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Denmark Chooses OpenDocument Format
Seahawk was one of several readers to write in with news of Denmark's decision to embrace ODF. "On Friday morning Denmark decided to choose ODF over Microsoft's OOXML. For now the decision is only effective for governmental institutions, but regions and municipalities will most likely follow some time in the future. The decision has unfolded over a period of four years, and many open source advocates were fearing the worst, but it looks like the minister finally caved in and listened to what a lot of people were saying." While in transition away from Microsoft Office formats, the Danes may find use for this new OpenOffice integration guide (sent in by reader AdeleWard).
It's still not in English, so I can not read it.
4...3...2.. hopefully this is more than an attempt to glean free Office licenses from Microsoft, which they would undoubtedly cough up to prevent anyone else from gaining a foothold. Good Luck Denmark, good to see this move, hope it was for the right reasons
It makes me happy to see yet another government moving away from proprietary M$ software. I hope our government does the same and soon.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Great, free Office licenses would be good being that it supports ODF, its a win win situation for them.
They use an open standard and aren't stuck with any one vendor, and one of those vendors may give them software for free.
The only retraining needed will be to get people to save in ODF rather than DOCX.
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Why hopefully? Do you even understand the point of ODF? It's *NOT* OpenOffice.
This is great news. Open standards, like other forms of openness, spreads like wildfire. In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark. A similar pattern occurred in South America, with Brazil proving to be the center of influence. So the question is: who is next?
but, how long will MS stay true to the ODF format, just because its a 'standard' doesnt mean they won't throw their own proprietary sh#t into the mix, they have done this before with other standards
I poked it on facebook, twatted it on twitter. Come on /. there are literally millions of other shitty social buttons you could add.
I guess there is no digg button because digg competes with slashdot for daily FUD.
By the way; do you prefer democratically chosen FUD, or Kdawson hand selected FUD?
As long as they want the government to use their software, which in turn keeps people used to using MS Office and using it elsewhere.
They start making it incompatible with the standard and they'll run into problems.
Now ... if the standard allows for extensibility, and they take advantage of that extensibility to provide extra features that governments want to use than whos fault is that?
The point of an OPEN document format is to allow people to use whatever software they want, not tie them in to some particular OSS software package.
If that is your (or anyone elses goal), to get people to not use MS Office and to force them to use OSS like OpenOffice, well then thats no better than being locked into MSOffice really.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So regions and municipalities are in fact not government institutions in Denmark? My guess is that you meant that the decision is currently only effective for national government institutions, but I'm not sure.
Their version of Java(jvm) being a good example.
Isn't there supposed to be an ODF loader for office? this is a positive shift away from a defacto standard to an open and interoperable standard, which has the potential to significantly reduce costs and improve accessibility in the long run.
The point of an OPEN document format is to allow people to use whatever software they want, not tie them in to some particular OSS software package.
If that is your (or anyone elses goal), to get people to not use MS Office and to force them to use OSS like OpenOffice, well then thats no better than being locked into MSOffice really.
100% agree. Standard file format, open software selection should be the goal.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Either you are a troll, or you fail at free-market libertarianism.
The state, in order to conduct its necessary business, needs to use some sort of document format. Even the most minimal of states would have to at least write the law code down somewhere.
The document format that the state uses affects the citizens of the state; because they must possess software capable of interpreting that format in order to usefully interact with the state.
Therefore, the state's use of a document format constitutes a state-imposed market distortion in favor of software that can interpret that format, and against software that cannot. Because the state's use of some document format is unavoidable, the imposition of this market distortion is unavoidable.
The more openly available, and widely adopted, and patent unencumbered the format is, the lower the barrier of entry to supporting it is, and the greater the amount of software that can support it will be. Therefore, the more open the document standard used by the state, the smaller the market distortion imposed by the state.
Any free market libertarian is therefore obligated to support the state's use of the most open and least encumbered formats available.
dealt themselves a blow to their ability to interoperate with other people.
Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
You should know that nothing makes this guy blow his top like improperly used homophones! Thanks for ruining his day! QUEUE? Un-effing-believable!
As a free-market libertarian, you must know that Microsoft is the enemy of the free market, having got where it is today by subverting free markets.
That's not entirely true, since Microsoft Office can support ODF. If their decision was about the benefits of an open file format then the choice of software to run should be irrelevant (meaning they could still run Microsoft Office everywhere instead of something like OpenOffice).
Remember to maintain your supply of
It can be used in offices where other file formats are used and represents a great cost saving for organisations
What costs are saved by adopting this file format?
