UK.gov's Open Source switch WON'T get rid of Microsoft, y'know Freetards are elated: Call-me-Dave’s people in the Cabinet Office have done the right thing and backed the Open Document Format as the default government file format. From now on, all electronic documents produced and used by Whitehall and government agencies must use the Open Document Format (ODF). ODF is the open …
Remember that UK Governments last no more than 5 years. This means that a wholesale switch to SaaS will show expense removed from the balance sheet before the next election.
The ongoing costs will be the problem of the next administration. Like with PPP and PFI.
You may also find that software counts as a Capital expenditure, so reducing that is also a win (when presented to the weak-minded electorate) for them in apparently reducing the costs of Government.
It's all a bit smoke-and-mirrors.
"and to those who suffered 13 years of Blair/Brown too"
.. only to discover it had been a dream compared to the nightmare of sleazebag Camoron and the loathsome, spineless, execrable Clegg
Ah, my dear boy, from an IT perspective I VERY MUCH prefer the Conservatives (I think we can safely continue to ignore the Lib Dems :) ). What you guys probably don't know is that the Open Source and open standards battle was one that the Conservatives actually started around 1995 - that's where the central government network came from, and the eGIF attempt to set standards across government.
A couple of years in, the Blair cretins landed, and with them came Microsoft in various guises (you find a couple of hints in an earlier post). The worst of the Microsoft invasion were their "consultants" - basically very much underpaid contractors who got a Microsoft badge, a speedy clearance and were let loose on systems they had neither the competence or talent for to handle. But that didn't matter, as far as I can tell from the contracting fees I saw and the charge out rate, each produced upwards of £750/month of raw profit - THAT mattered. I had to dig these idiots out of self made holes time and time again, but in the end even I gave up, because it only made them still look good and nothing changed. Or did you really think that the massive amount of IT disasters in government over the last, say, 15 years or so was a coincidence? My kids could do a better job with just the XBOX knowledge they have..
It has taken the people tasked by the Conservatives this long to wade through the mess this created, so it's no surprise that the decision went this way - there must be quite a lot of anger when competent people started to lift the floor boards and discovered what exactly was stinking underneath.
Cameron may not be able to pretend leadership as well as false-smile Tony, but on the other hand he's also not in need of setting up his own private bank to stash all the loot gathered. Pray to $DEITY that Labour, New or Old, will not come in again - the country can ill afford that level of spending abuse and incompetence again.
I was of course talking about a term of a government mandate, i.e. the time between elections, not the overall length of government.
What I was eluding to is the fact that this could be being done to go on their election propaganda manifesto. If it wins them votes, then they benefit, and can work out whether it was a good idea or not, but they're still in power. If they lose, then it's not their problem anyway.
Politics!
I like and support the decision to use ODF, but the cargo-cult statements I'm reading are a bit out there.
>> ...it will allow people to work with UK.gov without paying the MS tax
While a good thing, it's limited to those that want to -- a tiny (mostly IT-skilled) fraction of the population. ODF changes nothing. Outside UK.gov itself, people will send the government documents in the format of their choosing. UK.gov will read documents in whatever format they come in. People know what "Word" means. And "Excel". Ask the average man in the street what ODF means...
Note that the anecdotal evidence of someone's grandmammy and -pappy using Linux on a laptop != the populace.
>> It will also ensure that critical documents will still be accessible in 20 years.
Documents will be accessible anyway, whether ODF or anything else. I can access documents from 20 years ago today, and I don't see that changing. Do you mean accessible through something non-Microsoft? If. You. Just. Need. The. Information. does it even matter who created the software? Readers (even from Microsoft) are free.
Everyone can open ODF documents, ...that was a reason for the change, not possible with Microsoft Office files. Microsoft Office won't open older Microsoft Office documents, a secret file format and they do this, not good. "granny you have to edit the registry to be able to open that letter you did..." ODF will fix this too. The advantages of ODF go on and on.
Just about all vendors work with it, Microsoft are legally obliged to support the latest version of ODF within 6 months of release. They voluntarily agreed to do this for 10 years rather than get prosecuted a few years ago. When this period lapses, if they screw with it, they'll get in trouble. No doubt they'll be sods about.
