OpenDocument Gains New Fans 233
An anonymous reader writes "The OpenDocument format is gathering steam, as several influential companies seek an alternative to Microsoft Office." From the article: "The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell. That stepped-up commitment from major companies comes amid signs that states are considering getting behind OpenDocument. James Gallt, the associate director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said Wednesday that there are a number of state agencies are exploring the use of the document format standard."
No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because those alternatives do not charge you for a new visual theme.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
When there's a -1: Pessimistic option, then he should be modded down. In the meantime, reread the moderator rules. [slashdot.org]
As to the parent, I can't say I agree that this will happen. I agree that Microsoft will try (RTF, anyone?), but long term I think that Microsoft just has too many anti-trust watchers breathing down their necks at the moment. Everytime Microsoft attempts to rely on their old tactics (no matter how sneaky they are about it) someone is going to cry foul. It may seem silly, "Them: Microsoft has a tiny incompatibility in their support of the format! Microsoft: It's just a bug! No bigge!" but such attacks can really screw with Microsoft's time to market and keep them tied up in the courts for a very long time.
Re:How much will it change anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
OpenDocument Vs. "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winner" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those no brainer moves that would be unremarkable in any other industry. Technology makes the inevitable move to commodity status over time so companies can focus on competing in areas that actually give value to consumers.
But with Microsoft there is a strange group of people who can only be described as "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winner" believers. The computing world standardizing on OpenDocument in no way negatively effects them and the continued use of the proprietary Microsoft formats in no way benefits them, but they have become so emotionally attached to Microsoft they see it as a personal affront that anyone would ever dare to not use the obvious choice of whatever the Microsoft solution is.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Several posts were bizarrely moderated. I think a very angry person got mod points today.
I agree that Microsoft will try (RTF, anyone?), but long term I think that Microsoft just has too many anti-trust watchers breathing down their necks at the moment
While I could imagine some division heads or rogue employees putting intentional "quirks" in, I think just as a nature of the beast OpenDocument isn't an absolutely literally interpreted format (e.g. it isn't an output layout format like PDF), so like HTML there will be some variations in the way it is interpreted. If Office becomes the dominant platform, it will also be considered the "right" platform, regardless of how correct or not that is. If you layout a document in a certain manner in Office, and it displays differently in a different client, then clearly the other client must be "wrong".
Honestly I don't think I was being pessimistic - in the Office wars I do think Microsoft has a vastly superior offering, and if it's just a matter of supporting this format to make some states happy, then after a brief resistance I think they will. Everything will go on just like it was, albeit with a new document format.
Re:How much will it change anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Software upgrades are already figured into the budgets, and a government agency will spend their money on anything, not matter how silly, before they will let their budgets be cut by even a penny.
Near the end of every fiscal period, any money left over in the budget is very quickly spent, because if there is anything left over at the end the auditors assume that the department obviously didn't need the money and the next years budget will be reduced by that amount. This punishes efficient management and rewards sloth, abuse and waste. But this is government, and thereby I merely repeat myself.
Bob-
Re:No wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Museum Archives (Score:3, Insightful)
And unfortunately storing a document is very complicated. It involves knowledge of software version, compatibility issues, bugs, etc
Many of these programmes are leanning heavily towards open document standards. Simply because the people involved are not, and have no desire to learn every issue regard software excuatbles and how to make sure they will run in 20 or 30 years.
Re:OpenDocument Vs. "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winne (Score:2, Insightful)
Nevermind, you probably stopped reading this and labelled me in your microsoft for the win group, or whatever the hell you called it, right? I mean, if someone disagrees with you, why bother thinking about what they have to say when you can just put a label on them so that you don't have to do any thinking.
Re:Unfortunately... it reminds me of Fight Club (Score:3, Insightful)
No wonder I could get rid of my MOD points!
DRM in OpenDocument (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we really want a standard that enables DRM? Is there such a thing as acceptable DRM? Why is this a good thing for OpenDocument?
Re:Fortune 500 companies the key (Score:3, Insightful)
MS is in kind of an interesting situation here. There's a risk that making more noise about how bad OpenDocument is will attract the attention of corporate types who otherwise wouldn't have noticed it at all.
