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
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!
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.
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."
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
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.
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!
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