If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium

[lordshipmayhem]

Microsoft's attempts to hold onto its desktop monopoly just suffered another blow, this time in Belgium.

Why does that affect my non-geek friends? Attend, thou, and I wilst try to make your vision clearer.



You see, right now when you type up a letter or a fanfic, chances are you're using Microsoft Word. The document is saved electronically as a .doc file. To read this, ideally you should be using Word, and even more ideally (because their backwards compatibility isn't what it should be) the same version of Word that it was created in. (OpenOffice.org WILL read .doc format files, but not consistently the same as Word will. In fact, sometimes when a .doc file is corrupted and Word won't read it, OpenOffice.org will - which I guess counts as "not consistently the same as Word will".)

There has been a push around, especially with the Governments and libraries of the world, to switch from proprietary formats like .doc and .xls to Open Document Format (ODF). It's not Open Source - that's software - but a way of specifying how a file works that allows any software maker, proprietary or Open Source, to create a program that will create, manipulate and save documents in a consistent format. The idea is that these files will be forever readable because anyone can create a reader for them without having to reverse engineer the format. Some data is just plain no longer available because the files are in proprietary formats that no modern program can understand - and governments have a mandate to keep this information available to the public in perpetuity, which they're realizing that means "proprietary formats" just ain't gonna cut it. From ZDNet UK:

From September 2008 onwards, all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian Government will have to be in an open, standard format, according to the proposal now before the Belgian Ministers. Only ODF is accepted as such a standard in the proposal.

And Microsoft Office does NOT support ODF. OpenOffice.org does, among others, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux - for free.



Eventually, as this grows around the world, we may all be using ODF to save our fanfics and other word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files.

Comments

[shivanesti.livejournal.com]

This would be great if it actually happens, but, obviously, Microsoft will try to prevent it. There are a few "open" document formats being proposed for standardization, including Microsoft's own XPS (XML Paper Specification) and Open XML formats. XPS is apparently a real open document format while Open XML is the "open" format used in Microsoft's Office 2007 to replace ".doc". Microsoft is licensing Open XML for free so that anyone can create applications that use it, though Microsoft will retain control over the format (hence the reason I put the term "open" in quotation marks).

Microsoft Office 2007 is also backwards compatible with previous versions, allowing documents to be saved in earlier formats, allowing them to be read in Office 2007. Microsoft supposedly intends to release updates to Office 2003 and Office XP which will allow them to read Open XML documents (but I doubt this will happen).

For medium-sized to large-sized businesses Office 2007 includes server-side functionality with Sharepoint and other solution which leverage extensibility of document data to be more easily used in various systems. This means better database and web portal integration. It's something that currently, isn't being done on Linux or in products like OpenOffice of StarOffice because they don't have back-end components like Office 2007. This is what the law firm (one of Canada's largest) is doing during 2006-2007.

Microsoft's strategy is to keep everyone using their Office products. Open XML is their way of combating the other open document proposals. They stand a good chance of succeeding due to their ginormous installation base. The Microsoft hegemony is insidious and it will take a continued unified effort between open and Open Source vendors and solutions to even put a dent into the Enemy. There's a chance of that happening over time, but the innovation must occur faster than Microsoft can steal or come up those same ideas.

[lordshipmayhem.livejournal.com]

The Open XML format isn't working all that well at its efforts to stop/slow ODF adoption.

Efforts in Massachusetts to stop ODF (or have XML as an alternative) are failing.

India's top government technology guy has come out strongly in favour of ODF. The Danish Ministry of Science is giving ODF a six-month trial starting in September 1/06: all online documents will be in ODF format. Norway is also developing an ODF policy. FireFox just released an ODF reader plug-in.

There's a format comparison (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125144611543) between XML and ODF: let's be charitable and just say XML came off second best.

And the Computer & Communications Industry Association (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051020193905892) has serious issues with interoperability and XML.

On the subject of backwards compatibility: That would be a nice change. Office is currently not 100% backwards-compatible. If you're using any version of Word older than 2000, don't count on anyone using anything newer than 2000 being able to read your files. If you have older Word files, you'd better have an older version of Word kicking around to be guaranteed access to them. (Or OpenOffice, which seems to lack many of these backward-compatibility issues - putting on my tinfoil hat, I'd say that was an effort by Microsoft at the time to encourage everyone to upgrade to the latest Office version.)

I'm happy that Microsoft has decided to include Office server-side functionality with Sharepoint. It's this tying-in of the applications and the operating system that has made Windows the Petri dish of operating systems that we've grown to know and love. (It's also confirmation that Microsoft still hasn't grasped the basics of computer security in an on-line age.) That should keep both antimalware programmers and script kiddies busy for many, many years to come.

Microsoft's strategy of forcing everyone to use their Office products has reached the end of the line. The paradigm has shifted, apparently without a clutch (hence that grinding noise). Now that they are effectively a monopoly, with Office on everyone's PC and with almost everyone who wants/needs a PC possessing one, they need to get people to upgrade to the latest version of their product in order to continue to flow the money in. Therein lies their catch-22. Leave backward compatibility in 100%, nobody wants to dump their old versions and buy the new one. Take backward compatibility out, and nobody wants to dump their old versions and buy the new one. You have to make them want to, and when they've tried the result has been bloaty software filled with security holes.

[shivanesti.livejournal.com]

Yep agreed. I've been hoping that other states will follow in Massachusett's wake and adopt ODF because if that happens it will cause a ripple effect to non-government businesses and organizations that interact with state and local governments, and also federal.