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UK Forces Microsoft To Adopt Open Document Standards
First time accepted submitter Barsteward writes Microsoft has confirmed it will start supporting the Open Documents Format (ODF) in the next update to Office 365, following a lengthy battle against the UK government. In 2014, Microsoft went against the government's request to support ODF, claiming its own XML format was more heavily adopted. The UK government refutes the claim, stating that ODF allows users to not be boxed into one ecosystem.
That still going on?
10% effort into actually implementing this, and
90% effort into examination how to creatively misunderstand OPF, extend ODF with "open" binary extensions, denigrate users of ODF, or just plain break ODF
Or maybe it's 1% vs 99%, I don't know.
And that makes them hostile to open software in my book. They insist on treating Linux-formatted disks as essentially blank and have Windows tell the user the volume must be formatted to be used; fixing this would be simple in the extreme and would not even require an ability to read an Ext* volume. They stonewall AV formats like Vorbis when they could be added easily to existing apps. Really, the list goes on. The place where they have capitulated is formats that are intrinsic to the web (while parading their proprietary stuff as "open" hoping enough people will take the bait).
MS still promotes lock-in. And from what I gather even their new .NET licensing terms are designed to leave you on the hook.
it is a result of quite a few years of lobbying by organisations such as Open Forum Europe and internal pressure from certain folk within the civil service. The government is reasonably receptive to well made arguments. They have a big love-hate thing going on with Microsoft. They know they are being screwed over by an American company that doesn't pay it's full share of UK taxes, so they like to kick back a bit now and then.
Yes, last time when you looked in 1998.
Now you only have to do Control Panel -> Uninstall a program -> Turn Windows features on or off -> [ ] Internet Explorer.
It asks to reboot, and at the same time IE is nuked from the orbit.
There is no proof that IE would be needed for any kind of operating system functionality anymore.
IMO File formats are not the real problem. Microsoft's binary word processor and spreadsheet formats were reverse engineered years ago and have been pretty stable since 2000. OOXML is XML based and even has some documentation available on how to read it.
The real problem is that office documents blur the line between input and output and this makes them fundamentally fragile. An office document is input to a layout (in the case of a word processor) or calculation (in the case of a spreadsheet) engine but the user always looks at the output of that engine. Especially with word processors since the user is always looking at the output they aren't thinking about the structure of the input, they just bash things arround (holding down the space bar or enter key for example or dragging boxes around with no idea if their position is text-relative or page-relative)
So I don't think this will solve anything, even if MS implements ODF and even if the UK government gets it's employees to start using it as their main format for storing files (good luck) I would expect loading a document from office into libreoffice to still have similar results to today. The input (text typed, pictures included, user-specified values in spreadsheet cells) will probablly carry across fine but in some cases it will result in noticably different output (different and possiblly unreadable layout for word processed documents, different rounding of results for spreadsheets). Especially for large badly structure docuements.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One thing that MS does for some buyers (this is certainly true for universities, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't true for other large organisations)is give them deeply discounted subscription licenses where the pricing model for those deeply discounted licenses is not based on the number of installations but on some measure of the size of the organisation as a whole.
From the point of view of the customer this initially looks like a great deal. As well as saving money on the licenses themselves they are freed from the need to track installations saving lots of money in license management and auditing. It's subscription based so they pay at a constant rate rather than bursts whenever a new version comes out making budgets easy to manage.
However once the customer is in such an arrangement they lose most of the incentive to reduce the use of the software or use cheaper/free alternatives. They would have to massively reduce their use of the software in question before buying and auditing individual licenses would be cheaper than the subscription. During the transition period of said massive reduciont they would be paying for internal auditing and accounting that would not deliver any benefit or serve any external purpose until the process was complete.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register