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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 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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why hopefully? Do you even understand the point of ODF? It's *NOT* OpenOffice.
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
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.
government offices will not be forced to upgrade to maintain compatibility. they will be able to apply cost-effectiveness decisions to their software purchases based on the benefit and value of future software versions.
Judging by the low quality of documents that office monkeys email to each other, even more time and money could be saved by standardising on ascii txt files.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
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.
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.
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.
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.