Slashdot Mirror
Does ODF Have a Future?
qedramania writes "Linuxworld seems to think ODF is a dead duck. Is the Windows monopoly too big and too entrenched? Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing? It seems as though the momentum is towards a complete Microsoft monoculture in software for business and government. You can bet that big business and governments will want more than just reliability from Microsoft in return for their acquiescence. Does ODF have a future?"
Open Office will happily read/write/create MS Word files. That said, it seems that ODF is gaining popularity, not losing it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't think it's a technical issue at all, it's just what people "know". Whenever I go on a job hunt people ask for my resume "in a Word .doc", as if that's the only possible format.
What motivation do other countries have to send their tax dollars to Redmond so that they can write local laws?
ODF is not going to take off in the US until AFTER the rest of the world has adopted it. So let's look at what other governments and such are adopting Linux / ODF.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And vice versa. Who uses DB2 at home? Or Oracle? Or SQL Server? But I'll bet anybody using Open Office Base has as many ODB files lying around as a Microsoft Office Access user had MDB files lying around.
The needs of the enterprise and the needs of the individual are different- might they not be better served by different formats?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If ODF became as popular as the metric system, I think it could be considered a success. Still, a lovely riposte.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I prefer OpenDocument, and I am putting my money into it: OpenDocument export is finally finished for our TextMaker word processor and will be released in a few days.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
The MS-Office monopoly has so far been nearly impossible to beat. But things can change quite rapidly. Terms like vendor-lock and interoperability will eventually penetrate the skulls of the thickest CIOs and CTOs.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards. Even before you mention the word Open Standards, immediately others pushing Free Software agenda and Open Source agenda push their pet projects, creating an impression it is all one and the same and one can not have Open Standards without also Open Source and Free Software. They are different.
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly (like it is with Intuit-Quicken and MS-Money). But it is definitely better than the monopoly. Once the customers are educated about the vendor lock and compatibility the duopoly will naturally break down. Eventually there will be enough space for Free Software, Open Software, and Close source software to coexist.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
First of all "Linuxworld" is anything but. They should be required to change their name to "MicrosoftFUDsterPretendingToRepresentLinux." This would at least clue readers into the fact that they're anti-Linux.
LinuxWorld is just trolling and spreading FUD with their "just too big, why bother, you can't win, give up, don't try, it'll never work, it can't happen, you're just wasting your time, resistance is futile" rhetoric
Their words are as dog farts. They are not to be considered!
It's a great alternative that only computer literate people will every try, and that most businesses will ignore because it doesn't matter for them.
And then the alternative will gain marketshare to the point that even mainstream consumers are trying it out, which will cause businesses to notice.
Honestly, the analogy I'd think of is Imperial vs. Metric. The rest of the world isn't nearly as wedded to Microsoft as the US is. Therefore, we're likely to see uptake of ODF become significant elsewhere before it becomes significant in the USA.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I'm pretty sure ODF isn't dying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Office 2007 natively (or with a plugin available from MS's website) supports ODF as a native format to save and open from, just like you can specify that Word uses .doc instead of .docx.
IMHO, ODF is far from being dead.
The entity that installed the ring, expects to recover the cost of the ring, plus a lot more.
Freedom is not free, but slavery costs more.
Then there were text editors tied to document preparation systems. Anyone remember RunOff/Runnem?
Then there were integrated full word processing software that you could load onto your general purpose computers. WordStar anyone? Surely you remember Word Perfect!
All of these existed and flourished well in their time, and all existed before MSWord, whose first incarnation on the PC/XT was wretched!
To say that MSWord can never be dethroned is bunk! MS loves to hear this talk, since you're defeated and they win before the battle has even begun. Previous solutions lost out when something better and cheaper came alone.
The more MS hikes the cost of MSOffice, the more they make it more difficult to use (WGA on Office anyone?), the more they remove MSWord from the virtually free Works package, the more Open Office improves while maintaining its low, low cost of Free, the more OEM's cut costs by preloading OO so that you have it right out of the box, the more MS has to worry about.
Talk defeat, and that's what you'll get. Then only MS will be cheering.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The rest of the industrialized world seems on track to adopt ODF as the defacto standard for government documents (Brazil, India, France, India, Denmark, Belgium, Malaysia, Croatia, Norway, Spain, Argentina). All of them have either adopted ODF as a standard or appear to be in the process. California is considering it and while Massachuesettes may be saying the OOXML is an open standard and can be used internally I still am under the understanding that all government documents will still have to be made available in ODF format as well as whatever other formats they choose as well.