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Have YOU used MS Office? I open older documents EVERY day, your post is entirely devoid of any facts or useful information other than showing your ignorance and need to push your agenda on others. You are, infact, spreading FUD just like Microsoft. In your hurry to 'stick it to the man', you are acting EXACTLY like them.
Good job. Way to fail.
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As a free market libertarian, I think this move sucks, and anyone with half a brain should too.
As a free market Libertarian, I think you'd be well advised to learn why a group would choose an open standard that multiple vendors can compete for, rather than a closed (ISO can kiss my ass), single-vendor product.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And what happened with that?
People stopped using it in favor of the one that actually followed the standard, and the MS flavor went away.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
sleep(4);
queue<license> q;
for (int i = 0; i < complimentary_office_2k7_licenses.size(); i++)
q.push(complimentary_office_2k7_licenses[i]);
Makes more sense to me than "cue" which is a noun FFS.
This slashdot story has the same headline as many Danish stories, but the decision did not exclude OOXML, and did not specifically pick ODF. However, the criterias that were decided upon, currently only fits ODF in the minds of most people, but Jasper Bojsen fra Microsoft also thinks that Microsoft OOXML complies with the criterias.
So basically, ODF is in, OOXML may be in, too.
After a huge lawsuit from Sun!
No, SUN was well aware that MS pulls tricks like this, they thought that they would be clever and they put in a requirement in the Java licenses to stick to the standard. Microsoft's Java system was stopped by an actual court decision. Unfortunately for SUN, it turned out that Microsoft had used their work with Java to learn and they created a Java copy called .NET. Basically a lesson. It is never worth cooperating with MS even if you think you are much cleverer than they are.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Currently, the situation is, that ODF and OOXML must both be accepted, but there are several examples where only Microsoft dataformats are received. Therefore, it can not be expected, that this new decision will have full effect quickly.
You're probably a MS shill but the simple fact is that there exists free plugins so that MS Office users can use ODF. One of them is made by Sun which currently is the only one with Enterprise support. Surprisingly the only company that does not make a plugin is MS itself. So who's appears to be hindering interoperability here?
I would like see the logic at which you arrived at this conclusion. Open Office is free so there is no higher cost there. ODF is an open format which means anyone can write applications that use it. The list of existing applications that use it includes Google Docs, WordPerfect, Lotus Symphony, etc. If anything, using MS Office incurs a higher cost because Danish citizens will be required to purchase it from MS to see Office proprietary formats.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
more importantly, older versions cannot interoperate with newer versions, in an attempt to force everyone to upgrade once a few important people do so. MS was forced to release a docx interpreter for the older office programs because companies complained so much.
That was very creative, but I was under the impression that it is the invisible hand of the market that is supposed to select the best product, not the government. In so far that the government should be involved, it should do the least possible to alter the market from what it'd otherwise be. Even though "The more openly available, and widely adopted, and patent unencumbered the format is, the lower the barrier of entry to supporting it is, and the greater the amount of software that can support it will be." may be a positive market intervention, it is none the less a quite substantial intervention which libertarians are generally against. The concept that companies that get a too dominant position and have too much lock-in should be reigned in is more something I expect to find in a European socialist economy than coming from a libertarian.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Really? When was the last time you opened a document created in Word 95? How about Excel 95? Did they open with no problem?
Government documents often remain unchanged (and sometimes unlooked at) for the length of time necessary for a transition like Word 95 to Word 2007.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I only mention this because it happens to me all of the time. Usually with different versions of MS Word but in this case it can't even read its own file from the same version.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
They aren't choosing a product they are choosing a format. Since they must choose some format, in order to conduct business, some market distortion is inevitable.
By virtue of selecting the format that is easier for any product to support, they reduce the degree to which they interfere with the invisible hand's selection of the best product.
If they were to select a unique format, implemented by only a single product, they would be maximally constraining the invisible hand. Anybody who wanted to interact with the state would simply have to use the single product. By choosing a substantially open standard(pretty much all office suites that aren't Office already support it, Office supports it via at least two different plugin options and has native support on the roadmap) they have left the invisible hand largely free to choose the best product.
Had they said "No, only users of OO.org may interact with us", that would have been interference with free market competition between products. All they did was mandate a format, and they chose the format that imposed the least pressure on product selection.
Sir —
Well said.
Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
So they'd lose more and more documents? I don't think you're thinking straight, they want it easy for people to upgrade and annoying for people who haven't. If Microsoft had any substantial degree of failure on that (no, anecdotes aren't proof) then Office would FAIL in company upgrade testing. "We are unable to migrate to Office 2007 because we would lose compatibility with vital documents and historical records". Do you see that happening? No, so reality doesn't care how many times that FUD is repeated over and over.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Woosh!