"Outside UK.gov itself, people will send the government documents in the format of their choosing. UK.gov will read documents in whatever format they come in."
In my experience in dealing with govs in general, you either punch in the data in an ad-hoc piece of software (either online or downloadable application) or you sent the doc in the precise format they ask. They most certainly don't "read documents in whatever format they come in". You do have to send it in their specified format or it goes directly to the bin. It used to be MS formats most of the time; sometimes even the version is indicated. I have had to install software specifically for gov dealing-with purpose; on a dual-boot machine kept specifically for that usage, using MS licences bought specifically. If I could have had sent ODF files at the time I would have save a few hundred quids. No biggie, but still.
> I can access documents from 20 years ago today... Readers (even from Microsoft) are free.
Yes, that is possible, but MS don't make it easy to read pre-Office 97 documents; the latest Powerpoint viewer can't open presentations prepared in Office 95 ...
I've found it helpful to maintain a VM of Office 97 on Win98 as this version can read all MS document formats back to Word 2.0 (via the convertors pack) and save them in something that current versions of Office can read - although Office 2003 on XP is needed if you wish to save in ODF using either Sun or SourceForge convertors...
However, I suspect the real issue government has, or rather we will have, is that we need to be able to read electronic documents after 30 plus years when they get released to the public...
@Roland6, "I suspect the real issue government has, or rather we will have, is that we need to be able to read electronic documents after 30 plus years when they get released to the public..."
I suspect that the government will regard the difficulties in reading the documents in 30 plus years to be something of an advantage...
"We are being completely transparent and accountable, all the documents were released today..."
"But we can't read them!"
"As I said, all the documents have been released, not tampered with in any way, exactly as they existed when they were written. We have made no attempt to conceal anything."
>> Documents will be accessible anyway, whether ODF or anything else.
Sir - I challenge you to open a year 2000 Microsoft Works document - without resorting to installing the actual software, if you can find it - and without a third party conversion tool.
+1 for you, sir. (Not convinced about the long term accessibility bit, though!)
We've used OO here for ages and are very happy with it, but recently had to fork out for a fistfull of MSO licences just to read some bloody contract documentation and get the bullet numbers to order correctly.
I've no evidence to support this, but I suspect the vast majority of users don't use Macros and other fiddly bits in their day to day ops (we certainly don't) and wouldn't notice the difference.
Big Q for you, though - is this policy going to rattle down to schools and stop the problem at source?
'I've no evidence to support this, but I suspect the vast majority of users don't use Macros and other fiddly bits in their day to day ops (we certainly don't) and wouldn't notice the difference.'
Does this mean that OO and other ODF based products are now capable of tracking document changes and presenting it as markup? That was the biggest problem that we had in my old company and why a lot of people didn't use the ODF products, they could not support the monitoring of text changes in documents which in organisations which collaboratively work on them is a bit of bind. Of course the move nowadays is to collaborative document editing in the Cloud which while clever is not always an effective use of people's time.
Yes, LibreOffice can track changes and present it as markup. Don't use OpenOffice, but ODF allows it.
This is is a win for choice, not for a specific product.
MS Office will still be a good choice for some businesses and Government departments, but it is no longer the only option.
DOC is an opaque format that nobody in the world really understands - the only documentation is the combined source code of several versions MS Word.
MS-OOXML contains some of those unknowable chunks of DOC in it as binary blobs, thus cannot be fully implemented by anyone without access to MS Word source code, and several parts are covered by MS patents which they charge for.
ODF is a complete and open published specification. All of the information needed to create a complete implementation is publicly available to anyone who is interested, and you do not have to pay anyone for any patent licences. You can even download a copy for free if you so desire.
Secondly, even today it is very difficult, if not impossible to read DOC files from early versions of MS Word, because you need to gain access to a string of different versions of MS Word - even if that is still technically possible, it's almost certainly impossible to do legally.
Yet in 30 or even 300 years time it will still be possible to read documents stored in ODF, even if none of the currently-extant programs are still available.
