UK Forces Microsoft To Adopt Open Document Standards 178
First time accepted submitter Barsteward writes Microsoft has confirmed it will start supporting the Open Documents Format (ODF) in the next update to Office 365, following a lengthy battle against the UK government. In 2014, Microsoft went against the government's request to support ODF, claiming its own XML format was more heavily adopted. The UK government refutes the claim, stating that ODF allows users to not be boxed into one ecosystem.
My God! (Score:5, Funny)
Who are you and what have you done with the UK government?
They were (a) right, (b) stuck to their guns and (c) have a technical solution which didn't simply involve shovelling heaps of money at microsoft in exchange for a brutal lock in. Very out of character, not that I'm complaining!
Re:My God! (Score:5, Funny)
I also seem to recall that Microsoft caving in to a government was one of the signs of the apocalypse.
Re:My God! (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft has caved many times. Remember the browser wars and unbundling IE?
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Last time I looked, IE was still "an integral part of Windows".
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Yes, last time when you looked in 1998.
Now you only have to do Control Panel -> Uninstall a program -> Turn Windows features on or off -> [ ] Internet Explorer.
It asks to reboot, and at the same time IE is nuked from the orbit.
There is no proof that IE would be needed for any kind of operating system functionality anymore.
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It is still there.
Only the top level "application" got removed. The actual application is in the DLLs that are still on disk.
Windows won't run if you actually did delete it.
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Re:My God! (Score:4, Informative)
one of the dlls is mshtml.dll and I know several applications that use it - anything that has an embedded browser for example, MS Money is one that uses a browser control as its entire display surface.
The other is ShDocVw,dll which is a browser control - Explorer uses this.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]
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.CHM help files are HTML based and won't render without MSHTML.DLL.
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Precisely. My definition of "unbundling" doesn't extend to "turn off". If it's TRULY unbundled, the application isn't installed AT ALL.
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What shouldn't be installed? The actual application (which isn't very big) or the HTML rendering engine? Having the latter is (a) very useful, and (b) a huge part of the former.
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The point of unbundling Internet Explorer was to allow fair competition. That is, Microsoft's position as a monopoly with the OS should not give an adantage to IE or a disadvantage to other browsers. Thre are other applications that use Microsoft's HTML and rendering DLLs that can't use alternative Chrome or Mozilla DLLs for example. So there's still a built in prejudice, as Microsoft completely controls the rendering and parsing of any HTML used by those other applications; there's still no incentive to
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Yes and the kernel & NTFS driver. :-)
And then install Linux. Permanent solution to the IE problem.
Except for those people still stuck on IE6-dependent apps.
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That's a semantic argument. There are applications that depend on the libraries used by IE in order to render HTML. But nothing about Windows requires IE be your web browser. Most OSes have a built-in HTML rendering library these days.
To put it another way, a built-in library to render HTML from within applications would not have killed Netscape.
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But the built in library discourages the creation of more portable HTML web pages which ultimately harms alternative browsers. You're still stuck in a world where things appear to work better with IE because sites are written that only work with Microsoft's quirks, or sites that use ActiveX, etc.
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I don't follow. How would a built-in HTML library have taken away from Netscape as a standalone web browser? I could see it taking away from some theoretical Netscape libraries meant for application development, but if such a product existed it was not very prevalent.
Or are you saying that competing web browsers were using the IE libraries? That may have been the case, but my recollection of the time was that everyone was using home-grown code.
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There are also special editions of Windows for the EU that do not include Windows Media Player. There are a dozen versions for the Windows installation media for the different target countries.
People often forget how complicated being big can get when dealing globally.
Re:My God! (Score:5, Interesting)
it is a result of quite a few years of lobbying by organisations such as Open Forum Europe and internal pressure from certain folk within the civil service. The government is reasonably receptive to well made arguments. They have a big love-hate thing going on with Microsoft. They know they are being screwed over by an American company that doesn't pay it's full share of UK taxes, so they like to kick back a bit now and then.
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So, would they do this if MS were a British company? To my knowledge the U.S. hasn't done anything like that to a British company, with maybe the exception of BP after they blackened the Gulf of Mexico.
And just for the record, MS can die in a fire for all I care.
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I see. Isn't MS a publicly traded multinational company?
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The other possibility is of course that Microsoft was very much in bed with the Blair government, so in the good old UK tradition of "do the exact opposite of the other guys" the Cameron government is deciding to put the thumbscrews to 'em.