You have to remember while MS Office has a large install base but most of the time when documents are made available on the web or exchanged via email, it is done in the form of PDF's. That means that since Open Office can output to a PDF without purchasing other tools that it actually has an advantage over all versions of office pre 2007.
It will take some time because of the install base of Office XP and 2003 out there but when companies look to upgrade in a cost effective manner and potentially need to utilize both ODF and Doc formats they will choose Open Office. Microsoft looks like it is going to put its head in the sand and not implement ODF into Office 2007 and therefore it will force those who need to work with government agencies to either constantly convert things or use Open Office. Also remember that it looks like MS Office 2007 does not have built in export to pdf functionality its an external plugin that has to be included or installed and that it looks like for anti trust reasons MS may have to disable that functionality at least in the EU if not the states as well. If I'm a company I don't want to have to buy Office and then Acrobat crap just to be able to write to PDF's.
All that OO has to do to cement their viability is to refine the UI a little more. I find some functions cumbersome for those used to Office's interface but those that have to switch to 2007 from Office 2003 seem to become even more baffled.
It seems to me that open formats are most important for government archival purposes. That is, state governments are producing huge amounts of public documents that really ought to be preserved for posterity. Saving them in an open format (free from copyright protection which lasts 120 years in the instance of an institutional author like MS) seems to be a pretty good step to take towards that goal.
My question is, what are the practices of digital archival in state governments? Do they even have one? I'm taking it for granted that things like bills and committee reports are turned into pdfs and made publicly available, but what about letters to constituents, emails between legislators and things like that?
ODF isn't there to dethrone MS as the word processor of choice, to think so is a bit foolish. It's there to provide a format that *everyone* can use. I will continue to use MS Office because I think it's a superior product, but ODF allows me to *save* my MS Office documents to format that *anyone* else can use, but more importantly convert from when I want to read my own documents in 20 years.
Remember, ODF is not a platform, word processor, gizmo, Office killer, etc. It's only a standard in which to format documents.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I think that's probably my single biggest complaint against all the new document standards. XML creates monstrous bloat. It doesn't deal cleanly with binary data, and to be honest, I've never seen the romance that so many have with it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In all fairness, linuxwire posted the story almost 4 decades ago. You had plenty of time to get on that!
Right at the end, the article suggests an alternative:
Earlier on, the article talks about how it's too expensive to "rip out and replace" MS Office with ODF. Well yeah. Often in technology, a new technology doesn't have to be better - it has to offer something compelling that the old one doesn't, such as a lower price, convenience, mobility, or networking. The new technology gains a foothold in its niche, then starts to expand beyond it - without necessarily ever completely replacing the older technology. Thus we have cell phones displacing land lines, YouTube pressuring television (despite its crappy quality), MP3s replacing CDs, laptops gaining on desktops, digital cameras edging out film, etc.
So it seems to me that the strategy of perfect emulation is a strategy for failure: if ODF does exactly th same thing, is the freedom it offers enough to compel organizations to switch? (We might say yes, but then we know the consequences of lock-in and we don't have to make the up-front investment.) On the other hand, for all its weaknesses, HTML offers all sorts of things that Word lacks (e.g. accessibility and reformatting for differetn devices, universal browser support, Net-friendly, strong semantics), and is probably good enough for most uses. Thoughts?
Folks, this is the heart of the matter. This is what needs to be understood by both sides of the argument:
What the poster misses is that people don't ... D O N O T accept or reject a file format. They, with the small subset of geeks on /., don't give a flip about file format. They accept or reject a program.
For ODF to be accepted, it has to be part of a program that most users have installed.
Program acceptance is usually established by:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"File format isn't what people are worried about when purchasing software, it's the software itself!"
That's not the debate here!
We're talking about the format being used to create and store publicly owned information. The government is funded by the citizens. The citizen should not have to pay an additional Microsoft tax in order to access government documents. The government SHOULD BE worried, even though they probably are not. Even if ODF is adopted as the standard, MS has the option of supporting it in their applications along with everyone else. The reverse isn't true if the government decides to institutionalize vendor lock-in.
RTF is outdated. It's like HTML3.2 on the web: it's capable of recording formatting decisions but not of indicating structure.
A properly prepared word-processing document these days, whether written with Open Office Writer, Word, or any other decent wp-program, is prepared using styles. You can't do that with RTF. It was inevitable that someone would come up with an XML-based format at some time, because RTF is just too inflexible and incapable of structuring a document.
