UK citizens to Microsoft: Oi. We WANT ODF as our doc standard Even if Microsoft bosses collectively whistled Always Look on the Bright Side of Life they'd still struggle to drown out people backing Cabinet Office proposals to adopt the Open Document Format as the official standard for UK.gov missives. The good folk of Blighty have until 26 February to make their position known as part of …
More than a few government bodies have tried to make the jump to open source office suites. I might be wrong in saying this, but I'm pretty damned sure that no large body has yet to succeed in making the switch. Switching file formats is one thing, but the simple fact is the open source office suites don't come within a hundred thousand miles of MS Office. I'm as big a fan of open source software as the next man - I make my living flogging Hadoop solutions - but the simple fact is it's like suggesting a professional graphics house replace Photoshop with GIMP. Just not going to happen.
>More than a few government bodies have tried to make the jump to open source office suites.
One of the hurdles to migration is office document/file formats. So the switch to more open file formats means that other providers of office suites begin stand a better chance of competing.
Obviously, given the various Windows migration projects currently going on within government, I doubt there will be any serious deployments of non-Microsoft desktops until Windows 7 is due to go off support.
However, by setting a standard for office file formats now sends a strong message to the industry and perhaps may encourage a greater investment in non-MS products such as the open source office suites. So come January 2020 the competition and their offerings could be much more credible....
it's like suggesting a professional graphics house replace Photoshop with GIMP.
Honestly while The GIMP has that truly weird multi-window interface, it's quite capable, even if not quite as advanced as Photoshop, which is only one component of the entire Adobe creative suite.
However, given Adobe's recent "cloud"-only subscription bullshit, I could see some companies tempted to make the switch to just about anything else, even if it's only Paint Shop Pro and Corel Draw.
What Microsoft is afraid of is:
1) If ODF is the standard, what incentive is there for people to use their products?
2) Their support for ODF would have to be complete and it would have to work, of which neither is currently the case. Oh, and they would be able to keep changing it with each version of Office.
It should actually be pretty easy for Microsoft to use ODF keep a dominant position in the market by making the best software around. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are okay for many things but I have more crashes with either of them than I ever have with MS Office.
Going ODF would mean Microsoft could drop the army of people associated with maintaining and implementing its own very unwieldy (yes, I've worked with it) standard. They've sort of shown they can do this with the more recent versions of Internet Explorer but you can just see how they still haven't understood that providing tools and services are more important than sabotaging data formats.
It is often said that 80% of users only use 20% of features. As anybody who has ever done support knows, it's more like 80% of users only know 5% of features exist. I caught a user adding up cells in Excel with a calculator and adding them in manually recently. That is the stark reality of the level of ignorance that exists in the userbase.
For this 80%, If I could then I would cheerfully give the users LibreOffice on the basis that it meets all of their needs and then only give people Microsoft Office if they needed it. Microsoft know full well many other organisations would cheerfully do the same, and will do anything to avoid this happening, since Office is one of Microsoft's big money makers.
Microsoft is not going to keep office in a dominant position by having the best software around, even if they did have it. A combination of "zero purchase price" and "good enough" would severely degrade offices profitability.
Thank god we have some clever people in charge at the moment unlike the technophobe dimwits headed by Blair who must have thought "nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft".
Much of the big proprietary mess that was the NHS programme for IT is now moving over to open source software and away from big greedy companies like BT.
Now all we need is some decent IT lessons in school. I did BASIC, Logo and Pascal at school. At college I did 6502 and Z80 machine code. Such things should always be taught, I found history and geography pointless but it's stuff you can at least talk about.
While there are implications for the software used to create documents today, the more important thing for a government is being able to read them in the long term.
In the UK we have various rules (30. 50 & 100 years) after which documents might be made public. This implies that whatever the format, we need to be able to still read them 100 years from now. There is no reason to suppose that Microsoft (or any other company for that matter) will be around then, so using a proprietary format as a standard must surely be an unacceptable risk.
