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Australia Mandates Microsoft's Office Open XML
littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."
iirc, even MS office doesn't use the standard as published ???
Sneaking the word "Open" into this specification was a really dirty trick by Microsoft because
- it implies that this standard is somewhat "open", and the word "open" has positive connotations
- it (seemingly deliberately) creates confusion with "Open Office" ie the product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were taken in by this, thinking that by making the decision to support OOXML they were somehow contributing to more "openness" in the sense of open government and/or open source.
Speak for yourself. I haven't used Windows in years, and I haven't suffered for it. Anytime I'm forced to open an office document (which is more often than you would think over the course of a CS degree), I just use Openoffice and everything works.
At least at University, I'm seeing more and more students primarily using free operating systems. In my CS courses especially, it's all over the place: a show-of-hands survey in one of my upper-levels recently had probably upwards of ten Linux users in a class of thirty. Of course, it's a lot more prevalent among CS students, but even among the less technical students Linux usage is extremely common. When I first got here, I was shocked when I would see a Linux laptop or two near me in a class...nowadays I'm a little surprised if I don't.
Free software may not be catching on as well as we would like with the older generations, but it most certainly is with the younger folks.
That's right. Freedom is a lot of trouble. Just give it up.
Unfortunately this seems pretty typical of this government. They like to make policies up on the spot and those policies don't have any thought put into them. We've had stimulus spending that - helped keep the economy going. They didn't actually plan what they were going to spend on though and they never put proper policies in place and we ended up spending way too much on stuff that didn't work.
I especially like the opt-out section:
51. This policy is subject to the process for administration of opt-outs from Whole-ofGovernment arrangements.
52. Initial opt-out considerations will be factored into the transition plan and are expected to
show how alignment to the policy will be achieved as part of the transition plan. Claims for
opting out will not be considered during the transition phase.
53. When seeking an opt-out, an agency will need to include a remediation plan to detail how it
will return to the WofG COE policy. Opt-outs are limited to a maximum of 3 years, after
which the original business case will be reassessed to ensure it is still valid.
54. While it is recognised that agencies may have a need to develop separate SOE images, it is
expected that these images will comply with the standards set out for the COE to ensure
that agencies can still share data and services in a seamless manner.
Whoa shite! Opting out is a massive process and has to be reviewed every 3 years.............
They're not clueless. They're very smart. It's just that their priorities aren't your priorities. Their priority is putting money in their pocket. Who do you figure hands out money? It's not the linux geeks I'll tell ya that much. :)
The land down under just went underer.
ftfy
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The nice thing about .zip is that it is, in fact, supported everywhere, out of the box.
It's also nice in that it actually supports directory trees. The legacy lzma, and the newer xz, well, don't. I like tar in principle, and I use these formats for all sorts of things that I don't have to share with others, but there are definitely cases where zip is nice -- where it's nice to be able to effectively "mount" a zipfile, "seek" to an appropriate file within it, and read it, without having to decompress the whole thing. This is why zip is used by tons of games, where they might not even be using compression, but they can't trust most filesystems to handle that many small files properly. It's why it's used by both OpenDocument and MS OOXML -- it's the easiest way imaginable to embed multiple files into a single document, including multiple XML files that are compressed well.
It also depends what your goals are. Zip compresses and decompresses a hell of a lot faster than lzma. These days, I standardize on either lzop for speed or xz for compression ratio, but zip and gzip are nice compromises.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If they insist on actual compliance with the standard, even MS will be out...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Here's the thing - we're all gonna die in the end, so all these fights against proprietary formats won't mean jack.
In that case, so is replying. Yet you seem to care enough about justifying your position (perhaps to yourself) to reply, so don't give me this nihilistic bullshit.
In life we pick the battles we can fight. These are potentially important issues, but basically given you're effectively saying about 90% of people are part of the "problem", I don't give a fuck anymore.
When 90% of the people are part of the problem is when I absolutely do care.
Take another battle I've picked: Religion. There's a small minority which does some really crazy shit. And they get away with it in the name of "religious tolerange", because a majority of the world believes enough crazy shit of their own that it takes a lot to make us as a culture say, no, you can't let your child die because you'd rather fucking pray than get help.
Easily 80-90% of the US population is religious, which makes it a safe bet that you are, too -- probably also Christian, probably believe faith is a virtue. If so, merely by supporting the idea that faith is a virtue, you are encouraging yourself and those around you to turn off their critical thinking and skepticism when the situation calls for it. That kind of thinking leads to atrocities. Never mind that merely by calling yourself "Christian", you lend credibility to these fuckwits.
Am I going to win? Not really. I do hope to reinforce separation of church and state, to promote actual science education instead of "Intelligent Design", and to establish some basic rights the religious would deny, like the right to marry. I'd love to see people tolerate less of the extremists. I really doubt I'm going to see the religious become a minority in my lifetime.
But you know what? I'd like to think that when I'm lying on my deathbed, I lived for things that matter. I'd like to think that I'd still be the kind of person who would be ashamed to think I gave up because it was too hard, or because there were too many people who disagreed with me.
Life shouldn't have to be some damn crusade.
You're right, it shouldn't. But this is the world we live in, and there are some issues which tend towards exactly that -- either you're a good little worker propping up the status quo, or you're actually helping to move things forward.
