Submitted by “Is it game over for OpenDocument? Probably. We’ve been expecting Massachusetts ITD to publicly revise its open formats mandate to include Office Open XML ever since Louis Gutierrez resigned as CIO in early October 2006. That was as clear a signal that ODF had failed in Massachusetts as needed by anyone in the know.”
We have not seen the last of OpenDocument. With OpenXML around Microsoft may never be forced built OpenDocument support into Office, but that doesn’t mean it is game over.
I dunno.. The OpenDocument format seems to be a great solution for true document compatibility, but lacks any real momentum.
I wish it the best of luck, but I’m not holding my breath.
I remember an article about how Microsoft has tons of lobbyist supporting their format, is anyone doing the same for ODF? Unless someone (IBM? SUN? OOo?) decides to put some money down to support ODF legislation I don’t see the format getting support in the US. I mean who expects some elected official to actually know anything about this stuff?
Hopefully some other countries (and hopefully enuogh of them) will require all documents on the net ODF to force microsoft to support the format. I’m not holding my breath though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Promotion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_Format_Alliance
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/
http://www.spreadopendocument.org/
http://www.oidi.org/tiki-index.php
http://opendocumentfoundation.us/
Shouldn’t be the question rather, when our elected represents always decide for the party that bribes them the most and against public interest, shouldn’t we throw them all in jail?
This article was posted on Slashdot and it’s FUD. LinuxWorld is hardly pro Linux, its more like antiLinuxallthetimeWorld. I would disregard it.
You are confused.
You mistake http://www.linuxworld.com.au/
for http://www.linuxworld.com/
The two are in no way related.
No Didio or O’Gara here.
Edited 2007-08-02 05:25
You mistake http://www.linuxworld.com.au/
for http://www.linuxworld.com/
The two are in no way related.
Uh no, except for the fact that they are both IDG sites. So, there comments are not that far-fetched.
The italics at the end of the article say it all: the authors are the president and marketting director for a company that makes an ODF Plugin fo MS Office.
I Wish that information had been at the top of the article so I could have not wasted my time on it.
Dont want other free open formats, just their own it’s as simple as that.
Just the same as they want their version of opensource.
It’s from LinuxWorld…
It’s a MS-channel. Ever heard of Laura Idi..eh..Didio?
“””
Ever heard of Laura Idi..eh..Didio?
“””
Actually, it’s been a while since we’ve heard from the D’idiot. Is she vacationing with Maureen O’Gara somewhere?
Hope they are both having a great time, wherever they are!
Other countries have seen the benefits of .odt . Open format will get stronger once the rest of the world start seeing the benefits of sharing documents for free without any problem. I have contacts in other countries and we share documents with .odt and we love it. No problems so far.
-2501
Perhaps not posting completely sensationalist articles would be a good idea?
Game over? WTF? it’s not like ODF’s entire existence and uptake in other parts of the world relies on Massachusetts.
Seems like all tech news sources have seriously hiked up the sensationalism lately. Slow news period?
I acknowledge this article to look like really informative. And then, suddenly, the author drops a 3500 dollars (why not euros?) pricetag for migrating one seat to OpenOffice in Munich.
This is an absurd figure. Why not 350 000 euros while we are at it. Many French administrations moved to OpenOffice and I never heard of any absurd figure like this one. They ALL reported savings. Yes, you hear it, SAVINGS. It cost less money to implement and use OpenOffice than MsOffice.
This is when your natural trust as a reader leaves you and you just stop believing all that you were reading.
In Munich the cost per desktop is probably hight than $3500. On another note this is not related to Office but to the fact that in the city administration every department used their own piece of software – including a lot of obscure DOS programs. The migration process forces them to do everything from scratch and to use Virtual Machines where this isn’t possible.
The only complaints I heard a dev saying there was about the huge amount of pestering bugs in Openoffice,org and the long time it takes until they get fixed.
Ouch that’s sad considering OpenOffice used to be StarOffice which was written in Germany.
I wonder how really messed up Munich was, or perhaps how messed up the technology department in Munich is ?
The guys who wrote this article are literally incredible. These are the guys behind the Davinci plugin for ODF in Word… they claimed to have a converter for ODF but refused to show anyone what it was and said they’d charge people an “arm and a leg” to use it unless they also agreed to accept installation of Google Desktop. I strongly suspect that their converter never actually worked. Oh, and they got kicked out of OASIS for their antics, which is why they are now writing against Sun and IBM. That’s right: the Open Document Foundation has nothing directly to do with the creation of ODF.