Re:The ball is rolling... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OpenDocument Vs. "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winne (Score:3, Insightful)
Pragmatism is all right when you consider all the ramifications. There are certain possibilities which some might weight more heavily than others that lead to Open Document as soon as possible being the more practical and pragmatic solution.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Office 2003 was a flop. Really, all it offered for the end-user was an ugly-ass blue theme to go with Luna. Vista? All its APIs are being backported to XP, making it a--you guessed it--visual redress.
I know it's cool and hip and makes you feel enlightened to go against the grain by pointing out "M$ bashing" on Slashdot. It even gets you modded up.
Re:DRM in OpenDocument (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, because if you want to see it adopted, it's going to need to do everything the competition does and more. Otherwise, you'll get the usual "Well, we would use this, but it doesn't allow you to [blank], so we'll need to go with a format that does."
Is there such a thing as acceptable DRM?
Of course there is. Just like there are acceptable uses for weapons, wars, Windows, and alliterations. Market forces will determine what the acceptable uses are. If an organization DRM's the hell out of everything they pass around, customers will complain or go elsewhere if it's really a bother. If it's not really a bother, why bother complaining?
We're talking about word processors and spreadsheets here. If someone doesn't want a document passed around, copied, etc, then chances are it's "Privileged Information". Where's the problem, again?
Why is this a good thing for OpenDocument?
Like it or not, DRM is useful and is probably here to stay. Combining #1 and #2 above, I think you'll find your answer to this question.
Re:OpenDocument Vs. "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winne (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually it isn't true. Outside of things directly tied to their OS, Microsoft has been a gigantic failure across the board. One of the reasons they are fighting so desperately with against the open office format is for the very fact that they have been so completely incapable of 'winning' at anything outside of their OS and office suite products and creating significant new revenue streams.
I agree that Microsoft's inevitable place in the market is a niche player mostly doing legacy support of their software. And from the actions of the execs at Microsoft over the past few years, I am pretty sure they feel the same way and are most focused on extracting as much cash out of the company before the stock price moves from slow decline to outright freefall.
The wolfpack attacks the Alpha sometimes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How much will it change anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM in OpenDocument (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now it's pure speculation whether or not "fair" DRM can even exist, so I suspect that OpenDocument's claimed support of DRM is primarily a token gesture to soothe companies who might have been steered away for lack of stated DRM support. On the bright side, any DRM included in the OpenDocument specification will, by definition, be open. Thus we'll actually have a chance to evaluate and properly its technical merits without the fear of being sued under the DMCA by litigatous bullies.
Just as importantly, the mere fact that DRM is present in the OpenDocument specification does not imply that it will be built into any particular implementation. (OpenOffice, for instance.)
Wouldn't be surprised... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most employees access the Oracle mail backend through Outlook 2003 and the Oracle Outlook Connection Service (OCS), but they also pseudo-support Thunderbird, and they're paying for development on Sunbird (calendaring front end to complement TB). I suspect that once TB/SB are mostly reliable a corporate mandate will go out ending the use of Outlook and OCS.
Based on this, I'd expect that the next step after that would be to ditch MS Office all together. It doesn't matter that OO.org/SO won't read/write MS format docs perfectly, or that there are some features missing -- Oracle is the #2 software company, and sending revenues to the #1 software company doesn't make much sense. Particularly when you're in direct competition in several market spaces.
-- An Oracle employee
Just one question for the Slashdot editors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this article about OpenDocument format in the Linux category?
The OpenDocument format can indeed be used by software which happens to run on Linux but it's a *FAR* bigger thing than that. The OpenDocument format is architecture neutral and as such if you could equally choose to classify the article under the BSD daemon or the MacOS or even Windows.
So, surely, this should be under some other, architectural neutral label to do with digital freedom or open standards in general?
Massachusetts' choices (Score:2, Insightful)
The other option is to delay and dilly dally, wait for the rest of the world (cities, states, countries) to pick up the ball on Open Document format and eventually have it imposed on them either formally or by the market and go down in the IT History as "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" as for as document formats go, and be a Harvard Business School case study on leadership (on what not to do), inspite of all the excellent work done by their ITD.
Choose carefully, MA!
Re:html? (Score:2, Insightful)
HTML + CSS is not the most optimal solution to that as HTML lacks semantically quite a whole deal compared to what one would want to have in a word processing document. A word processing document is after all not quite the same thing as online hypertext documents, therefore it is more sane to have an own XML format with semantically descriptive tags for word processing.
And HTML carries with it a great amount of legacy tags along with it. Not even XHTML is currently free from that legacy. It would just complicate things needlessly to try to make a sane document format by building it on top of HTML.