Because RTF is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft.
A rule of thumb when trying to replace one product in the marketplace with another is that the new product needs two tangible advantages. ODF needs to have one "gotta-have" feature that non-technical people can understand and appreciate in order for it to successfully beat out Office.
Yes, ODF is theoretically cheaper then Office. However, the productivity boost of spending $500 / employee is a bargain when the employee's time is worth $50 / hour! (Remember, a guy making $20 an hour really does cost the company $40-$50 an hour.)
The "Open" aspect of ODF is too abstract for many people to understand. To the non-technical person, Office "just works".
Thus, in order for there to be a demand for ODF, there needs to be tangible features that work better with ODF then Office. What tangible features could people appreciate from ODF? Here are some suggestions that come to mind.
Thus, to repeat, in order for ODF to really succeed it needs to have easy-to-understand features that non-technical people will desire. Competing on price alone won't beat Office.
No, I will not work for your startup
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Red Hat created a logo and posters recently to help spread ODF.
I don't think the slogan "Liberate your documents" is going to go over well with businesses. The image it evokes is security leaks and industrial espionage.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, the blurb for this article is confusing 2 different things - ODF's relevance and Microsoft's dominance. I'll put on my IT Director hat and toss in my $.02.
There's some big News To Me in this article and I wish the open source community would do a better job of informing the rest of the world of this crap. This article mentions that Microsoft's OOXML format can't be implemented by other vendors. What?!?!? That's News To Me. I'm sure the article is right, but frankly, I don't keep my nose to grindstone enough to follow this kind of religious news any more and it's the first time I've heard MS restricts who can implement this file format. It also says it's an import-only format that's basically junk. Really? I didn't know that and I just assumed that the format was reasonable and worked. Can the rest of the world's new organizations please make a big deal out of those facts?
OOXML is crap and ODF works. That's important and I didn't know it.
Now, let's look at Microsoft's dominance in the marketplace. I guarantee you that every IT Director in the world is figuring out how to get OpenOffice in the door and figuring out what role it can play. When I look at my budget for the year I want eradicate any line item having to do with licensing. Realistic? No. Can we cut back on things? Hell yeah. We don't need every PC in this company having a copy of MS Office. For us, Outlook is a bitch, but the Exchange web client is pretty good. Visio and Project are tough ones, but not everyone uses it. Some people have custom integration with Excel, but those people are also a minority. Oh, and there's the religious thing with using free software, that's nice to me and gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
So when you look at the landscape, the single biggest obstacle appears to be document formats.
And really, I know that's not even much of a concern. We already rely on the MS document formats as being the default. Maybe if ODF is so good we should consider switching our default formats now. Maybe that should be the first step in our migration. I could care less who came up with the document standard as long as the documents open and do what I expect them to do.
----- obSig
"Is it game over for OpenDocument? Probably. We've been expecting Massachusetts ITD to publicly revise its open formats mandate to include Office Open XML (OOXML) ever since Louis Gutierrez resigned as CIO in early October 2006. That was as clear a signal that ODF had failed in Massachusetts as needed by anyone in the know"
.. same thing ...
How can you equate political machinations with the the technical merits of a document format. If OOXML was so technically superior then why did MS need to get the decision to go with ODF reversed and Peter Quinn effectivly FIRED.
Yea I know, they just cut his funding and ignored his recommendations
davecb5620@gmail.com
In the past this has meant "whenever a competing product looks like it is gaining parity with Word"
This is completely unacceptable for a long-term document archive solution. It's not an open format, so you have to rely on Microsoft making "converters" for older iterations available, or reverse engineering. In addition, you have to realize that since the formation is closed, your reverse-engineered implementation may not correctly handle some "features." And that when MS decides to change things, your solution may not correctly handle the new "improved" format.
Not that Microsoft would intentionally break compatibility, of coure... What is it that the Office team says? "RTF isn't done until OpenOffice won't run"
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
That's a very nice idea, but examine the history of pushing ODF through in Massachusetts. Applying a little common sense to a situation that just so happened to directly threaten microsoft and cost the IT guy his job.