Hmmm. So what you're saying is, as a free market libertarian, the correct decision is to encode government documents in such a way that citizens would be required to pay for a product from a specific private company in order to have access to them because that private companies products are currently popular. And by extension you see to think this is better than placing the documents into a format that is open defined such that any vendor (including the popular vendor in the previous setup) are able to provide access, with the added bonus that decades from now those documents will still be readable (while the proprietary single vendor format would only be readable as long as the vendor continues to support it). For some strange reason I question either your stated position as a free market libertarian, or your intelligence.
Microsoft will then just have to compete by having the best products and quite frankly they have won. Especially with excel, their features and usability are far ahead of anything else. I love being able to open excel sheets in OpenOffice on my laptop (linux..so no Excel) without any weird formatting errors, but when creating complicated shit I far prefer the MS product. If only they could do as well with their other products...
Bottles.
Wrong! As someone who was involved in the TAP program for Office 2007 I can tell you that the docx support for Office 2003 and Office XP was in beta at the same time as Office 2007 was in beta. It was not released later. It was released at the same time - and not because of customer complaints. The only thing they surveyed people on at the time was whether they had to support the older Office 2000. If you guys are going to make shit up, at least make it believable.
NO!
No, Sun sued them and MS were forced to stop developing their non standard version... Theirs went away because MS stopped pushing it, not because users chose the standard version instead.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Microsoft Office is a *program* not a format. The standardization is about *formats* not software. That is a common confusion fostered mostly by Microsoft, but perpetuated by those who aren't looking closely at the issue.
When OOXML was being crammed through ISO through ballot stuffing, what was Denmark's position? Were they involved at all? If they were involved, did they vote yes or no?
No time to search that right now, but it would be an interesting question to know the answer to.
OK, let me break down fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument into simple sentences for you, because you seem unable to wrap your mind around it.
-- Government chooses a proprietary format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- The software of the company owning said format, regardless of its merits, is the only one that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can go fuck itself selecting the best product.
-- Government chooses an open, unencumbered with patents format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- Anyone can write software that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can freely choose whichever products they fancy.
And you seem to be absolutely right, only evil socialist governments and the pinko commies who've elected them seem to understand these two simple concepts. Hoorah for libertarianism.
First: software document formats are so far removed from the world of Adam Smith his arguments hardly apply
Second: even governments which are based on Smith's theories, such as the U.S., state in the constitution that the government is responsible for setting standards for weights and measurements so no one can try to patent things like inches or grams. In choosing what format the government uses for software documents they should follow the same method for choosing weight and measurement standards: choose something which is not patented. When the government is dependent of patented technologies, they become a slave to the patent owners.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
MSOffice interoperability is nearly as good as OOo's. But why is OOo always dinged on slashdot for use in companies?
It doesn't EXACTLY MATCH the output of "MS Office" (whichever version you have everyone using).
So therefore, MS office is less ready for prime time than OOo because it's operability with earlier versions is much worse.
PS MS Office can't even get the ODF spec right when it says "we haven't finalised this yet, but until we do, do what MS Excel does". How bad is that?
"It's been 3 hours, 15 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
"It's been 3 hours, 39 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
"It's been 4 hours, 6 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
ODF is already on a roll throughout the European governments. It is the standard in Belgium, Croatia, the Netherlands, and has a strong foothold in Finland, France, Germany, the UK, Norway and Slovakia.
The real watershed moment will be when the central EU administration decides to standardize it. That might greatly encourage the other member nations to follow...
why the parent is modded as 'flamebait', in a reasonable manner ?
Read radical news here
Microsoft has substantial degrees of failure on all of their products and always have... This is largely why end users have come to expect computers to be unreliable devices to the point that it's considered a joke. Most users simply ignore problems that occur with microsoft software because they have become so used to it.
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there are open standards, there is microsoft's standards. wherever open standards are not used, microsoft's formats are used. up to few years ago, microsoft determined all standards due to their monopoly.
yet, there you are, talking about differentiation in between microsoft and odf, and making conclusions on other people's stances. you need to think about your own stance and know where you stand first. most disturbing thing is that there have been fanbois who modded you insightful.
Read radical news here
As this is a majro step for open standards IMHO, we should make sure that the government, parliament and citizens of denmark see the global support.
If you feel similar, please do sign the petition here:
http://www.pledgebank.com/DenmarkODF
We will deliver the list of signatures to the parliament on tuesday.
Jan Wildeboer
I wonder if they'll have to file the specification for their ATM Machines in ODF Document Format?
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
those 'other people' will have to adopt a format to do business with the government.
Read radical news here
Probably the biggest cost saving, presuming you stick with MS Office, is that MS will make Office cheaper to encourage you not to use OOo.