Re:OpenDocument Vs. "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winne (Score:2, Insightful)
> between version of MS Office
Ah, I see you live in that portion of society where things are upgraded in a timely fashion, so that you have not experienced the pain of attempting to take a document someone sent you that was created with Office 2003 and help a colleague open it on a computer that still has Office 4.3. (If you suggest an upgrade, said colleague gives you a dirty look and commences ninety solid minutes of bemoaning the horrors the previous upgrade, with all the user-interface changes it entailed, and extolling the virtues of Lotus 123 for DOS. Eventually you tell the colleague to just save the stupid document on a floppy diskette, so you can take it and print it on a computer that's a bit more up to date.)
With that said, there *are* some concrete benefits to the OpenDocument format, not least of all because it's *much* easier to generate with custom software. For instance, if you've got a database on your intranet containing names and addresses with a DBI/CGI frontend, it's easy to add a "generate mailing labels" feature that returns an OpenOffice document to the user; you can easily spend more time choosing the font so forth and setting up the formatting in your template than it takes to write the code that plugs in the data and returns the result. No, I don't expect the average home user to appreciate this sort of thing, but IT departments might think it's pretty cool.
> The continued use of the proprietary Microsoft formats
> benefit me because that's what just about everyone is
> already set up for.
That's either circular, or more likely you misunderstood what the other poster meant by "the continued use". Perhaps you thought he was talking about *your* continued use; he wasn't. He was talking about the continued *widespread* use, i.e., the continuance of the overall situation wherein just about everyone is already set up, more-or-less exclusively, for proprietary document formats. If this situation changes to the extent that just about everyone is set up for an open format, the only *potential* inconvenience that could cause you is that you would need to upgrade to stay compatible, but that would happen anyway with a future revision of Microsoft's proprietary formats, as has happened numerous times in the past; indeed, it is already poised to get underway again with Microsoft's XML-based formats, which are intended eventually to supercede the binary ones, assuming something else (like OpenDocument) doesn't supercede both first.
The argument that the other poster was making, although perhaps he wasn't sufficiently clear, was to the effect that there is no benefit to you if the next format that "just about everyone" upgrades to (and you therefore need to upgrade to as well) is a future version of Microsoft's proprietary format, versus some other format. If you only use the existing MS format because that's what everyone else uses, then you are not part of the group he was arguing against. He was talking about people who specifically don't want any non-Microsoft format or technology to gain widespread adoption.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
those who can't use MSOffice or who want to be able
to seemlessly integrate a non-windows desktop into
a windows office environment.
What catagory would you prefer?
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember. "cat" means "concatenate". If you're not concatenating, don't use cat.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is such an obvious lie, that I wonder if someone could sue them for malicious misrepresentation, and unfair business practices.
Besides forcing them to stop spouting that garbage, I think it would also generate some interesting (and very useful) press.
Re:Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'll give you this much: the X11 that ships with OS X sure is a lousy implementation.
Beyond that, since you wouldn't believe anything I say anyway, I suggest you do some benchmarks yourself and share them. You'll find that a good X11 implementation runs rings around Quartz.
Re:How much will it change anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OpenDocument Vs. "Microsoft Is Always Teh Winne (Score:3, Insightful)
The quick answer to your question is 'yes.' Whenever you get people who spend a large percentage of their life in one industry, they develop preferences that seem obsessively odd to outsiders. It is our own fixation on computers that makes us think that people aren't just like this about other things; but being a "geek" isn't restricted to computers, we just don't use that term for people whose interest goes towards other things.
Re:DRM in OpenDocument (Score:3, Insightful)
It's certainly not a good thing for OpenOffice and other free/open source office packages since DRM is fundamentally incompatibile with open source. If you don't understand why, read this:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/24/drm_ssl.html [boingboing.net]
Put simply, client side security only works (and that is debatble) in a completely closed system. Here's an example of this I ran across just last week. I have a PDF that I have many times copied and pasted text out of using xpdf. Recently, I bought a Mac Mini, and I happened to scp the very same pdf over to the mac, and open it in Preview. When I tried to copy text out of it, Preview popped up a dialog saying I was not allowed to copy text out of it without entering a password. That works as long as everyone plays by the rules in the standard. But as soon as there is an open source version someone can modify, it'd be quite simple to remove further restrictions once the software already has access to the unencrypted data.