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UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents
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."
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.
We're talking about a Government.
I'm pretty sure a government would have the resources to develop a renderer for an open document format, whether that be ODF, HTML or PDF/A.
The specifications for those are all freely available and ISO standards.
For certain limited definitions of "support".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
purely for ideological reasons.
That's a great reason. People should get some principles.
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."
You're clearly misinformed. ODF was the first document format ever to become an industry standard (ISO/IEC 26300).
Microsoft then suddenly decided it also wanted to be kind of open and standardized and drafted ISO/IEC 29500
There have been lots of discussions about ISO/IEC 29500 also on slashdot, because of the lack of necessity of another ISO document standard and how MS got it approved, the lack of a reference implementation (Office 2007 wasn't OOXML compliant), the reference to software patents within the standard and the way ISO 29500 got approved.
The way MS acted when getting OOXML ISO approved is just one of the reasons why I always have "Fat Tony's" voice in my head when reading their public statements.
So in a nutshell, OOXML was MS way to be a little like FOSS.
When iWork first shipped, I asked folks in the know (at Apple) why they chose to design/engineer a completely new suite of file formats rather than adopting/utilizing ODF. I was told it was because ODF wasn't mature enough for their needs, and that it was felt that the ODF working group would be too slow for the iWork development roadmap.
So far, ODF has chugged along, consistently; while iWork has seen a divergence in format compatibility (between Mac and iOS versions) and a complete, from-scratch rewrite (in the most recent version) that torpedoed backwards compatibility.
Enough is enough. If Apple would have embraced ODF, they'd have rocketed the world's move away from Microsoft's Office document stranglehold. Instead, they have squandered both an opportunity to further stomp a odious competitor as well as an opportunity to position their desktop and mobile products as the best commercial competitor for the future where ODF clearly will reign supreme, all in one stupid "Not Invented Here" design decision.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
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
I use ODF but no-one else does because MS Office doesn't properly support it, I'm crippling my ability to share documents around purely for ideological reasons.
Microsoft OSs are down to 14% market share.
It simply makes no sense to continue using their outdated lockin-inspired formats. The world needs to transition to document editing formats that're portable across whatever computing devices users want to buy.
ODF was designed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium to be that set of formats in 2005, and was only derailed by an intense and deeply corrupt effort by Microsoft. It's incredibly sad that we've had to wait for almost a decade for governments to finally start the transition.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
Good decition from UK. But one has to ask why not ten years ago. And why not in all countries. Instead MS has been allowed to nominate it's own closed format as open standard! And continue ruling and taxing the globe. And making competition impossible.
And yes, ODF is not perfect. Nothing is. And ODF will continue to evolve like any format. The key is that it is open and allows (opens) competition.
And for an even more limited definition of "natively".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I really hope this catches on with businesses as well. I'm writing a lot of job applications at the moment, and being financially challenged I'm doing the work from LIbre Office. If I convert my application and CV to .doc or .docx the formatting will be all wrong when a potential employer reads it. Therefor I've been converting everything to PDF before sending. I'm starting to see job ads now that actually require people to deliver in PDF, most likely for the same exact reason, but I'm not entirely sure everyone can figure out how to convert a doc/docx/odf to PDF.
There are a lot of people out there with very limited computer skills, so I think a well supported open document standard will be good for everyone in the long run.
For what it's worth, ODF is XML, which nominally human readable. So is Microsoft's OOXML, a perversion that demonstrates clearly that "human readable" doesn't always mean what it says. The main difference between ODF and OOXML is that ODF actually is a credible attempt to be open and portable whereas OOXML is designed to achieve the opposite.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What does "human readable" mean for you?
This is normally understood to mean lines of printable characters.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I do the same, though mostly as a small business. Very occasionally I find someone for whom the document doesn't work right. In those cases I simply say something like "oh; it must be a bug in MS Office; you might try LibreOffice; its available for free from https://www.libreoffice.org/" everybody I have done this for has downloaded that and been happy.
Many people work in situations where they must exchange documents with other people (inside or outside the company). When a document looks vastly different in LibreOffice compared to MS Office, that is a problem. At a previous job, I had to use Word on Windows -- Word on Mac was not enough -- when dealing with files containing MathType equations.
Just tested...
* OpenOffice loads in 4 seconds
* 2nd load, 3 seconds (After closing the app)
* 3rd time opening it (without closing the app completely), 1 second
Am thinking if part of it is preloaded at boot-time, it would load a lot quicker; I'm told that this happens on Windows with MS Office for the same reason, which could explain why the work-laptop I was using earlier would load MS Office fairly quickly, yet take half a minute to boot :)
(from memory, opening MS Office 2008 on OSX took several seconds too; don't have it installed currently)
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)
OOXML wasn't designed as an exchange format at all ; every indication is that it's just an XML serialization of the internal data structures of Office. (The "Strict" version that nothing can write was produced after removing some of the more egregious kludges that have accumulated over time in Office).
