Slashdot Mirror
EU Should Switch To ODF Standard, Says MEP
DTentilhao (3484023) writes "The European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format (ODF) as their internal default document format, says Member of the European Parliament Indrek Tarand. Speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament's Free Software User Group (Epfsug), last week Wednesday, MEP Tarand said: 'Moving to ODF would allow real innovation, and real procurement.'"
I also believe that there should have been more abbreviations in the title, something like this:
EU SST To ODF Standard, says MEP (SST = Should Switch To)
BlameBillCosby.com
The MS Office file formats are far more powerful, flexible, entrenched, and every bit as open as ODF.
Switching formats will just make old documents unreadable. Where will that leave Europe?
EU has managed to pass a network neutrality law as well as cancel all roaming chargers starting 2015. I'd give them more credit than you do.
When Boehner says something intelligent about a subject of interest to most Slashdotters, he might very well make the front page, too.
What's with all the Euro-hate, anyway?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
At first I thought this MEP was exaggerating the benefits of switching to ODF...but then since making the switch to PDF this morning I immediately began "real innovation" Before lunch I already had applied for 12 patents, written an innovative sci-fi novel, and designed a spring & summer fashin collection. In addition, with the help of Amazon & eBay I began experiencing the orgasmic elation of "real procurement"
It's simple enough - if you use Microsoft's formats you're limited to using Microsoft's products (nothing else fully supports the formats as they're incompletely documented and intentionally obfuscated). That means any product innovation happens purely at Microsoft's discretion - which these days seems to mostly tend toward zero except where lock-in and payment extraction is concerned. It also means procurement processes are limited to purchasing Product A from either vendor X, Y or Z, all of whome are selling at very close to the monopolist-set retail price.
With open formats you have the option to choose between multiple supporting products to find the one that best suits your specific needs. Maybe for most people that's Libre Office. But Google Docs has much to recommend it in some situations. As does Abiword, or dozens of other ODF-supporting applications. And every one of them is developing in slightly different directions, allowing them to be mixed and matched on a case-by-case basis, and in the case of open-source applications it even becomes possible to add in organization-specific features if you so desire. All while keeping the documents themselves completely compatible with everyone else. Pretty innovative compared to a mega-corp-controlled monoculture.
As for procurement and cost, well hopefully it's obvious that having dozens of different products optionally supported by hundreds of different suppliers gives you a lot more procurement options than in a monoculture. And when some of those products, some of the best of them even, are completely free to use (without contractual support obviously) there is far more incentive for suppliers to not artificially inflate their prices. Consider this: in a truly free market profits tend toward zero - obviously everybody still has to get paid, but any profit margin above and beyond production costs gets eliminated by competition with alternate suppliers. Now, how much did Microsoft make from MS Office last year?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Now, how much did Microsoft make from MS Office last year?
That's a red herring. They could avoid sending money to Microsoft by foregoing computers and doing all their work with pencil and paper.
The question is how much does it cost to use some other standard versus ODF? It's hard to tell because so much FUD is being spread on both sides (including this article). But if there were significant savings the switch would likely have been made a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea. I use Apache Open Office and I'm quite happy with it.
If by "best" you mean "able to read standard ODF and write subtly broken MS-ODF that only Office can interpret correctly"... then yes, I'd fully expect them to do that.
If EU switches to open document format, significant part of the market will consider European advice. They get many things wrong but this one they got right. The proprietary documet standard could be comparable to the proprietary railway track gauge. Can you imagine paying an extra royalty because you are using "specially measured" difference between the wheels. The problem for Microsoft is that at some point, very soon they will figure out that it does not matter which operating system is on user's PC. I fully expect that in 5-10 years most of the users will not know what operating system they are using.
They'll just offer discounted no-roaming plans.
If they do which I doubt it will be a gigantic failure, EU citizens in difference from US citizens tend to travel a lot outside of the borders of their home country as doing so for many often is just a few hours car ride or at the most a 1 hour flight. That combined with many (most?) EU citizens having 3-4 weeks of paid vacation a year is the reason you find many Scandinavians going to the south of Europe for their vacation, Belgians going to the Alps for skiing in the winter and then Italy or France in the summer, Dutch and Germans going to Scandinavia and so on. Nearly every single person I know tend to go to another country several times a year and that is including low income earners. Last year alone I visited 4 EU countries for vacation another for work and 1 non-EU country for a wedding. While that might be a bit more than the average EU citizen it certainly is not something unusual and no-one here even raise an eyebrow if told about it.
With that level of cross-border mobility only the most ignorant PHB would believe such a crippled mobile plan ever having a chance of gaining any traction.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
I think it comes down to the 'right to read' a document.
If you can read a document for free (ODF is a free format, there is no cost to getting a reader once you have even a rudimentary computer) you can build on the knowledge in that document without having to pay that toll.
The toll may not seem like much, but added up over all the people that want to read, it keeps MS afloat, which isn't the goal of a proper document.