And life should be meaningful -- and it's up to you to find that meaning. Maybe you honestly don't care, but that's not what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is that you do care, you're just too lazy to do anything about it anymore.
Yet somehow, you're not too lazy to post, and to try to justify how much you don't care. That says a lot.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As long as they provide information to the public in an open format such as HTML or PDF, I don't care what they adopt in an SOE.
The major beef I do have however, is the Windows only tax return software provided by the Australian Taxation Office. The fact that I have to use Windows if I want to file my tax return electronically is totally unacceptable.
After Wikileaks, governments are going to be all about rights management protection for documents. RMS stops people opening sensitive documents that they've copied to a USB stick.
Open / Libre Office doesn't have this functionality (and because of the Open Source movement's philosophical objection to rights management technologies probably will never have this functionality).
The recent wikileaks saga has been a big wake up call to business and government - because they want to do their best to make sure that their information isn't plastered all over the Internet. Office 2007 / 2010 support this out of the box (just that few people use it). Open / Libre Office won't support it in a million years because "DRMs is Teh Evil"
One of the key problems in our government is career politicians get positions that aren't relevant to their history, career, or expertise. Many of them have a degree in getting votes doing things like graduating with a degree in Economics and then going straight into politics. Does this sound like a suitable background for a person making critical decisions on the IT in any government? Well this is our current Communications Minister. At least the opposition's communication minister Malcom Turnbull actually did something to earn his position such as chaired an internet service provider. I'm willing to bet he has more clue than the current buffoon. I'm willling to bet everyone has more of a clue than the current buffoon.
This happens with many ministers. Such as Penny Wong our former Minister for Climate change, who's only real experience with anything environmental was siding with loggers in the 90s logging debates. She also has a degree in Law and Arts which I'm sure is a lot of help for her current portfolio which includes a huge finance position.
The "Ancient Greek Democracy" was very alike to our democracy: A plutocracy were the wealth make the decisions, very far away from the people of the country. Now, we have a lot more of circus, but the inner workings are exactly the same.
How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks?
Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
I have worked with companies and governments that try to implement various restrictions to stop employees taking data out of the organisation...
I have found that:
The restrictions are generally flawed (often the fault of ms for flawed implementation) and people can get round them easily.
The restrictions only serve to hinder people's ability to work.
Windows typically requires expensive additional software, eg software to prevent access to USB storage devices, and when this software crashes the underlying os allows the unwanted devices anyway.
Even if the restrictions work, there are other ways, eg taking photographs of the screen, printing stuff out, stealing the internal hdd from the machine etc...
You place restrictions on removable media, uploads to the web, attachments via email, people will just find another way... It's better to log rather than to restrict, because if there are no restrictions people will often pick the easiest route and you can at least catch them in the act, and everyone else can get on with their work unhindered.
When implementing security policy, people only tend to think about the front door, they concentrate on features rather than implementation... They buy all kinds of junk claiming to support fancy sounding buzzwords not realising that there are often ways around all of this stuff...
I saw a system where someone was using a web based application to keep data of different security classifications and belonging to different customers separated, now sure if you go through the web interface it won't let you access other people's data but if you get access to the underlying server you obviously have access to everything... And yet, people were claiming that an admin on the server wouldn't be able to access the data because they cant do so through the web interface!
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here.
I'm going to make a number of assumptions. All are what I would consider "reasonable", though obviously they're assumptions so make of them what you will.
So at just about the time that it becomes apparent that some sort of standardised document format is necessary, enter Microsoft stage left, proudly announcing that they've spent a long time working on just that and if they upgrade now, they can have an office suite that uses a standard document format. All they need to do is dictate that every department purchases something that is compatible with OOXML. The issues surrounding OOXML aren't brought up because the big cheeses are unaware that they even exist and the Microsoft sales team certainly aren't going to volunteer such information - in fact, there's a good chance they're not aware of the issues either.
Where's the salesman for OO.o? Where's the flashy suit, the company car and the briefcase full of numbers showing cost savings? These guys are from a very traditional background, and know little or nothing of the F/OSS world. From their perspective, software is developed by businesses - and what sort of a business can't even be bothered to put together a sales department? If you've ever tried explaining F/OSS to that cousin of yours who runs a business and has always bought Microsoft products - and before you've even got the first couple of sentences out you can see you're getting looks of open disbelief, by the time you've finished your cousin is seriously thinking you need to see a psychiatrist - those are the people who are making the decisions.
Not even MS Office is able to write OOXML as in ECMA-376:
Office 2010 provides read support for ECMA-376, read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Transitional, and read support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.
(emphasis mine) [source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179190.aspx ]
Actually, they are now required not to pay the Microsoft Tax. The last tests I saw showed that Microsoft Office got over 5,000 failures in Microsoft's own OOXML conformance tests. It therefore does not support OOXML and can therefore not be used by the Australian government. I suggest that anyone in Australia points this out to their elected representatives.
Amusingly, Microsoft Office actually did better in ODF conformance tests (with a plugin, I think), than it did in OOXML conformance tests. I'm not sure how OO.o does with OOXML, but it's managed to open both of the the OOXML files I've ever been sent.
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