The only thing it was designed to achieve was to provide some reasonable doubt that it might be an "open format", at a time when open formats were starting to become all the rage.
Because it gave that reasonable doubt, people were able to shy away from the difficult problem of how to migrate to a different office suite. Because Office allegedly "supports" ODF, that reasonable doubt is sadly still there.
The main reason you might want a human readable format is for collaboration ;
So many of my customers have collaborative content editing requirements as follows
* All changes to be auditable
* Changes to be peer reviewed before going into the released content
Which basically screams out to be put in a version control system ; the problem is that merging sucks for binary blob formats.
You can close the gap either by creating better merge tools that understand your blobs, or moving the document structure to line-based text that merges well ; for a document of any complexity, you're going to need the improved merge tools, but line-based text makes sense for those who can read it without the GUI tools.
As programmers we fill the role of that improved merge tool for the content that we manage ; we forget that for most people, parsing and grokking even something as simple as nicely prettified HTML is akin to reading Sanskrit blindfolded from stone tablets wearing gloves.
I agree though, I want to move most of my technical authors to Markdown so that I can have an easy platform for converting their content to multiple formats for consumption.
Because Office allegedly "supports" ODF, that reasonable doubt is sadly still there.
Not so much any more.
The real version of MS Office doesn't run on most of the computing platforms people want to use. Instead there's real competition, with dozens of variably capable Office tools available. On Android, you can get QuickOffice, Polaris Office, Kingsoft Office OfficeSuite and even the almost full version of Open Office. On iOS there's the Apple collection as well as Office HD and a some of the same Android apps. Even the web suites like Drive and Office Online work well enough.
Even better, when a genuinely open document format is available, automated document builders like Python's POD (http://appyframework.org/pod.html) will be able to merge machine data (like engine readouts, noise levels and thousands of other data sources) with human-readable charts and text to automatically generate presentation documents.
MS Office is an obsolete dinosaur already. Light it's pyre and send it on its way.
The efficiency improvements alone will make the investment in change worthwhile. Bring it on!
Disagree, at least from the points you make. The "best" format is the one that is the most useful to you, technical reasons be damned. If I use ODF but no-one else does because MS Office doesn't properly support it, I'm crippling my ability to share documents around purely for ideological reasons.
Well since the entire cabinet is now using it, they all use it, so it will be appropriate for sharing.
We (the UK) are about to embark on another round of austerity, regardless of who wins the next election. I'd like to see what the public thinks about mass conversions of Word/ Excel/ PP docs - because it's not going to be quick or free, and once we reach the stage of 'well, what benefit will this give us right now?', there isn't one - in fact, it's the opposite.
If the cabinet office wanted to do this with purely internal documents, they might have a chance - but if any docs come in or go out of the office, it's MS or bust. The conversion issue won't go away, and local Councils *certainly* don't have the money to implement this sort of thing (it took Munich ten years, and supposedly didn't cost much. Have you ever heard of a council project that took that long but didn't cost anything? Me neither). Then there's third-party apps - again, most of these aren't going to export in the format needed.
TL, DR: Councils don't have the money, the Government doesn't really have the money, and the benefits don't amount to much outside of getting a warm cosy feeling because you're using an open format, meaning questions will then be asked as to why this was given priority/ money when the rest of the world is still using the app/ format you've abandoned.
Souce; I've worked UK government IT for twenty years.
The constrained resource is "desire"
That doesn't make much sense as this particular change would be welcomed by people who think that principles are important. In fact, a lot of changes are brought about by people who stick to their principles (e.g. abolition of slavery).
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
ODF is more like a zip file of XML files
You can have a single-document xml file, but its quite rare.
Not that it really matters so much, the only problem I had was finding a library to write a .ods file (basically wanted to write a csv, but in a format that Excel would actually fucking render correctly, the fucker). Writing out .xls files was just not available unless I had Office installed and called some COM wrapper to some craziness.
Which is WHY it's important that big guys are doing this.
When you are the little guy there is a lot of pressure on you to conform to the standards set by those you work with (and that may mean not just using MS office but using a specific version of MS office), when you are the big guy you SET the standards and require other people to conform to them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
bullshit. I get a .xls from my accountant to enter my details, and its full of protected cells and functions. I use LibreOffice, and so far my accountant hasn't even noticed anything untoward with the returned .xls file I send him.
Considering Word can't even open some Word documents created with older versions of Word, I think this is pretty damn good.
Perhaps in your little corner of the world MS documents still reign supreme. But can your MS Word open a .doc written by your Mom in 1995, allow you to add commentary, and then save it back into the archive in its original format?
Short answer: Microsoft's breakage of its own standards to leverage its marketing position has you screwed. You might not know that yet, but you are definitely screwed.
Hop off that dinosaur, its in its death throes (beware that thrashing tail). Get on some critter that has some life left in it. Just about any of the newer office suites (other than Microsoft) will support ODF and assure that you will always have access to your archives.
Will