Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
File Deletion is Murder.
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
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.
If anything the losses in state legislature open the door for class action law suits and forces every corporation involved to put forward their views in public and under oath. So while it might be a struggle in politics it should be far easier in the courts.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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,
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
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.
You don't need to. You can keep going with Word for the time being for recieving attachments, but the agencies would be required to internally communicate and send out communications in a format that anyone could read.
The idea is not to kill microsoft. The idea is to push government agencies and the software suppliers that support them to use and create document formats that we have a hope of reading in 10 or 20 years (let alone 200). Can you imagine if the US constitution was written in Symantec Greatworks? Or if key data from 50 years in the past was written in GobeProductive on BeOS? If Microsoft adopts a truly open format that satisfies this need for transparency and readability, then that's great! But if not, we shouldn't be tying ourselves to them to fill a need they don't want to fill.
The ______ Agenda
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.
Virtually every historic event is going to involve government documents. It does not matter that Microsoft provides a reader in the present day that works in a very limited scope. One of the key points of requiring an open format is to ensure the documents can be read by historians hundreds of years from now. Such a guarantee can not be made without a clear published standard.
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.
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!
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.
Your first paragraph leaves it sounding pretty clear the Microsoft API is the only solution to your troubles. Which highlights what having a standard (a real one not a subverted one which is the Microsoft solution) like ODF much earlier would have left the market for your very needs much more widely open with I'd expect benefits to the range of tools you could select.
No tools that work OK (less than 100%) with Microsoft Office components isn't a solution. You can hardly rely on full compatibility between successive versions of Office and the whole control being with Microsoft allows them to make changes and protect them with patents etc to eliminate competition and remove choice. Fact is their tool might be the best tool, it probably is, but shouldn't I have a choice not to have to use a tool from a company that I think is harmful? As it stands (I'm in the UK) I routinely find I can't even submit things to Government unless they are in Word format. Which in a worst future case driven by intellectual property encumbrances could mean I do have to own Word to be able to participate in the functioning of my nation.
And Java used to be (comparably to any other competition) cross platform until Microsoft in self interest stopped it being present as standard. Which is a demonstration of the kinds of action that are the reason why they (Government especially) should use an open format.
Turn it around and say if to support the likes of me Government either had to support all available formats for submissions or provide tools to allow me to create submissions in a format they accepted the cost would be huge. The principle here is leaving me choice. So then a simple solution becomes to use a format that is free.
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.