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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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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();
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.
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.
Um, not *having* to spend money in commercial software licenses?
It's the same old argument ... why insist on having citizens pay for software so they can read official documents?
* If you force a free format, you can use any software you like -- including the same commercial software you've been using for years.
* But, if you force a commercial format, there is NO guarantee (almost like the opposite) that you can use any software you like -- even non-commercial.
"Good news, everyone!"
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Prominent office suites supporting OpenDocument fully or partially include:
* AbiWord [16][17] (Users of Windows installations must first download and install Import/Export Plugins)
* Adobe Buzzword[18]
* Atlantis Word Processor[19]
* Google Docs [20]
* IBM Lotus Symphony [21][22]
* KOffice [23]
* Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007 with plugin [24]
* Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) [25]
* Microsoft Wordpad (Windows 7 versions)
* NeoOffice
* OpenOffice.org
* Sun Microsystems StarOffice
* SoftMaker Office
* Corel WordPerfect Office X4[26]
* Zoho Office Suite
--
I vaguely remember reading that each ODF implementation has little variances.
But it is a step in the right direction.
I went ODF (and open office specifically) with all my documents last year after word 2007 started abitrarily hanging when I tried to print word 2003 documents. After translation to OOo, printing time was reduced dramatically as a side benefit.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Denmark voted "Yes with comments" on the ISO OOXML ballot. Of course that turned out to do a hell of a lot of good since at later meetings a lot of ISO's changes to the ECMA spec were tossed away, so essentially we just voted "Yes".
A lot of the members of Dansk Standard wanted to vote "No", but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Denmark would say yes given that business in this country is nearly 100% MS-based. (Actually... Denmark might be the country in the West with the highest percentage of Windows installs).
And on a personal note, I don't take ISO seriously any more, and neither should you.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
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?:
How are you supposed to use a spreadsheet to calculate your taxes when there is no standard for formulas in spreadsheets?
Why would you want to use a spreadsheet? Our taxes are calculated automatically. If you have any changes to the proposal mailed to you, there is a web based system were you enter your new values and get it recalculated instantly.
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.
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.