Consistency. Our nearly obsessive desire to be (and appear to be) consistent with what we have already done. What the downvoters are so ably demonstrating is that once we've made a choice, we encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Given that my post was a factually correct counterpoint is amusing. And a bit sad, given the assumedly enlightened audience here.
Be that as it may, Microsoft do follow their own spec, just haven't implemented all of it. The problem is quantitative rather than qualitative. ODF vendors don't fare much better with their format.
"Microsoft's format is published and freely available."
Except that the OOXML "Standard" <cough> is replete with instances of backward compatibility features (often optional of course <cough><splutter>) that are described along the lines of "Treat version X feature the same way that versoin X does." but with no details on exactly how the proprietary format version X actually performed said function. The documentation for version X being proprietary and not available.
It leaves Microsoft as the only ones that could possibly implement the OOXML standard in full, while they point at their competition on performance issues over exactly such ill defined behaviour.
Even then, Microsoft railroaded OOXML through as an IEEE standard by stacking the ballot by having Microsoft business partners join IEEE, purely for the purpose of filling seats at meetings and in doing so, ensuring that objectors were not able to attend these meetings in enough numbers to make a difference.
Despite that, several modifications to the original OOXML standard as proposed by Microsoft were pushed into the final OOXML standard that made Mocrosoft Office only partially compliant to their own standard. Microsoft however were uninterested in making changes to Office so that it does comply.
In other words, it is a standard that even Microsoft don't comply with.
Really? Can you then point me at the .doc format spec as it was in 1990?
Back in 1990 we were having the same discussions as now and at the time SGML was hopefully going to be the saviour, especially since we had standardised formats for things like tables (the US military DTDs). Trouble was that the editing tools never really took off, and convincing management to support a format we could still easily read in ten or twenty years time was bloody hard. This was for military and commercial data relating to products that would be in use for decades, hence the importance of long term formats.
Technically you don't need the format to endure that long. What you need is a set of standards that are robust enough that one can run an update program on your current set of documents that will convert them reliably into something reflecting the new standard and maintain the same appearance and formatting and be able to trust that it's done so without needing to visually inspect every document.
No. Format shifting is not a good idea.
Imagine that the 1215 Magna Carta was created in word. What are the chances that after being shifted to a new format every ten years the result would be readable in exactly the original form without losing content or positioning after 80 format changes?
A static format is the only sensible way to go.
>Technically you don't need the format to endure that long...
Obviously not been involved with archives as the scale of the task you are contemplating would tell you how impractical it is.
Plus whilst slightly different, we shouldn't forget the problem encountered with the maintenance of climate data. Where due to the size of the records archive it was decided to do a conversion and consolidation and destroy the source records. When questions were raised about the reliability of the conversion etc., it was not possible to verify the process because the original source records no longer existed.
Likewise as we've seen recently the compression algorithm used in Xerox copiers was found to be flawed even though the algorithm was reliable. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_means_dodgy_numbers_and_dangerous_designs/ )
What is telling about this one is that the majority of pages copied were okay, but some weren't and the only way to verify was a detailed visual inspection of each page.
So no we do need formats that can be read over long periods of time, but yes like Microsoft and others have shown, if we want to do more than just view ie. edit, then we can save it in a newer format.
I wasn't thinking of deleting the originals, merely providing versions in the latest standards. Keeping the original work, and a means of reading them, is important in case of conflict. Very few people read the original Magna Carta, but the text is available in different formats for everyone to view.
... the tech community is predominantly pro open. This is good, but it doesn't mean it's a fair representation of "citizens" of which I presume most, like me, couldn't particularly give a damn.
Most "citizens" want easy access government data. They couldn't give a damn how that is achieved, but they will scream blue murder if they don't get it.
Different users, using a different devices, will be using a variety of different software packages from different suppliers -- some open and some not. The use of an open data format ensures that all the suppliers are free and able to provide access within their software to the government data.
"My personal preference is UTF-8 done with a plain text editor for most official documents."