Citizens are the **last** ones to benefit when we aren't involved in our government. Always.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
I think you're all overlooking something important here. Regardless of whether Microsoft wins the battle against ODF, they've already left the door open for OpenOffice and other products. Why? Because in order to plug OOXML as the supposedly "open" standard, they had to document it and not patent it. Compared to the ridiculous amount of energy that had to go into reverse-engineering doc/xls/ppt, this makes life much easier for the free world. Even if OOXML ends up becoming dominant (I refuse to ever call it a standard), we still win.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Considering that MS Office is a tried and tested solution with a huge support network, a product can't really compete on being a little bit worse (i.e., a raft of unknown headaches) for a few bucks less. I bet you'll find more people who'll pay 10% more for a 10% better product than 10% less for a 10% worse product. If your perception of 'worse' or 'better' in a given situation skews those numbers, the choice becomes easier or harder, but it still kind of boils down to your cost/quality curve. And I'd suspect Linux power users are more concerned with quality than cost.
The basic RTF spec is about two pages long, and about as complex as HTML 1.0. Like HTML, it defines a simple way of extending it. Word can export documents as RTF that include all of the formatting of the original. The catch? That nothing else can read them. Remember early on in the last browser war where IE and Netscape both defined large numbers of extensions to HTML? Imagine a situation like that, but with half a dozen browsers. Now imagine the browsers also edit the document, and strip out any markup they don't understand. That's pretty much the situation with RTF.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Seriously, have you ever wondered how PDF managed to get so usual? People began using them in web pages, and asking for you to get adobe acrobat reader to read it, that's how it works. If people want your information they'll use your format.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
.DOC and PDF are the standards and will stay that way for a long time. There first must be a shift in applications. For example if Google Docs and OO.org can penetrate the market then you might see a slow shift. If you breakdown the OS by percentages and then the applications within those Operating Systems, you just have a long way to go. OO.org just committed to porting to the Mac. Sure NeoOffice is an alternative, but it has some major weaknesses. But Even if everyone on Mac and LInux switched to OO.org and Google Docs, you will still have a majority of people on windows using Word.
You also have to get the word out. How many non technical people know what ODF is? Not many. How are you going to promote it? The only way you can do this is for big companies to jump on board and make all internal documents ODF and eventually that'll push to outside firms. However, it's not likely in the near term. It does have a chance to creep in when more companies use web service for office suites, but that's a ways off.
As far as I know, every school (including mine) is using MS Office 2003 (for well cheap) or better and every student who cannot afford it is pirating it from other people or getting the student discounted version (for well cheap again).
It's weird to say that pirating is the problem, but I really think that every kid who knows something out there will just get a copy of Word from someone, somewhere, whether it be online or through a friend. Nobody out there is saying "Use AbiWord or Ooo to read it."
And it's very weird to say something like "MS might be gone someday and we may not be able to read the file format" to someone. How can any average person think MS would ever go out of business? You can certainly bring up big companies like Digital and all, but MS will probably not be making their mistakes.
The Microsoft RTF 'standard' is re-written with every version of MS-Word. It has exactly the same compatability problems as MS-DOC because it's about the same format, just asciified. Also an MS-WORD RTF file usually contains three seperate versions of the document (a) the document in the current RTF variant, (b) the document in the previous RTF variant and (c) an original style approximation of the document. This is one of the reasons it makes such big files. (The other major one is that MS-Word usually puts images in the file as hexdumped BMP files!)
RTF is seen as more compatible than MS-DOC because the previous version of word can read the file; but that's a con, it's just a single step reversed combatability not true interoperability.
Finally it's also got the same problem as OOXML, a very, VERY badly written standards document.
I work as a hotliner for a computer retailer (no, not Dell).
The latest trend on our computers is to bundle them with a trial edition of Microsoft Office (60 days). This doesn't support saving your files it seems, nor priting or anything else even remotely useful apart from viewing documents.
Once we explain customers that they have to pay Microsoft to get a fully functioning version of the program, they almost always ask where to get something else, that works without having to pay for it. I always tell them to try out OpenOffice.org - see if it fits their needs. If it does, great - they've just saved a minor fortune. If not, they can always switch back to paying for MS Office.
Same when the computer is bundled with MS Works, which for some really arcane reason doesn't want to play nice with MS Office.
While I've no feedback from all of the customers that I've advised to try out OO.o, I have heard from several of them that they will never use MS Office again, when their trial version is so "buggy", that you can't even use it properly in the trial period.
Does ODF (well, something other than MS' formats) have a future? I would say it has a big future as long as Microsoft shoots itself in the foot instead of luring customers in with fully functioning/compatible programs.
But maybe that's just me.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.