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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.'"
Viva la French for their choice of OpenOffice
And all it takes is for Microsoft to say "Look, our document format is also universally accessible, we even have 'open' in the name," and most people would believe them. Good thing though, Obama seems to have some sort of grasp about the concept of computers and the interwebs.
c++;
So they know the pains of vendor lockin.
From two coworkers not directly related to computer science:
- What? Everybody uses Word.
- Oh, dear god, please let them reach a consensus.
Guess which one works as the step between scientific writers and printing services.
Goverments documents should be stored in format that is free and open and has free converters to other accepted formats - that is all. Law that says i need to use odf format, is as bad as using M$. Hey but looking at other people comments i see: "as long it is odf SCREW FREE CHOICE".
Obviously, other countries may be different, but it should be illegal for the USA Government to enforce, by law, the use of one product/standard over the other, IMO. Certainly laws should exist saying something like all data should be stored in open standards formats approved by X$ organization, which at this point is the same thing (since OOXML isn't approved by any such organization, yet). It shouldn't dictate exactly which standard, though... because at the very least, they'll also get bogged down in specifying what version(s) are allowed, and all sorts of other issues, not the least of which is depriving free-market decisions on which standard(s) to support by various vendors.
:(
The government technically isn't allowed to compete with private industry either (for obvious reasons), but unfortunately, that happens often enough these days as well
It makes perfectly sense for the government to standardize when practical on some formats for its own documents, so citizens won't have to have converters for zillions of different formats, just in order to talk to the government. In this regard, the government is like any other big organization, and should have the free choice you seem to advocate against.
Where the free choice of the government should be limited is that they should not be allowed standardize on formats that are entangled with legal limitations.
Apart from that, we can argue on technical merits on what formats to standardize on.
With the availability of the free (as in beer) Word document viewer, it's arguable that Word .doc files are in fact universally accessible already, for some reasonable definition of universal (cf. universal telephone access). You might argue that people still have to buy Windows, which could constitute an obstacle to universal access; but going one level further, they also have to buy a computer regardless of which OS runs on it, so even a free software solution isn't actually without cost.
Bandannarama
There's some irony in that Obama's technology proposal on docstoc is a Word document and that you can't download it without logging in.
Well, I also think that the big distinction is: You're allowed to use whatever format you damned well please. In most cases where they're talking about a government adopting "open formats", they're talking about using open formats for specific kinds of communications. More specifically, the laws force the governments themselves use open formats for documentation that is supposed to be "publicly available". So if your local/state/federal government tells you that you must download a particular form or document, they must make that document available in a format that can be read for free. If they make that document available in MS Word format, then the government is essentially *forcing* their citizens to buy Microsoft Office.
So, you know, it's not like you aren't allowed to own MS Word, and it's not as though saving a private document in MS Word format will result in police breaking your door down. The law just means that the government won't be forcing you to buy a particular piece of software, and a side-effect of this is that it encourages software developers to support open standards.