Which is why RFCs are published in this EXACT manner. No fuss, no muss. Of course they are dealing with an entirely different audience, but it is worth noting that documents from a word processor (pick one) are good at multiplying the character count of even the simplest of documents.
Most word processor document formats have grown "organically" to accommodate the ever changing landscape of users who like the latest gee-wizz feature that they found out about. Then you get a word processor vendor that adds on a newer fature, needs a new document format, and one person in the organization publishes in that format necessitating that everyone else use the "more modern" word processor even though they have no need for its features. So everyone does upgrade and the vendor of the word processor makes out by making previous versions obsolescent. When the next new feature comes out, the cycle continues, only this time the version of the word processor needs a new version of the operating system to function properly.
Rinse, repeat.
Hopefully an 'open document format' will cut down on this vicious cycle.
Microsoft just happily give up their lock-in? Not without a fight they won't.
Remember when they knobbled windows to make Word Perfect for windows work "weirdly"? Pretty much screwing many clients and leaving them without a working word processor of their choice? The only way to get them going was to either fork out for Word, or, pirate it? One way or another, Microsoft made sure they were the last man standing - whatever the cost.
Remember that? Because I do.
But it goes much deeper than that, I'm STILL seeing software today that spouts "this requires Internet Explorer vX". Are there still programmers around today that are that lazy, they can't find libraries outside of IE to do the job? Shame on you.
Not very related, but every version of Word was touted as having improved productivity. My first proper word processor was Word2.0 (I think) for MSDOS (no GUI!) and I could bash out degree coursework in no time. So, by extrapolation, I should be able to write those same documents in a fraction of the time. This isn't to say any other software is more productive, just that the whole "improved productivity" seems to be marketing speak for "more frustration and time wasted".
Oh, and to get back to the topic, I don't think there's a current version of Word that could read those old Word files.
but every version of Word was touted as having improved productivity
The next version of Word could indeed do this if they removed all the rubbish they added over the years. Take Word 97 (or at most Word 2003), recompile it for 64 bit and give it a new name: massive sales, and real productivity boost - simply by giving back what they took away.
We could even get some work done then, but why wait? I switched to LibreOffice for exactly that reason, and it was worth it. No need to spend money other than contributing to the people who develop it - if you pay them 10% of what you would have spent buying yet another break on productivity you still save 90%, and make sure you can keep on saving.
I got bored of the format wars years ago. Now I don't give a **** what format something arrives in. I just convert it into the format I want and go from there. If you want to use ODF then go buy some software that uses ODF. If you want to use MS Word then guess what? No ODF. If I was in charge at MS I'd tell you all to go take a hike. Why on earth would I want to support a minority document format that could cost me future earnings? Greedy monopolists MS may be, but stupid they are not. And yes, "it's not fair" but that is just the way of the world.
Mind if I make a comment? Back in the "format wars" of the early 2000s, I realized something. These competing file formats could be considered authoritative definitions of word processing functionality, as seen by the Open Source/Data crowd and Microsoft.
Now the ODF definition isn't pretty, but it's well-thought-out and workable. The OOXML one contains a lot of "edge cases" I believe the word is, where functionality is defined in terms of something that is not well known outside Microsoft's Office division, and even then, doesn't seem to be all that well understood either in those hallowed halls. OOXML/DOCX is basically DOC redone in XML, and DOC is a memory dump to disk.
Anything more I need to say?
The argument about which format the government will accept is pointless since almost any decent word processor will at least open & read pretty much any format. We saved any internal document that would not need editing as a pdf and all of the documents available to the public (including on-line forms & email attachments) were only available as pdf, no problems.
"since almost any decent word processor will at least open & read pretty much any format."
And how about in 50 years time - all that will help then will be a well-documented format (so not an MS one). If you read the threads around this you'll get plenty of views on this **. Also documents are being edited on various tablets and not all of these will read every format.
**(I know you might not have had time having only joined today)
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