As a Dane, you should know that the decision won't go into effect for another year.
I'm from Denmark.
They decided on a list which contains only one member, ODF.
Requirements for being on the list:
Microsoft argues that OOXML could easily fit those requirements (and OOXML-Strict fits all except the "Already Implemented").
There is a little war going on in the press where the opposition has declared ODF as a winner and the current
government argues that there is nothing in the decision that prevents OOXML.
Dear friends over Denmark, use http://go-oo.org/ instead, it has more features and it forks from OOffice that now belongs to corporate Oracle ! Think in the long run !!!
There are lots of companies who make standard nuts, wires, screws, tires, gasolines, insulation, etc.
If the government were to define a few standard cell phone chargers, then multiple companies would compete and cell phone chargers would probably cost about $6. Since they don't, off brand chargers are $13 and "brand" chargers from the cell store are $29.
Libertarian philosophy is fundamentally broken because it relies on a "magical" force to keep wealthy, powerful, individuals and companies in check and fails epically with regard to the iron law of oligarchy.
The only way libertarian philosophy can work is by having harsh taxes on anyone who passes a certain point of wealth and power such that we have many many "rich" people and no "super rich" people.
Since corporations are effectively immortal, psychopathic, wealthy and powerful people, we need a strong government to keep them in check lest they due things like dump toxins, allow us to be raped, take our property, fine us several lifetimes worth of income for downloading a couple dozen songs, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Have YOU used MS Office? I open older documents EVERY day
What do you mean by "older" documents? I bet it's not from the early 1990s...
I used MS Word since the 1980s when it was a DOS program, and used WinWord 386 on Windows 386, and Word 1.0 on Windows 3.0. I have not tried to open any of those 1980s-era documents in recent versions of Word, but I can assure you that Word 95/97/2000/2003 all screw up on opening a Word 2.0 doc file (Word 2.0 is 1990s-era Windows only, and is much newer than Word 4 - MS version numbering inconsistencies again).
Microsoft retains fairly good backward compatibility with recent versions, to ease in migrating by one or two versions. It is not in their interest to make it easy to migrate by larger version jumps, because that would remove one of the big motivators for regular upgrades.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
How can anyone choose OOXML, even if they want to? Microsoft may have written the specifications, but they don't support it. They may support something like it, but they have stated that they aren't going to support the actual standard. So, is there any software that can actually handle it?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"Guys, ODF is totalt hyggligt."
o hai
Forgive me, but I'm a native Englishman and I'm patient enough to pass on a little education. Think of a performance; E.g. Cue the music, maestro. Cue the record, DJ. Yes it's similar to "a queue", but the implication of the word "cue" is to set things up ready to release the pause button on the tape deck ... yes, yes I am that old! In my day we used a chinagraph pencil to make a mark on the tape which we aligned to the tape head - a cue mark.
{ While I'm in teacher mode, please do NOT use the non-word Walla! It's really a French word: Voila! }
Thanks for listening!
How are you supposed to use a spreadsheet to calculate your taxes when there is no standard for formulas in spreadsheets?
Come now! Don't LOOSE your cool and go all rouge on us!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The banking system is hardly an example of free market failure - when the first few cracks started appearing, if govts had just let the worst offenders die (or atleast nationalized them, wiping out all shares) then others would've learnt a lesson from it; but as things stand they're just a model for how to receive bailouts. And the reason they even dug themselves into such a deep hole, is because they've been helped before with all the influence they wield in administrative policy.
I'm not trying to argue for or against libertarianism, but I've seen banks used as a counter example a few times; and really wonder if it is even relevant to free markets.
He is going to say, "aw! Shucks. Guys, just buy Denmark and close it down. Those pesky gadflies!".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk i highly recommend that video explaining in a fun way what free market is and what is not.
there is no free market in existence for a century. What we have now globally is keynesianism which argues that government regulations and spending (central planning in disguise) is good for economy and politicians love that doctrine because they measure economic success with the GDP which can be inflated by government spending even with borrowed money ( gdp = consumption + invenstment + government + net exports).
Laissez faire economy is a natural state of things (think ecosystem unharmed by a man). There are natural tensions between the players of the ecosystem, supply and demand play decisive role in defining the equilibrium.
Now add government and central bank to the equation modifying natural balance. GDP growth too low and bars of citizen support on TV don't look good? Set low interest rate and observe the credit boom and consumption shooting through the roof. Ecosystem example? Think dropping tons of meat from helicopter into the ecosystem because you think that the predators need help.
