Slashdot Mirror
Australian Government Denies Microsoft Bias In OOXML Choice
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the Australian Government is not taking criticism of its decision to mandate Microsoft's Office Open XML standard lying down. 'The policy is vendor-neutral which allows its principles and standards to be used across any platform,' they said this week. Yup ... except for the fact that almost no other office suite apart from Microsoft Office supports writing to the standard. And as for Firefox? Turns out 96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer. Looks like bureaucracy is winning here."
US Government denies Halliburton bias in mandating no-bid KBR contracts.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You call this a "single vendor"?
The department/agency responsible has re-opened comment on the COE due to the level of interest the announcement caused. Have your say.
This just goes to show that open standards are not enough to provide for competition when it comes to software procurement. Microsoft has created a standard (of sorts) and it has even managed to ram it through the ISO. This does not, however, guarantee any actual interoperability. In point of fact there are precisely zero applications that implement the ISO standard. Even Microsoft fails in this regard.
Australia would have been better off to standardize on the old binary file formats. These are at least fairly well understood, and Microsoft is in no hurry to break backwards compatibility on these legacy formats.
WebM, on the other hand, is not really a standard at all. At beast it is a file format that Google hopes will become a de-facto standard. The difference, of course, is that Google does provide source code that will read and write the format. In the end this is clearly more useful in providing true interoperability. A year from now you probably won't be able to buy a device (with a screen anyway) that won't play WebM files, and some will probably record in the format as well. Meanwhile reading Word documents will still be the crapshoot that it is today. If you have the exact same version of the software, with the same fonts, and the same print driver you might (theoretically) get the same print output as the person that created the document.
Unfortunately that's not the case. Office 2007 requires significant pain for the end user and also doesn't support OOXML all that well. In face a 1.3mb template file is enough to cause 100% cpu load, where as libre office handles the same file without any issues. A number of our staff voluntarily use Libre Office and we deploy it on our rental equipment as we cant justify the license cost of MS Office to open the simple excel files our survey software generates.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
This isn't about the particular document creation software. It's about the notion that a clean room reimplementation of the document specs could be done without any knowledge of the originating software. This certainly can be done with ODF, because, though it is hardly perfect, has relatively straightforward specs.
OOXML, on the other hand, by even the most generous description, is a fucking mess. Yes, I'm sure sufficiently competent programmers could probably get the data and a good chunk of the formatting out of a docx file, the spec makes that quite difficult, and there are certainly cases, particularly since Microsoft has yet itself to create any software that in fact implements the ECMA version of OOXML.
No matter what way you cut it, from the basic position that adopting an open document standard should assure the ability to produce software to decode the document, years, even decades into the future, even if the original software is lost or no longer runs on any extant hardware, choosing OOXML over ODF is a sign of either intense stupidity on the part of the Australian government, or more likely that Microsoft and/or its Business Partners have had undue influence on the choosing of an open document standard. From a technical perspective, OOXML is a laughable joke.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
At least, that's why I've heard. The issue is that the documents Microsoft Office makes don't confirm to the OOXML standard. Programs that perfectly implement the OOXML standard can't ready documents created by MS-Word.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Training is popular in Oz because of the "training guarantee" law enacted by the Hawke govternment a couple of decades ago. The law stipulates that companies over a certain size must provide a certain level of training for employee's. Failing to comply incures a levy in the form of additional taxes. The training can be in-house and on any subject, so most large corporations run in-house training courses that are often, (but not always), little more than a tax dodge. The training budget usually runs out as soon as the company has met it's training guarantee requirements.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office-formula
Pirate Party UK