One funny little thing is that they quote Marbux’s comment in some website. But, as far as I can tell, Marbux is just the alias of Buck Martin, one of the co-authors. This guy pissed a number of people at GrokLaw off for massive edits to their anti-OOXML wiki with claims too inaccurate for them to defend.
Frankly, nothing that Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Buck Martin say should be taken seriously or at face-value. OOXML is not some totally unimplementable closed format, ODF is not dying, and no one is going to get incorrect medical dosage based on a poorly-converted document (Doctors don’t often use Word to write out their prescriptions and medical orders… heck, older doctors barely even use computers… why would medical orders need anything but plain text?).
OOXML formula specification is full of errors.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html
OpenFormula (soon to be part of ODF) isn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula
I know on which system I’d rather that the dose for any of my medicine was calculated.
Or the price, for that matter.
Edited 2007-08-02 04:31
Not true.
Both Sun’s plugin for ODF and the daVinci plugin worked absolutely fine, right up until just before the release of Vista and Office 2007.
Then, suddenly, just in the final release versions of Vista and Office 2007, both plugins were “mysteriously” broken. Funny, that.
Sun has eventually decided to release the ODF plugin for versions of Office up to and including Office 2003 … it still doesn’t work in Office 2007.
I have heard (unconfirmed) that the OpenDocument Foundation are quite close to getting daVinci working again, even in Office 2007.
no one is going to get incorrect medical dosage based on a poorly-converted document (Doctors don’t often use Word to write out their prescriptions and medical orders… heck, older doctors barely even use computers… why would medical orders need anything but plain text?).
I work for a group of hospitals. We use Adobe Acrobat for the physicians orders. Works cross platform with no errors.
I’m a bit surprised by that. Is there anything in the orders which would not work the same as plain ASCII text?
I imagine that ascii text cannot quite capture the essence and style of that little scribble thing that is supposed to be the doctor’s signature. Seems like a few tilde and caret characters should be good enough that most doctors would never even notice the difference themselves, though.
Of course… what was I thinking? We definitely need a fully SVG-enabled prescription format. How about ScriptML?
Looks like Massachusetts has now officially revised its standards to include these formats:
ODF 1.1,
Ecma 376 (Office Open XML),
plain text,
HTML,
PDF,
RTF.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/08/01/massachusetts-etrm…
(BTW, the LinuxWorld article has many inaccuracies on both sides of this issue.)
Edited 2007-08-02 07:42
The commonwealth of Massachusetts is officially supporting both OOXML and ODF.
That’s hardly “game over” for ODF. ODF is still being officially supported.
In fact, it’s a major, major victory for openness. Before, there were only MS’s closed, and constantly changing, MS Office file formats that completely locked customers into MS Office. Now, there are two open formats, one (ODF), more open than the other (OOXML), both of which provide more choice/flexibility for customers.
But even OOXML, which quite frankly is not fully open – it has it’s MS specific hooks, is a HUGE improvement over standard MS file formats.
The existence of ODF, and Massachusetts (and other states/municipalities) embracing or even considering it, forced Microsoft’s hand to provide it’s own more open file format.
Now everyone is looking at open formats, and gaining more control over their documents, and gradually shaking free of MS lock-in.
And considering how much money MS puts into lobbying the politicians, it’s a miracle that ODF is still even on the table.
And in the future I see ODF gaining more traction in smaller, lower profile governments/organizations. ODF being embraced by Mass. was very very high profile, and thus the army of MS lobbyists in Mass.
But MS isn’t going to be able to swamp their lobbyists everywhere, at anytime. Even MS has finite resources.
So ODF will grow organically, with smaller locations, and gradually spread, until it eventually becomes ubiquitous, and MS, even with all of it’s lobby money, won’t be able to stem the tide.
It’s inevitable. There’s everything to gain for customers when it comes to open, standardized file formats, and absolutely nothing to lose. People will naturally gravitate to open file formats over time.
MS can only slow down the growth of ODF. It can’t stop it.
i dont see the problem
the world is bigger then Massachusetts
governments in europe are moving to an open document format this can be odf or anything else at that time
not talking about asia or russia dont know what they want but just to make a point that the war is not over yet
this can still go anyway