This causes problem - natural interest rate is decided by the compromise between amount of loanable savings and demand for loans, but when government bodies set interest rate too low, saving doesn't pay back, borrowing money and gambling with it does. For a short period of time economy set to such overdrive produces nice GDP numbers and people feel warm and fuzzy inside but the disaster is around the corner. All that accumulated debt doesn't have backup in real savings which means that the whole economy is stimulated by lots of hot air and nothing more and becomes very fragile. Add government guarantees to the mix to make things worse (if government guarantees something, it's a safe bet, right? be it mortgages, bank deposits). In the ecosystem example dropping a lot of meat will make population of predators very healthy and big, so they'll kill most of the grass eaters, just like we have debtors more numerous than creditors. As you can see this is lose-lose situation, because there are only 2 ways to deal with it: feeding animals for eternity or letting predators to starve to reduce numbers to their natural levels.
Recessions are simply corrections freeing the energy of unnatural tensions created by the artificial stimulation and they are in fact healthy. We lived on credit card money and now we pay the price. It was nice while it lasted but now it's time to pay the debts and underconsume.
Current recession? There was a dotcom bubble which burst. Politicians didn't like the negative gdp growth of the recession that started, so they reduced IR and started guaranteeing mortgages. This led to a decade long real estate boom based on a false premise that houses gaining 10-20% every year is somehow backed up by the real wealth and legitimate growth. When subprime mortgages started to default it started the chain reaction.
>When the government is dependent of patented technologies, they become a slave to the patent owners.
We all depend on patented technologies to go about our day-to-day lives. Does that make us slaves to patent owners?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I wish Apple would make ODF more standard in its products (like in iPhone OS built in document viewers, etc.). That would go a long way to seeing widespread adoption. It's the 21st century for heaven's sake. I can't believe we haven't adopted an open standard for our documents yet. This is really becoming a pain.
>ODF is an open format which means anyone can write applications that use it. The list of existing applications that use it includes Google Docs, WordPerfect, Lotus Symphony, etc.
.doc files. Interesting for a closed format.
The funny thing is that all of those programs you mentioned also open
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
... And just WHY is a government choosing a format in which to keep its documents NOT an example of the "Invisible Hand" at work?
Get an older version of MS Word.
Try to open up a word document that was saved in a newer version of MS Word.
Fail.
QED bitch
It isn't. In the US, at least, Banks are given the authorization to create an amount of money equal to 1/3 (I think. The fraction may be wrong.) of their deposits. They frequently cheat and exceed this fraction.
This is, therefore, a state granted monopoly. As such, any institution that profits from it cannot be used as an honest example of libertarianism in action (whether pro or con).
Then there are all the special state granted charters, limits on who can enter the market, etc.
Personally, I don't believe that libertarianism would work, but banks aren't an honest counter-example.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How far back? I don't use it, so this is an honest question, but I had heard that the current MSOffice was unable to open MSWord98 documents.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So ... older versions of Office do work with the new format then ... so you're point is invalid.
Also, how common is it for older versions of OO to work with newer versions of ODF?
Its retarded to argue that 'old versions can use new formats' ... of course they can't, you have to upgrade, anyone can grasp that concept, its the same regardless of what software you use. Doesn't matter if it comes from Sun, Microsoft or anyone else. If the format changes the software has to change to support the new features.
MS released a plugin to open the new format in the old versions of the software ... for free.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
And this is different from any other software package how?
What application reads the ODF document format version that was used in the 90s? Whats that? None of them? Because like Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny it doesn't fucking exist?
There comes a point when you're format is hard to view anywhere if its anything other than plain old text. And EVEN THAT is a problem. How many apps do you know of that will open EBCDIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC today? I'm sure there are ways to do it, but being that I haven't seen an Office 95 document OR EBCDIC text in years, its not really the issue you're trying to make it out to be.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Plural of anecdote... yadda yadda...
.pptx format.
...but when opened in Office 07, The Office 07 free ppt viewer, or OpenOffice, they were all screwed up, formatting was all wonky, tables, graphs and images were all misaligned (often times half off the screen). And text was overlapping all over the place. WTF? This happened to him while giving the presentations in class using Office 07.
One of my teachers last semester created Powerpoints. He saved them in
*I have NO IDEA what version of office he was using to create them.* Likely to be 07 though
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
The effect of this decision is that every official in the national government will have to publish official documents in ODF. I don't think this decision has any directives about the formats that the government officials can receive.
The obvious ripple effect of this decision is that everyone who consumes official documents will require software that can render an ODF document (and there are lots, so this will be easy). Since most software that can render ODF documents can also create ODF documents, it seems likely that the ability to create ODF documents will become ubiquitous among those who interact with the government.