You present this like WORD support for markup is wonderful. It cannot handle lists of figures/tables when track changes is enabled with any decent number of changes present. I've hit the buffers on various other aspects of WORD's markup in the last year, all with many posts plastered across the web from others seeing the same
Does this mean that OO and other ODF based products are now capable of tracking document changes and presenting it as markup?
Edit - Changes - Record (and all the other options in that menu)
You cannot have been near an OpenOffice derivative - this has been in there for ages and even interoperates with Word's approach to it.
Exactly so. Really, for a tech rag, this article smacks more like a Fry-based BBC analysis of the issue. I can't believe that anyone reasonably informed thinks that this is about removing Microsoft from the equation, but it is about ensuring that the tail does not wag the dog. The writer may be better advised to analyse the practical differences between OOXML and ODF in the context of the outcomes Maude was seeking to achieve rather than some tabloid non-issue.
This is to do with information interchange in document format, not about the choice of suppliers. The requirements for that go far beyond choosing Word or Writer. It may well lead to other questions about purchase strategies, but that's not the issue this announcement changes.
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@ ElReg!comments!Pierre
Yes I agree, but I would like to point out that this is about accepting ODF as the standard. And what Microsoft so furiously fought for was to prevent ODF to become a standard, one that Microsoft could controll and alter at it's own will. Microsoft has lost it's ability to lock-in customers to their own "standard" which of course is no standard as there is a lock-in. Providing ODF will not create any problems for Microsoft. Lots of small companies has done it "easily" as it is well documented, as it is a open standard.
Still this article stinks, I think intentionally.
It's of course nice to mention OSS but anybody writing for the ElReg should know that OSS is not possible, in this respect, without an open standard. It is also nice to see Linux mentioned, but Munich is just one case. It's also nice, for IBM, to have it's name mentioned.
Seriously, Gavin Clarke, did you write this drivel yourself, or was it sent to you.
If I were Microsoft, I'd be making sure that when Office saves an ODF file it does so just badly enough that non-Office programs that follow the spec will produce interestingly mangled documents upon trying to read them. That way everyone else has to waste time trying to hack in support for MS's latest standards-lax bodgery, and it looks like their fault for being unable to open a file.
I think the word you are looking for here is 'extend'... as in 'extending the format until only MS software can read it' :)
This is something which usually forms part of microsofts fall back strategy and which will be in everyones interest to fight against.
For those that didn't pay much attention in the 80s, 90's and nagthies, the microsoft fallback strategy is:
1. Embrace (java, html, and now ODF)
2. Extend (extra bits added in which only microsoft software can save/read.. still compatible with other software (for a given value) mind you)
3. Extinguish (leverage the extra extended bits to hinder/disadvantage/make life difficult for/destroy the competition)
oh, what do you know.. there's a wikipedia article :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
And when it leaks that these bugs are not accidental, but deliberate noncompliance with what is an ISO standard (or deliberate exploitation of problems with that standard)?
Microsoft has tried to play hardball with the EC anti-monopolies people before. It took billion-dollar fines before they accepted defeat. Do we think that they are willing to go there again? With the EC far more desperately short of money than it was back then?
Indeed.. there are of course open source software that can read the open standard, but they are 2 different things.
Its actually quite sad that by its very existence an 'Open Standard' indicates that there is such a thing as a 'closed' standard... how can it be a standard is only a few know what it is/how it works?
There are many industry standards, like those promulgated by the ISO, whose detailed specifications are locked up behind paywalls that cost thousands of [dollars or pounds] to access. An important difference between these and ODF is that the details of the latter have been made freely available to the public. Part of the answer to why we tolerate "closed" or "non-free" standards is historical. Just making copies of an already developed standard used to cost thousands in printing expense. The advent of the Internet and free publishing formats (HTML) has alleviated that cost to a great extent. But then there's also the problem of how to compensate the experts who develop these standards. The old model often depended on the standards body making grants to institutions or individuals, or maintaining a large staff to do the work in-house. While some open standards are also created that way, it's clear that others operate using contributions of expertise from outside and do not maintain large numbers of staff (compare the ISO to Open-OASIS). The old model isn't necessarily "wrong", but it can be much more expensive for consumers of its product (note we have a similar problem when it comes to published academic research, where the cost of access is becoming a serious issue -- especially in life-and-death fields like medicine).
