UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents 164
Andy Updegrove writes: "The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all."
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of their users aren't especially smart when it comes to technology. They're essentially office workers - they don't give a stuff about the underlying format, they only care about being able to do their job.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:4, Insightful)
For certain limited definitions of "support".
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why ODF? Because its the best format. It was designed very carefully by a very large team of stakeholders (including engineers, lawyers, document companies, the Vatican Library, Medical professionals, architects, electrical engineers, etc). It was reviewed and revised by large groups to ensure it would fit their needs. Its unencumbered by patents. NONE of this happened with microsoft's OOXML (as it is, there is no software that can read that standard, including no software from microsoft). Microsoft cannot support their own standard. Oh, and ODF is human readable.
When is the US going to get on board? (Score:5, Insightful)
Government should only be allowed to use open standards. This proprietary vendor lock-in is a crime against society -- the very people the government is supposed to serve.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
purely for ideological reasons.
That's a great reason. People should get some principles.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure a government would have the resources to develop a renderer for an open document format,
Or they could just link to the web page: http://webodf.org/ [webodf.org]
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, if everyone used Word with ODF then everyone has the same level of compatibility. Or they can save some licensing cash and replace it Open/Libre Office.
Unless they're an Excel junkie the average civil servant probably won't even notice. And the UK government shouldn't be allowed to use Excel [accountingweb.co.uk]
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of their users aren't especially smart when it comes to technology. They're essentially office workers - they don't give a stuff about the underlying format, they only care about being able to do their job.
So true. And therefore we should be thankful that some knowledgeable people who do care about such important matters are willing to step forward to do the right thing.
Why so late (Score:3, Insightful)
Good decition from UK. But one has to ask why not ten years ago. And why not in all countries. Instead MS has been allowed to nominate it's own closed format as open standard! And continue ruling and taxing the globe. And making competition impossible.
And yes, ODF is not perfect. Nothing is. And ODF will continue to evolve like any format. The key is that it is open and allows (opens) competition.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:4, Insightful)
And for an even more limited definition of "natively".
Re:Why ODF? (Score:2, Insightful)
I do the same, though mostly as a small business. Very occasionally I find someone for whom the document doesn't work right. In those cases I simply say something like "oh; it must be a bug in MS Office; you might try LibreOffice; its available for free from https://www.libreoffice.org/ [libreoffice.org]" everybody I have done this for has downloaded that and been happy.
Re:When is the US going to get on board? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you are ready to pay". There you go. I *already* paid: Any document which is produced by a government official was paid for *by me*, in the form of my tax money. I would expect to be able to read these documents without additional charge. If a *company* decides to go for vendor lock-in, that's their business - they should be able to do the "easiest/fastest/most convenient" calculation themselves. If it turns out they can't read their old design documents anymore, they have the right to pay a team of engineers a lot of money to reverse-engineer their old stuff. They will factor in these costs in their next product, and I have the choice to buy it, or shop elsewhere. However, this is not the case for the government. I cannot simply "shop elsewhere", so I expect the government not to cut corners and factor in what's easiest/cheapest/most convenient for their citizens.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why ODF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Office allegedly "supports" ODF, that reasonable doubt is sadly still there.
Not so much any more.
The real version of MS Office doesn't run on most of the computing platforms people want to use. Instead there's real competition, with dozens of variably capable Office tools available. On Android, you can get QuickOffice, Polaris Office, Kingsoft Office OfficeSuite and even the almost full version of Open Office. On iOS there's the Apple collection as well as Office HD and a some of the same Android apps. Even the web suites like Drive and Office Online work well enough.
Even better, when a genuinely open document format is available, automated document builders like Python's POD (http://appyframework.org/pod.html) will be able to merge machine data (like engine readouts, noise levels and thousands of other data sources) with human-readable charts and text to automatically generate presentation documents.
MS Office is an obsolete dinosaur already. Light it's pyre and send it on its way.
The efficiency improvements alone will make the investment in change worthwhile. Bring it on!
Re:Compliance With Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
The constrained resource is "desire"
Re:This a wheeze to get Office 2013/ 365 cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
I would imagine that someone at GCHQ could easily convert the documents for a tiny fraction of the budget that they've got. In fact, they've probably already got conversions of everyone's private/secret documents already.
Plenty of money for spying on UK subjects, but no money for protecting their interests in not being tied to a predatory US company.
Re:Why ODF? (Score:4, Insightful)
ODF is more like a zip file of XML files [wikipedia.org]
You can have a single-document xml file, but its quite rare.
Not that it really matters so much, the only problem I had was finding a library to write a .ods file (basically wanted to write a csv, but in a format that Excel would actually fucking render correctly, the fucker). Writing out .xls files was just not available unless I had Office installed and called some COM wrapper to some craziness.
Re:Where is Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe you should start realizing Apple is worse than MS.