It remains to be seen whether or not that will reduce the number of documents received by the government in non-ODF formats, but it certainly is possible since there must be some overlap between people who consume government documents and people who provide documents to the government.
As an open standards supporter, what excites me the most about this news is that the Danish government now has a vested interest in preserving the integrity of and perhaps even improving the ODF format. Vendors such as Microsoft will be less able to "get by" with substandard support for the format which, in turn, improves the experience of everyone using ODF.
*sigh* back to work...
it wouldn't be modern slashdot if they didn't spelled out all the technical stuff for you constantly.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
My understanding was that MS Office's implementation of ODF (at least in Excel specifically) had some serious issues. Maybe that's been improved since they first implemented it, but given MS's track record I kind of doubt it.
I think you're interpreting the GP statement differently than I do because IIRC it's common for Microsoft to give better deals to those who seek alternatives to MS Office, and in many cases the organizations who say they're going with Open Standards (tm) end up with that sweet MS Office discount in the end. What the GP is pointing out is that he (and I) are hoping the Danish government is really routing for open standards but not using it just for leverage in price negotiations with Microsoft.
{ While I'm in teacher mode, please do NOT use the non-word Walla! It's really a French word: Voila! } Thanks for listening!
Hear hear! "Walla" bugs the crap out of me. Mispronounced and misspelled -- a double threat.
While we're being technical, let's remember that it's Voilà with a grave accent on the "a". I know it's not always easy to type that way...
And what happened with that?
People stopped using it in favor of the one that actually followed the standard, and the MS flavor went away.
Let's try that without the historical revisionism. Microsoft implemented a very buggy and incomplete version that killed Java's reputation, and Sun spent 4 years fighting Microsoft in court to kill the Microsoft JVM until they finally got it to stop shipping a JVM. Eventually there was only Sun's version left, but it was only a bleak shadow of what it could have been.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
For some strange reason I question either your stated position as a free market libertarian, or your intelligence.
Please tell me where that is my stated opinion, because I strongly doubt your reading comprehension (and intelligence, fool). I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government measures office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does. But I think I hit a sore spot in the slashdot groupthink, going by the "-1, Disagree" moderation.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That should read: "I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government isn't changing the market by measuring office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does."
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My understanding was that MS Office's implementation of ODF (at least in Excel specifically) had some serious issues.
The "issue" in this case is that spreadsheet formulas (and some other things) are underspecified in the text of the standard (see here and here and here), and the (proprietary) MSOffice implementation is different from the (proprietary) OO.org implementation. Specifically, MSOffice uses formulas as specified in ISO 29500:2008 (that is, ISO-amended OOXML).
This wasn't the case just between MSOffice and OO.org, by the way, other implementations had similar interop problems. One of the links above describes such a problem between OO.org and KOffice
OO.org had since moved to implement a draft of ODF 1.2, which does cover spreadsheet formulas. Other FLOSS word processors have followed suit. However, MSOffice remains an ODF 1.1 implementation, with no stated goal of having OO.org compatibility.
That said, MSOffice ODF formulas are still open in a sense that there is an open specification for them.
You're probably a MS shill but the simple fact is that there exists free plugins so that MS Office users can use ODF. One of them is made by Sun which currently is the only one with Enterprise support. Surprisingly the only company that does not make a plugin is MS itself.
Your information is outdated. Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 supports ODF 1.1, to the extent it is specified by the corresponding ISO standard, out of the box - no plugins needed.
That said, GP is still wrong, since, one way or another, ODF can now be used with any major office suite.
Um, you don't seem to know much about banks.
Banks, for the last few centuries, have functioned by taking money from some people, paying a small amount of interest on it, and then lending much of it to other people for higher interest rates. The difference between interest taken in and interest paid is where their operating expenses, capitalization, and profit come from. A bank that accepted deposits and didn't lend that money would have to charge people for keeping their money safe, and obviously wouldn't attract depositors.
Now, the ability to lend money that's deposited creates money. Assume I have $1000 that I deposit in a bank. The bank then lends you $900 of it. Now, I still have $1000, and you have $900. The bank has created money without any need for state-granted anything, and indeed in most periods banks didn't have any state-granted powers. They were straight businesses.
Note that the bank doesn't normally have enough money on hand to allow everybody to withdraw their money at once. They have to have enough to satisfy the demand for withdrawals under foreseeable circumstances. Of course, if depositors distrust the bank, they will want to take their money out of it, and if enough do that causes problems for the bank, and there's an increasing demand for withdrawals called "a run on the bank". This caused a lot of banks to fail in the 1930s.
