to the open source formats, but forcing people to use open source?
TruePunk | Games
I'm a GNU/Linux user and I can't do anything with M$'s new "open" format. Mac users are in the same boat.
That wouldn't happen to be because the new Office for Mac isn't out yet, or because no Linux office suite has implemented support for the new format yet?
Here's a thought; use your "open" advantage and code support for DOCX into OpenOffice or KWord or AbiWord or something. It's XML, shouldn't be too hard. After all, you are an accomplished IT professional.
Limiting choice to free things is a good limitation. Allowing things like slavery is bad. Yes, the difference is really that stark and the issue will not go away.
Slavery. Yes, twitter, this is a battle of LIFE AND DEATH!!1
Jesus christ.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
This an open *standard* like HTML, TCP/IP, or ASCII. It is not "open source" there is a difference.
For example: after eight years of insisting that USA markets stayed open, while Japanesse markets were closed, Ronald Regan went to Japan to pick up a $2,000,000.00 "speaker's fee." Get it? As long as it's a "speaker's fee" or a "service fee" it's not a bribe.
The US electronics, automotive, steel, and other industries were decemated during those years. But the incident hardly raised an eye-brow.
Judging from your post, it does not seem impractical at all. In fact, long term, it seems like the most practical thing I can imagine.
.docx, which can only be read by a small fraction of the available office suits out there?
What is "practical" about saving everything in
Deeeeep huuurrting... DEEEEEP HUUURRRTING!!!
(lameness filter, go and fucking lick me.)
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Um... slavery isn't a matter of life and death, it's a matter of freedom.
I wouldn't say slavery and choice of suppliers for office suites are on the same level, but they're certainly on the same spectrum. Matters of life and death are not.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
I agree with most of your post, but there is another solution to this. The latest version of Office presumably supports OOXML in its entirety[1]. You can reverse engineer that and be done with it.
-----
[1] Actually, I think we'll find that MS Office doesn't actually follow OOXML. The last thing Microsoft wants is for its competitors to have compatible file formats. In that sense, it's actually better to reverse engineer the defacto implementation than to implement the standard as defined.
True. But that is not what the standard says to do. I could quote you, over and over again... But I'm sure you can find it yourself, especially since we mostly agree.
I realize that standards need a reference implementation, to cover areas where it is unintentionally ambiguous, as this is inevitable. I object to the standard deliberately relying on the reference implementation, especially when said reference implementation is an expensive and proprietary product.
Also, realize that while we could "reverse engineer that and be done with it", that would only work until Microsoft changed the standard again. Of course, standards must change, but ODF makes that an open process -- Microsoft can actually come and be a part of that committee, I think. I know that we can't exactly have representatives from OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, and iWork all come and sit in on the meetings at Microsoft that will determine the next OOXML.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Before understanding the bills, the politicians need to read them first. If you'd like to see a bill to make that happen, check out DownsizeDC's "Read the Bills Act" (RTBA). They're also working on a project to require only one subject per bill, and to prevent delegating the job of creating legislation to the unelected bureacracy (the "Write the Bills Act").
I am amazed that this issue is so hard to understand. Government document should be in a readable format. Maybe not ODF, PDF would do as well, maybe better. But government documents being in Microsoft only formats is an obvious BAD THING. You should not have to purchase expensive or platform dependant software to view government documents. The continued trouble convincing people of this is final proof of the existance of EVIL, in my mind. Of course when the averaage word processor can output PDF files (a slam dunk onm the Mac), it will be less of a problem.
Create a presentation in OpenOffice Impress some time. Make a few dozen slides in a variety of styles.
Open up the result. WTF? The lines are eleventy-zillion characters long.
Pretty-print it somehow. Still, WTF? It's highly redundant, and even includes a huge mass of style-like stuff for slide types you never even used.
"Or, do you think Government should step in and make your decisions for you?"
As opposed to Microsoft, I suppose?
legislation mandating ODF should mandate a "Freely implementable XML format" or some other such language. Not ODF. Not OpenXML. The laws should be simple and clear, and agnostic towards Open or Closed software. If MS's "NewOpenXML" winds up being a billion times better than ODF, we shouldn't be tied to ODF by law.
Most people aren't against a free and open format. They are against three things. One being any law that tries to pick a specific technology that must be used. Most of the current proposed laws demand ODF, or something that might as well have just said ODF. That's may be fine for today if that is really what is needed, but it should be something that is done because it's the right choice, not because it's a law. Things change quick, laws don't.
The second being ODF in particular. It's too simple of a format. It's too ambiguous in many areas and/or defers actual clarification to a separate document. There is only *1* office suite that supports it, and it has very little presence in business
The third is that it isn't able to faithfully store the vast amounts of documents that are already created. To convert all the documents that businesses currently have to ODF would be a massive undertaking, one that costs a lot, and has no revenue. Because of that, the largest of businesses will refuse to switch, and we won't end up with the ODF-lovers utopia. We'll now have two formats one of which is seldom used (ODF) to talk to those branches of the government that mandate it, and everyone else. That puts the cost burden on them to constant convert back and forth, or you can argue on the companies they do business with, either way, the government pays for it, and ultimately we all do.
There are many more reasons, like trying to keep idiology (which in many cases has similiarities to religion) from being mandated anywhere. It's neither the governments or business's primary (or secondary, or tertiary) role to use a particular format (open/closed/free/commercial). For publicly traded companies, they already try to maximize profits, and I'm personally against any legislation at all that tries to force companies to use/pay for something that boils down to ideological opinion. If it's more profitable, cheaper, or easier to use a tool, then it should be used. Not because someone says that it conforms to some standard that makes a few people all warm and fuzzy inside.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Actually there are a few that I'm aware of. Support may not be 100% at this time, but they're definitely heading that way.
So what's your suggestion for moving away from a closed, proprietary format? After all, the status quo is definitely not where we want to remain. Any change will be costly, but the long-term costs of being tied to a single vendor are much greater. Too many people and organizations only look at the short term, which is a very costly mistake.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Wait for the cost/benefit ratio to be more favorable.
I agree that it will be handier when that ratio improves. The problem is that the cost/benefit ratio won't improve without help. And that's precisely what much of this effort is about: getting more people and organizations behind an open standard so that it improves and gets easier for others to follow. If everyone adopts the "wait until it's easier and cheaper" attitude, there is no advancement. And that applies to so many aspects of human history that I shouldn't have to point it out.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.