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UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents

Posted by Soulskill on from the won-the-battle,-working-on-the-war dept.

Andy Updegrove writes: "The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all."

9 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why ODF? by _Shad0w_ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The vast majority of their users aren't especially smart when it comes to technology. They're essentially office workers - they don't give a stuff about the underlying format, they only care about being able to do their job.

    --

    Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.

  2. Re:Why ODF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why ODF? Because its the best format. It was designed very carefully by a very large team of stakeholders (including engineers, lawyers, document companies, the Vatican Library, Medical professionals, architects, electrical engineers, etc). It was reviewed and revised by large groups to ensure it would fit their needs. Its unencumbered by patents. NONE of this happened with microsoft's OOXML (as it is, there is no software that can read that standard, including no software from microsoft). Microsoft cannot support their own standard. Oh, and ODF is human readable.

  3. When is the US going to get on board? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Government should only be allowed to use open standards. This proprietary vendor lock-in is a crime against society -- the very people the government is supposed to serve.

    1. Re:When is the US going to get on board? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "If you are ready to pay". There you go. I *already* paid: Any document which is produced by a government official was paid for *by me*, in the form of my tax money. I would expect to be able to read these documents without additional charge. If a *company* decides to go for vendor lock-in, that's their business - they should be able to do the "easiest/fastest/most convenient" calculation themselves. If it turns out they can't read their old design documents anymore, they have the right to pay a team of engineers a lot of money to reverse-engineer their old stuff. They will factor in these costs in their next product, and I have the choice to buy it, or shop elsewhere. However, this is not the case for the government. I cannot simply "shop elsewhere", so I expect the government not to cut corners and factor in what's easiest/cheapest/most convenient for their citizens.

  4. Re:Why ODF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    purely for ideological reasons.

    That's a great reason. People should get some principles.

  5. Re:Why ODF? by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm pretty sure a government would have the resources to develop a renderer for an open document format,

    Or they could just link to the web page: http://webodf.org/

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  6. Re:Why ODF? by moderators_are_w*nke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not really, if everyone used Word with ODF then everyone has the same level of compatibility. Or they can save some licensing cash and replace it Open/Libre Office.

    Unless they're an Excel junkie the average civil servant probably won't even notice. And the UK government shouldn't be allowed to use Excel

    --
    "XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
  7. Re:Why ODF? by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The vast majority of their users aren't especially smart when it comes to technology. They're essentially office workers - they don't give a stuff about the underlying format, they only care about being able to do their job.

    So true. And therefore we should be thankful that some knowledgeable people who do care about such important matters are willing to step forward to do the right thing.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  8. Re:Why ODF? by Barsteward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    you get the same problem with people using different versions of Office, we've had countless problems with users who have the older versions of Word etc not being able to read the newer formats of DOCs, not only that but different versions of Word can format the same document differently

    --
    "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)