The US government therefore created a program called FDIC, which would guarantee that depositors in a bank would get their money back if a bank failed. Therefore, there was no need to immediately withdraw all one's money if one's bank became shaky, and banks became more stable. For a long time, banks would advertise their connection with the FDIC, to reassure potential depositors. I consider this to be an example of positive government influence on the market. (By the way, there are financial instruments not covered under the FDIC, so bank-like functions don't even have to comply with it. They usually have to pay more interest to attract deposits, of course.)
However, the FDIC is not a market exclusion, since, given sufficient money and knowledge, you can always start your own bank, and become FDIC-insured. There is a cost of entry, but that's true of many other fields. It would probably be more expensive to start a CPU foundry, for example.
So, given that banking is a business that can be freely entered, and requires no special government approval, why do you think banks have nothing to do with libertarianism?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The funny thing is that all of those programs you mentioned also open .doc files. Interesting for a closed format.
Well, they open it by reverse engineering the doc file format. So they are vulnerable to lawsuits by Microsoft, claiming they are violating the DMCA. Right now Microsoft is not suing them because the adverse publicity would be more than the additional revenue it would gain. But, if the alternative products get a toe hold, and start biting into Microsoft sales, it would hit back with lawsuits.
You could wonder, "it is my data, it is my doc file so how can you claim copy right?". But even if you win in court you need to go there and spend money and defend. Just look at how Microsoft strong armed TomTom for its use of FAT format disks. How many roadblocks Microsoft has placed in the path of Samba servers. So the ability of OpenOffice and google docs to open doc files could be severely threatened by Microsoft.
No right thinking person would lock up his valuable data in some for profit company owned proprietary format. But most Fortune 500 companies have done precisely that. And they are wondering how to get out of the fix. ODF is a way to stop digging the hole, even if you are already in it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As an American, I need to set you straight on a few things. First, it's queue the music, as in a queue ball in pool or as you call it, green ball bounce edges pocket shooting or simply snooker.
Now we cue up in a line, or simply a Q, named after the irrepressible Star Trek character who was of course partly British in spirit. And marking edges of tape is most effectively done with India ink, which has a bit of a misnomer as it is actually produced by Native Americans.
Finally, the word Walla is French, of course, by way of the frontiersmen who first traveled up the Columbia and started trading with the Indians. I am afraid that your word, viola, simply refers to a big violin.
Listen, idiot, with Virtualization, most of us, in a professional sense NOW have instant access to a Windoze VM, and MS office, and commonly several versions, and I now almost never use M$ Office, for anything but testing. An when I do I cringe since I see software make harder to use, eg the ribbon, simply for marketing reasons; that is M$ greatest sin, they think they are ENTITLED to frig with the software to force sales.
By any objective standards all M$ software is crap by design, M$Word typeset algorithms are a crock of shit, the documents looks so awful that you can tell it must have been set by Word. Excel and its many 'mathematical' bugs and quirks is well known for creating un-auditable business process, usually a big SOX headache. And so on, on, on.
So even though I have essentially free access to the OS, Office and Outlook I almost never use them because they are so bad. When it comes to Development the WinWorld is even worse. M$ regularly shoots itself in the foot in security, portability and flexibility terms.
At an even more basic level, if you follow the history of the industry, things move on, you adapt or die, look at past greats IBM, DEC, Wang, Compaq, SUN, HP all now shadows of their former greatness.
If you look closely M$ is in terminal decline.
As an American, I need to set you straight on a few things.
Not a strong way to start a post.
'nerd rage'.
what is SO wrong about getting angry about something. its a fucking emotion, its a reality of human existence, and it can be just or unjust.
whats meaning the rush to mod anything down that shows the slightest bit of rage.
Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, ...
It can't even interoperate with newer versions. I teach math, and have Word 2008 for Mac OS. Students who hand in assignments edited in Word 2007 for Windows is unreadable, since math from Equation Editor is incompatible between versions. Both versions of MS Office saves in the "standardized" docx format.
Your lies and bias are so blatant that the even hurt your evil master STFU, please.
I just received a few .docx files. I tried opening them in Office 2008 (mac, obviously). It failed, claiming corruption, then "recovered" the contents of these simple documents. All of them were "corrupted". Same archive contained one stray .doc file. Office 2008 opened it perfectly. If you want, I can mail you these files so you can open them on a mac yourself so it isn't anecdotal anymore.
Q.E.D. While it may have "recovered" the contents, it still failed in opening it initially. If that doesn't scare you I don't know what will.
I'll take the bait and post this despite my dislike for Microsoft.
link
Also, their PR
Hm. No plugin, because no plugin is necessary, I presume.
The Excel ODF bug was another deliberate considered example of M$ screwing up the interoperability experience.
The form of the bug is that Excel sc cells have either a value, or a formula, or BOTH, both in the file and at run time.
