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France Leading Charge Against OOXML
Bergkamp10 writes "As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format waits in ISO limbo, South Africa, Korea, and the Netherlands are now actively pursuing the alternative Open Document Format instead, said the ODF Alliance. The Alliance now claims 500 members, and by their count 13 nations have announced laws or rules that favor the use ODF over Microsoft's Office formats. Those nations include Russia, Malaysia, Japan, France, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, and Norway. The French have been the most aggressive in their rejection of Microsoft's standard; nearly half a million French government employees are being switched to OpenOffice. There has been no similar move in the US, though in a speech at Google last week Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for data to be stored in 'universally accessible formats.'"
There have been some very bad things happening lately in France like the Olivennes report which is to lead us to some massive and generalized internet filtering (this has already been discussed on slashdot here : http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/1355220&from=rss) and having a president who is a friend of major media corporations doesn't help in this regard. I guess the ODF support is at least something I can be proud of in my country. And I definitely hope it will last as Sarkozy makes me kind of pessimistic both for French and European future (sadly, not only in a technology-related fashion)
We translate acronyms (how arrogant!)
AIDS = SIDA
kB = kO
OPEC = OPEP
And the list goes on. We do that less than the French speaking Canadians though... KFC = PFK is my favorite.
Apparently he's also pro network neutrality: http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/
c++;
here they are: http://www.dis29500.org/category/countries/france/ nearly as much as the UK and more than twice the USA total. Raw totals of comments can be a bit missleading, but the UK, France and the USA were the top three in terms of numbers of comments. That kind of indicates the level of detail with which they looked at the standard, not the depth of feeling they have about it and how resistant they will be to MS lobbying during March (they have 30 days after the BRM to change their votes - it will be a crazy amount of lobbying and no doubt there will be more corruption/allegations of corruption)
From what I have read about Obama, when he takes a position for/against an issue, he really educates himself about it before making the decision. He is not the type to just accept what his advisors tell him.
>>Law that says i need to use odf format, is as bad as using M$.
Wrong. ODF is honestly open, OOXML is absolutely *not* open. In the OOXML specs there are several sections that essentially say: "do this the same as in Word-95" but the Word-95 specs are still closed.
BTW: ODF does not exclude msft. There are pluggins that allow ms-office to work just fine with ODF. Also, msft is entirely free to incorporate ODF if msft so choses. Msft's claims that ODF excludes msft is pure bullsh!t.
The ODF (that would be Foundation) was never in charge of the ODF file formats. They just had a confusing name. The ODF format was created by OASIS