Re:My God! (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO File formats are not the real problem. Microsoft's binary word processor and spreadsheet formats were reverse engineered years ago and have been pretty stable since 2000. OOXML is XML based and even has some documentation available on how to read it.
The real problem is that office documents blur the line between input and output and this makes them fundamentally fragile. An office document is input to a layout (in the case of a word processor) or calculation (in the case of a spreadsheet) engine but the user always looks at the output of that engine. Especially with word processors since the user is always looking at the output they aren't thinking about the structure of the input, they just bash things arround (holding down the space bar or enter key for example or dragging boxes around with no idea if their position is text-relative or page-relative)
So I don't think this will solve anything, even if MS implements ODF and even if the UK government gets it's employees to start using it as their main format for storing files (good luck) I would expect loading a document from office into libreoffice to still have similar results to today. The input (text typed, pictures included, user-specified values in spreadsheet cells) will probablly carry across fine but in some cases it will result in noticably different output (different and possiblly unreadable layout for word processed documents, different rounding of results for spreadsheets). Especially for large badly structure docuements.
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That might be true, but MS-specific interpretations of ODF's XML should be a lot easier to reverse-engineer than the weird, undocumentable junk that's supported by DOCX. ODF was designed to be open and implemented by multiple products, DOCX was designed to be implementable correctly only by MSWord.
Cue ... (Score:5, Interesting)
10% effort into actually implementing this, and
90% effort into examination how to creatively misunderstand OPF, extend ODF with "open" binary extensions, denigrate users of ODF, or just plain break ODF
Or maybe it's 1% vs 99%, I don't know.
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And limit the implementation to specific UK release versions that cost more than ordinary versions.
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The cynic in me suspects this might just be Microsoft's next step. Implement OPF capability, but make it so awkward to use, with such poor results, that users avoid it.
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10% effort into actually implementing this, and
90% effort into examination how to creatively misunderstand OPF, extend ODF with "open" binary extensions, denigrate users of ODF, or just plain break ODF
Or maybe it's 1% vs 99%, I don't know.
Knowing Microsoft, it will be 0% and 100%.
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That makes sense (Score:3)
If only ODF could be adopted everywhere...
Quit Being Cheap (Score:3, Funny)
Ditch the Mac, use Windows and buy Office like all the normal people.
Why are you troubling the people at Microsoft with the self-imposed problems you have created for yourself just because you are trying to be "different"?
You decided to be "different" and but you keep depending on others to fix your problems now that things have gone south. At what point are you going to be a positive member contributing back to society instead of siphoning resources away from the productive members of soci
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You decided to be "different"
Different from what? A sheep?
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The following notice is being posted for the sarcasm-impaired, in compliance with the ADA.
The OP had implied <SARCASM> tags.
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Haha, people who are cheap don't buy macs...
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Re:That makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen OOXML?
The reason they had to fork is because the format is SO binary and tied into the old legacy codebase that - even masquerading behind an XML front - there's no illusion of portability whatsoever.
They were forced to document it, by the EU, and all they did was describe every hack, binary fudge and kludge that went into it so that it was almost impossible to make a compatible format.
When you're talking Office on Mac, it's not a question of just adding Mac UI code and incorporating another platform into the build process. It's replicating all those stupid bit-wise assumptions made throughout the format. It's like WMF used to be - literally just a description of the Windows GDI commands required to replicate the object on the screen (which is why WMFs were capable of containing executable code!). That's pretty much the best analogue to something like MS's "open" XML formats.
I'm not surprised that the Mac versions are staggered by several years and not entirely compatible. That's how long it takes to emulate the Windows-specific fudges in the format.
What MS are scared of is a format that works across all platforms because, then, what's to say you'll bother to buy Office?
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What MS are scared of is a format that works across all platforms because, then, what's to say you'll bother to buy Office?
Definitely. I bless the day it's gotta happen.
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Not as bad a pack of bullshit as what you wrote. If a different team is delayed by a year in implementing an "open" standard, that tells you just how ridiculous the standard is. End of story.
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PDF is an output format all the structure that went into the document has been removed pretty much.
While you can get to the elements of a pdf document its very difficult to reformat them. for example say there is text in 2 columns selecting them you get a single column with the left side from column 1 and the right side from column 2 scrambling the sentences to make nonsense. The structure has been left in the word processing document. which is where you must return in order to use a smaller page size for
MS is still hostile to open formats (Score:5, Interesting)
And that makes them hostile to open software in my book. They insist on treating Linux-formatted disks as essentially blank and have Windows tell the user the volume must be formatted to be used; fixing this would be simple in the extreme and would not even require an ability to read an Ext* volume. They stonewall AV formats like Vorbis when they could be added easily to existing apps. Really, the list goes on. The place where they have capitulated is formats that are intrinsic to the web (while parading their proprietary stuff as "open" hoping enough people will take the bait).