That is important since it levels the playing field, allows other s/ware to interoperate. I do not expect a sudden switch to Open Source s/ware, but people will start to care less since they do not need MS s/ware to properly handle their documents. One they care less the market will open out to other suppliers.
Also: documents will now be readable in 100 years time.
"Also: documents will now be readable in 100 years time."
Only if we keep on shifting them to whatever replaces today's disks and file systems.
It doesn't matter how open the file format is if we don't have the kit to read the physical copies.
Wote :- "[documents will now be readable in 100 years time] Only if we keep on shifting them to whatever replaces today's disks and file systems."
Funny you should say that, because I am just transfering some stuff I wrote years ago from WordPerfect format files on floppies to ODF on archive tape. A tedious job.
But at least ODF is likely to last longer than the WP5 format, or the ability to read a present day docx document on future versions of Word. Microsoft have every incentive to keep changing the docx standard in order to force people to keep upgrading Word and Windows - or to buy into their rental software money-making scheme. Indeed, support for ODF should last much longer than MS itself; I'm not betting on MS existing in anything like its present form for more than a few more years.
WEll what I do personally and what I suspect is happening in any company that values its data, is that as the kit changes, the old archive data gets pushed onto the new technology.
My email that goes back 15 years that started life on a 50Myte hard drive in windows 95, now lives on a 500GByte hard drive on a Linux server.. Well two of them in fact in case one breaks.
"My email that goes back 15 years that started life on a 50Myte hard drive in windows 95"
Somehow I doubt that size. Even my poor family had a 486 with a 120MB HDD years before Windows 95 came out.
But I agree on the point - you just copy everything over. I don't know of many businesses or government departments that just abandon their data as technology changes.
I have to agree it does begin to level the playing field and I'm glad the decision has been taken now (ie. in 2014) rather than delayed for a few years. Whilst it will probably make no real difference to current procurements centred on XP refresh, it does give incentive for people to enhance alternative offerings, such as Calligra etc.ready for the Win7 refresh in circa 2019.
Given that most of government runs on big systems, and that's where the data lives, most of the office documents are likely to be reports - in other words data that has been manipulated into information. So this will be a faff to do but won't provide any real benefits in terms of transparency. Since the cost/benefit looks at best neutral, this looks like another great Maudian victory.
Poor Frankie - he's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: his is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Odd the way basically everyone other than MS is being characterised as a 'Revolutionary' here. I guess it's just the usual Reg vision of the 'wild eyed, beard-wielding sandal-wearing freetards' who are apparently waiting to smash down the edifice of capitalism and usher in a new anarcho-communist state.
It's just common sense - publicly owned data should be stored in a public data format, otherwise you just handed the keys to the kingdom to a corporate body. The only shock here is that MS failed to grease the right palms so as to ensure that their agenda gets pushed through.
> It's just common sense
Common sense in government policies IS revolutionary.
The normal practice of government is to correctly identify an issue in the way they do things, then come up with a solution that makes things worse, because they haven't thought it through.
It will hit Microsoft, not because the big office suite replacements will be alternatives, but because they won't be forced to happen.
If a new computers appear with a newer version of MS Office, the documents will still be compatible, the change won't be forced. (Although technically Microsoft didn't force it, because converters for the old versions are available. Did you know that Word 97 and Powerpoint 97 work quite happily with the 2007 converter pack? Excel doesn't though, presumably due to the larger sheet support).
With the way governments procure, this may not be such a big effect, but once industry in general starts following, it will be.
"Did you know that Word 97 and Powerpoint 97 work quite happily with the 2007 converter pack?"
Er, have you tried to use them with a 2010+ era .docx document? It sucks and MS has only themselves to blame, so .odf is a major improvement here as it won't have the same petty hidden changes to bother with.
People just doing word processing and tracking a few numbers in a spread sheet won't have a problem switching to something like open office.
However I don't see the people who have invested time and money into integrated workbooks and documents with dozens of macros & templates dropping them any time soon - they'll have to work harder to make sure those features/elements still work in an ODF doc. Time is money, and if they have to spend time on fixing something they'll just continue to use what works for them rather than spend more on the change than the supposed benefit of switching.
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