Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 know it is not popular around here, but come on folks, Microsoft Office is the standard format for doing business. By taking this move, the Danish government has dealt themselves a blow to their ability to interoperate with other people. Going forward this means higher costs will be needed by both the government and every company that does business with them, meaning higher taxes and a reduced standard of living. As a free market libertarian, I think this move sucks, and anyone with half a brain should too.
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
I don't see this retarded grammatical error anywhere other than Slashdot. You drooling morons complain about nigger trolls, but I say you deserve what you get.
Go fuck yourself.
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.
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
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1247049/Nobel-Peace-Prize-winner-Barack-Obama-ups-spending-nuclear-weapons-George-Bush.html
Once again, the foreign media has no trouble at all pointing out the hypocrisy of President Breakfast Obanana!
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 =-
'course if he hadn't... "Obama Wimp President! Wants Terrorists to Win".
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
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!
The Internet is often eternal. Once something appears on it, someone will invariably keep a copy of it--or the thing will simply stay online forever. Just as the rest of us are finally forgetting that video of the chubby kid prancing around the room with his light saber, someone will reintroduce it to a whole new generation of viewers. When - if - this kid turns 60, I guarantee that someone will pull out the video at his birthday party.
Parents and siblings do enough damage riding their own immediate family members about their missteps as a four-year-old. But in-family embarrassment has nothing on the Internet. Family faux pas is seldom self-inflicted--most of the Internet's embarrassing moments, however, are created by the targets themselves.
Tech-savvy parents--I include myself in that group--often lecture their kids about how every dumb thing they do on the Internet will never be forgotten. It's like a tattoo. As for tattoos, I've prevented my kids from getting those by reminding them that they're like buying a dumb sweater and wearing it for the rest of their lives. Posting dumb things on the Internet is worse. At least there's a painful process to remove the tattoo. The Internet has no such safe guard. If something actually does disappear, that's just luck. And there's also the Wayback Machine for looking at those old pages that have been cached forever.
There are seven deadly things kids should be leery of, when it comes to electronic tattooing.
1. Sexting. This means sending lewd SMSs or pics via cell phone. This is probably the dumbest thing you can do, and, according to studies, as much as 40 percent of teenagers do it. I can understand the sophomoric humor in the concept of "virtual flashing" to gross someone out or tease them, but you know that these flirtations are being saved by other giddy teens. Since most of these pics are technically kiddie porn, you don't see kids putting up Websites with these photos. But anyone playing this game is subject to child pornography laws and can be put on the various sex offender watch lists (which have been watered down by these sorts of dumb activities). Try to get a job in 10 years and see what happens. Get used to living at home for the rest of your life or pushing around a shopping cart.
2. Facebook and Myspace. Peeps are often far too open on Facebook. This includes posting too much personal information and revealing or embarrassing photos you think are funny. Facebook is a product you use after agreeing to its terms of service. It's a well known fact that the guy who runs the site is not interested in your privacy. Never assume that anything you post on the Internet is going to stay private. Nothing is. This is a giant, public network. Nowadays most employers, suitors, and would-be friends do their research through sites like Facebook. Try not to look like an irresponsible dummy.
3. Twitter. For twats !! Did you know that various credit reporting agencies are now using Twitter to find out information about you? Sounding like an idiot on Twitter with hour-by-hour chatter about your feelings is incredibly revealing. Every so often I check in on someone's "tweets," only to discover that the person I just met is a total dingbat. Folks, these remarks never go away! Do yourself a favor and up the ante on your tweets. Try: "Wow. I just finished the last volume of Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Great history!" Rather than: "Yuck. I just squished a spider. I hate spiders. Eeeeeeew."
4. Blogging. Before Twitter and Facebook usurped much of the idle chatter, blogs were used for this purpose. Story after story emerged about how some dummy was fired from their job for blogging about their boss or co-worker in an unflattering manner. The weird part is that they were flabbergasted when it happened to them. I've never understood why someone wants to reveal their innermost feelings on a blog. It's generally not that entertaining. Too often it focuses on someone's cat. You have to wonder why people present such sad personaliti
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 !!!
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?
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
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.
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
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
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.
Your lies and bias are so blatant that the even hurt your evil master STFU, please.
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
...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.
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.