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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."
The others could support the standard. Or they could eat cake.
What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it? Moreover, what kind of "openness" is it if the single vendor is also the issuer of the standard?
No bias, my gluteus maximus...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
96% of desktops use IE6 and thats because most users are blocked from installing their own apps. Upgrades to IE are rare due to this breaking old web code that they rely on. This is less malice or conspiracy and more stagnancy than anything else.
Cheers, Chris
US Government denies Halliburton bias in mandating no-bid KBR contracts.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I work for a major Australian Government department. The summary comment about how "96 percent of Australian Government desktops use Internet Explorer" should not be a surprise to anyone - it's the mandated platform for nearly all corporations these days, at least here and in the US. If Firefox had some OFFICIAL support for things like Group Policies and MSI package deployment (and I'm not referring to those hacks and repackaged releases you can find at certain places on the net), then maybe there would be an increase in the level of corporate uptake of the browser. As an engineer and not a lowly secretary for example, I'm able to have both Firefox and IE on the same machine. Shit I can have nearly anything on my computer, so long as it's legal of course (thank goodness for open-source). There was a lot of tweaking to get Firefox to accept NTLM authentication which is normally passed through into IE automatically (hence a lot of poking about with the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.* settings in about:config), but it works quite well in the end except for some peculiar pages.
My point is that whoever wrote the summary has probably never worked in the IT department of a company which has to suppose thousands of desktops. There's a reason Active Directory and by extension Group Policy is so useful, and hence why IE is a standard on said desktops, and it ain't about bureaucracy. As for Microsoft's Open Office XML... well, we apparently use a TON of .doc files where a nice PDF would have been more appropriate, so a cultural shift to more open standards was never going to happen quickly anyway.
I never realized it was our high moral standard that brought us into that war, and not simply an attack on our soil.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
That and retraining government employees is incredibly difficult.
Ironic seeing as in the DPS (Dreaded Private Sector) workers love free training as we can ask for more money, get a free lunch and a 3-5 day semi-holiday (when was the last training session you had that went past 4 PM).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Chris is right, at the government department I just left, installing apps wasn't an option, but we did at least provide firefox and IEtab for the users. but even still, most of them used IE anyway, due to compatibility with external department's websites. the grapevine has told me that the department is going to be moving all servers away from Novell SLES10/11 and OES2 to Microsoft software in a cost-reduction exercise... looks like I got out just in time!
... wait, what?
Didn't have an MSI installer or GPO support for years on end,
has bad support for multiple instances (if you are running more than one session on the same machine, firefox won't even launch)
can't administer settings remotely, or lock down settings pages based on user rights.
Firefox is great browser, but it's very difficult to deploy and administer to a large corporate environment.
The recently added MSI installer is a step in the right direction, but there's still some ways for Firefox to go before it can really break into corporate.
The department/agency responsible has re-opened comment on the COE due to the level of interest the announcement caused. Have your say.
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.
Sorry, meant ISO version, not ECMA version, but they're both crap. OOXML is a bad spec, so bad not even Microsoft implements it the way they have submitted it to any standards body.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
OMG the big bad government mandated that all internal documents have to be in a common format that is used by the majority of the corporate world!
LOL.
Every time someone sends me a .docx file at work I'm glad I run Linux with Open Office because the Windows PCs all have Office 2000 so they can't read it.
While telling the world about been "vendor-neutral".
If they wanted MS only, why not do a local version of the "no bid contract" and then it would all be fine.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They're also more cheese-cake, but less lawnmower. Define your terms, please.
I hear ya man. I worked at uni that went from an awesomely diverse mix of mac, pcs, linux & unix desktops to a nearly total microsoft takeover. What orgs like microsoft , dell, oracle & cisco tend to do is force universities to sign exclusivity contracts that stop them from making purchases from competitors. I mean sure cisco stuff is great, but when we want to just stick a 4 port in the photocopier room to make a little room for an extra terminal, it sucks having the dept told we cant spend $80 on a little d-link switch and instead had to blow hundreds on some overpriced cisco thing that was far overspecced for our needs because some prick in a suit and no idea of the implications signed an exclusivity contract. Even worse when our old 3COM router rack was forced to be dismantled and replaced with a hideously expensive cisco thing because the compliance officer took a shit when he discovered the perfectly reliable rack of unix+3com gear.
I felt really bad for the physics + chem guys who where getting denied unix workstations to run software that could ONLY run on unix because of these deals. I know at one point the dept actually threatened to unplug from the network and get a private fibre link to completely dissociate themselves from the university. Watching lawyers INTERNALLY battle is bizzare.
And yeah, we knew it was all over when our beautifully functional Solaris mail servers where replaced with exchange crap , requiring a grand total of 2x solaris servers servicing 10K+ students perfectly with a rack of about 10 exchange servers that NEVER where able to cope with the load. What a waste of good money.
And yeah, I knew my time was up when I was told my beloved Netware servers time was up. Good night sweet prince and hello private industry. Not sure I made the right decision though.