If you load from a '.odf' in M$ Excel the values only are loaded and the formulae are dropped on the floor, so the sc no longer works.
need more large finesn
This works the other way too, Excell is notorious for failing to correctly determine dependencies, which is why you find habitual users hit RECALCULATE several times.
The value CACHE is an example of 'defective by design', and since these guys are evil, not stupid, this was deliberate.
The only question is whether EU governments will fully migrate from M$, or whether they need more big fines "pour encourager un comportement honnete"
Slashdot, ISO 8953-1 isnt new
for Profit is not evil, M$, by action reputation and legal determination is.
So the correct question is would you entrust your data to evil for profit?
Who the F*** modded this as "Informative"??? Apparently someone with no irony detector.
And yet there are still a lot more Java jobs in the newspaper than C# jobs. So I think your point doesn't have much punch.
I don't know, but I think that it's a time that would be more easily expressed in microseconds than in gigayears.
Oh, hang on.
Microsoft stay TRUE to [anything FLOSS].
The time was 0 seconds (that's a mathematical zero, not a representational approximation to zero) ; before they'd got far enough into understanding the problem to finish reading it, they'd already decided to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
This is a knee-jerk response to the actions of a lot of jerks knees.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Clearly, the GGP Anonymous Coward is from Washington State in the US, most likely that city to the southeast of the state, called Walla Walla. See, they're not mis-saying "Voilà" so much as making a plug for tourism business in their home town.
:D
Mmm... OK, try this:
1. Create ODF doc in OpenOffice, with table of contents, pics, tables etc.
2. Save
3. Now try and open it with MSWord 2007
4. Fail.
Nope, MS doesn't comply.
I agree. However, those of us with a whole brain, rather than just half, realize that it's a good idea to have a open format that is supported by many vendors.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
...It must be demonstrable that the standard can be directly implemented by anyone in its entirety on multiple platforms;
There's the kicker - no more tags like "playslikeWindows95" - if MS can't, won't or don't fully document how to implement such tags, then OOXML can not be used for such doucments, simply because the "standard" can not be directly implemented by "anyone".
You can go further, and dissect item 3 as well, since OOXML is hardly maintained though an open process in an open forum. It's controlled by closed processes in MS forums, so once again, it's a no-show.
FTFY.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
As I am a native Swedish speaker, I can actually read Norweigian. But as the page came within a Google Translate frame, it was "fun" to read the Swedish "translation".
Videnskabsministeren er glad for, at staten vender sig mod de gratis programmer.
is translated to:
Science minister är glad att staten vänder sig till gratis program.
a correct translation (but a bit to literal to my taste) would be:
Vetenskapsministern är nöjd [the word "glad" means something slightly different in Norweigan and Swedish, in Norweigian it roughly translates to "content" in Swedish it means "happy"] med att staten anammar ["vänder sig till" is the wrong grammatical gender in Swedish] de gratis [means free of cost in both Swedish and Norweigian, the reporter is getting facts wrong, it is evident by the rest of the article it should be "available to everybody"] programmen.
It seems like Google Translate first make a bad translation from Norweigan to English and then a bad translation from English to Swedish (shudder). Then it tries to retro-fix it into something resembling real Swedish. English is a language with fewer language features than most other languages and lacks most features of both Swedish and Norweigian (like compound words: science.....minister and actually having an expressive grammar). Norweigian, on the other hand, is very similar to Swedish, but Swedish is not very similar to Norweigian. Norweigian is a very expressive (compared to English) but simple language (compared to English) and Swedish is slightly more expressive than Norweigan, but is a hairball of a languge.
Your rite!
You're is longer than your just like Loose is longer than lose.
I can understand "Rouge" a little, but typing more letters for an incorrect word makes no sense!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They don't have to reverse engineer anything. Microsoft publishes the the format specifications:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I have no idea what causes this, but I've seen it several times in pptx files. Additionally, if they reopen the original file on their computer (where it still displays perfectly), then select everything and paste it into a new blank document, THE SAME THING HAPPENS.
WTF. The only solution is to literally remake the slide entirely from scratch. Note: this sucks because the files they're usually sending are posters to be printed.
Any government that can steal for you can steal from you.
And, you know, knock-off chargers are usually cheaper than the brand name ones... or are some volts and amps different from others?
That should read: "I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government isn't changing the market by measuring office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does."
And the alternative?
Assume a market in a near-monopoly situation. You seem to be arguing that the correct government action would be to assert the monopoly as "free market decision" and further cement the single company as the only alternative.
Instead of blaming groupthink, you should reconsider and re-analyze your line of argument here.
I lost my sig.