Microsoft 2007+ supports ODF (or so they say). Departments could continue pouring money down that particular hole if they wanted to, but the ones with tighter budgets could decide for themselves whether LibreOffice/OpenOffice or Calligra were good enough for their needs.
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/
I'm tired of Bureaucracy being blamed for good 'ole fashion political corruption. Did it ever occur to any one that the Bureaucrats just do what they're told, and it's the elected officials ramming this through? It's like when New Orleans was destroyed in floods. Everybody blamed the guy that ran FEMA, and nobody pointed out the he was just an organizer for the flood response, and he had not authority to order the Nation Guard in to shore up the levies. Also, nobody asked why the National Guard wasn't shoring up the levies early on (hint: they were all deployed in Iraq, still are too).
Mark my words, this anti-Bureaucrat nonsense is the start of a class war to pit private employees against public so the rich can drop all our wages without us noticing. You'll be too busy wondering why the public sector employees have it so good to ask why you've got it so bad...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Mate, it's not biased because of one platform versus another, it's biased because OOXML isn't a widely-supported (or well-supported) standard, and they're picking it on the false premise that it is. Office 2010 supports ODF natively, and 2007 and 2003 support it with a plugin—those are the same suites that support OOXML (2003 needs a plugin). The fact that they chose to go with the Microsoft-only format tips the hand.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Uhm. News flash, even MS Office doesn't fully support said "standard"!
AND IT'S THEIR FUCKING "STANDARD"!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
OOXML is vendor neutral. Nixon is not a crook. Gorbachev has been removed from his position due to illness. Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman. Diebold voting machines were validated. AIG is a financially sound company. No oil is leaking from BP's well. Kim Jong Il's birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.
Awfully common. I've seen the Big Lie used so often that we've gotten wise to it. I wonder how such whoppers can still work at all. Mostly it just makes the teller look brutishly stupid. The more obvious it is, the stupider they look. So, Australian Govt, are you too stupid to feel embarrassed about this? Are your flunkies and subjects all supposed to pretend to be too stupid to notice, so that you don't punish them?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You'd have to find a reason for those guys to get off their arses and support Firefox to the level that IE is
As someone who is "one of those guys" I take issue with this. The reason we use IE still is due to legacy programs requiring IE6. Now I hate IE6 more than anyone else in my building. As someone who has spent years developing websites, I know the terror of IE6. But I've had it explained to me that we can support 1 browser with our resources (fortunately the webteam aren't required to follow this policy for the external websites). It can be either IE or Firefox. Due to the fact we must support IE6 only programs, we must support IE.
The vendor has finally released upgrades that don't require IE6, they don't make these upgrades available for free. And even then, companies or government agencies moving to the latest greatest program immediately is a recipe for disaster. Instead its often better to remain a version or two behind the latest developments, in order to minimise the number of bugs that will affect the system. Meanwhile other departments are asking us to invest in these other amazing systems, that have IE as a requirement. But its all good, because we already use IE. Right?
So give IT a bigger budget with more staff members and more control over what programs are purchased, and I'm sure they'd be happy to support Firefox. Most of them are probably geeks, so they probably use Firefox when at home anyway.
So exactly which politician is taking the M$ bribes then? Come on, name and shame time.
Sticking with MSIE is just dependence on an archaic IT infrastructure, and no respect for security, but forcing the use of OOXML just makes no sense other than for vendor lock-in.
#include <sig.h>
Very old FUD. Come back later. http://lwn.net/Articles/410387/
And yes it took time because there are different partener involved in the definition and they try to do it right (exactly the opposite of Microsoft OOXML qhich does have formula but with plenty of error found during the ISO process).
Time and again I've come up against the same thing. And every time I either say 'No' or 'Goodbye'. Watching the chaos when a large AD deployment gets munged and domain controllers start refusing to sync with each other, or exchange hits some arbitrary artificial limit that some dick thought was a good default that's impossible to change without a 8000 character powershell oneliner, or a mandatory microsoft security update fucks the tcp stack on a headless machine requiring a rollback or total removal-then-reinstall of the network drivers in a colo you can't get to, I've vowed never to administer microsoft shit ever again, no matter what they want to pay me to do it. The price to my health from dealing with users screaming all day (not to mention the self loathing that comes from knowing you put up with perfectly functioning and reliable setups being replaced by this shit) isn't justified by *any* paycheque. Never regretted leaving those places. And last I heard every single one of them have either gone bust when their customers got sick of services dying all the time and then being constantly charged for techs to fix things and the only knowledgeable techs leaving like rats from a sinking ship, or are currently in litigation because of introducing those things by switching to microsoft and will go bust very soon. There's a reason microsoft is struggling right now and it's a real shame because they do have *some* good things. Windows 7 is actually pretty sweet in my opinion. C# is a fun language and the latest visual studio still beats eclipse, monodevelop and netbeans hands-down (for the languages it supports at least). But SBS? Exchange? Sharepoint? IIS? No damn way. We really need businesses to get past this brain-damaged notion that Microsoft's niche is the enterprise.
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