MS still promotes lock-in. And from what I gather even their new .NET licensing terms are designed to leave you on the hook. [slashdot.org]
Re: MS is still hostile to open formats (Score:4, Informative)
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This is interesting to me, I've never heard this. Are you saying that parted, as in the Linux partitioning tool, uses the Microsoft partition type GUID incorrectly... and that is what Windows is reading, and thus sees it as not being formatted correctly?
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I don't know why it took so long. My soapbox version is I think there's a history of partition types being unreliable and pointless be
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The difference is that MS believes the purpose of "software" is to extract your money and give it to them. Any value they give back is pure coincidence or the minimum that cannot be avoided. On the other hand, FOSS projects believe that software is there to solve problems and to help people and making money is just an unavoidable and to be minimized side-task.
Re:MS is still hostile to open formats (Score:5, Informative)
And from what I gather even their new .NET licensing terms are designed to leave you on the hook. [slashdot.org]
Chinese whispers...
(1) Microsoft adopts MIT license for .NET, a perfectly standard OSS license. Many people leave it at this, but MS additionally makes a "patent promise".
(2) Blog site reads the patent promise, notes that for most use of the .NET OSS you're covered by the patent promise, but there's apparently one particular case (where you write your own alternative .NET runtime/fx that's incomplete) that doesn't appear to be covered by the patent promise.
(3) Slashdot summary makes the leap to say that MS is "undecided about suing" users of its OSS.
(4) Burz makes the leap to say that this is actually "designed to leave you on the hook".
There are quite a few unjustified leaps in there. Burz, I wonder if you'd say the same about all OSS software that's licensed under MIT or BSD but which lacks a patent promise? Because such software would be in an even weaker state from your perspective than Microsoft's OSS .NET.
(disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft, and I did generate some patents for them, and I'm an engineer not a lawyer).
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So only MS gets to embrace and extend; Who would have guessed? Break a single rule [slashdot.org] in Microsoft's .NET standards and they can come at us with both barrels.
The irony here is MS are using licenses that are thought to be the most libre as a cover to keep the developer community fenced-in to their platform with patent threats. Re-purpose any of the patented code and.....
Also, I'd like to remind you that MS still enforces at least two very silly patents against FOSS distributors: The FAT filename-length patent a
Microsoft "personal promise" deemed dangerous. (Score:2)
EndSoftPatents.org makes multiple relevant points very clear in their warning against relying on Microsoft's "promise" for .NET core [endsoftpatents.org] listing the limits and foreseeable risks in Microsoft's offer. It seems to me there's enough there to make anyone wary of relying on .NET and instead heed what the Free Software Foundation said in 2009 [fsf.org] warning against developing in C#.
You asked:
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I doubt it is trivial to add EXT2/3/4 support to the windows stack. Consider that ZFS has barely moved in linux space, even though it is fully BSD compatible, opensource, and awesome. Apparently it makes more sense to develop BTRFS.
Its trivial to get Windows to recognize a Linux partition and refrain from telling people to format those volumes.
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ZFS has a terrible license that was intentionally designed to be incompatible with GPL. So don't expect integration nor even good support, especially out of the box. People at zfsonlinux are trying hard, but without much success. And all of that could be avoided if the sole copyright holder (Oracle) decided to relicense.
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That's is the one thing I have always despised about working with MS products. I hope the new leadership is as open as they appear to be. If not, the saga will continue and I don't think they will survive it much longer.
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Apple is an example of a succesful walled-garden. Microsoft is an example of a failed walled-garden.
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UDF is supported, and is an ISO standard format.
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You do realise you can add your own repositories on e.g. Ubuntu, right?
https://help.ubuntu.com/commun... [ubuntu.com]
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Wrong. It's easy to add other repositories so that you can add software from them, and keep that software automatically updated. Anyone can set up their own repository.
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"Microsoft simply wants to support industry standard formats and not hobbyist formats like Ext4 or OGG Vorbis. You are not going to find Ext4 or OGG Vorbis support from your camcorder either."
So those massive datacentres powered by Linux are running a hobbyist filesystem?
And don't forget there are billions of Android devices that can understand Ext* disk formats.
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makes the installation process virtually impossible to automate.
Strange. We have been automating various installation package types on Windows for a while, now, usually with answer files... for test purposes.
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UTF-8 is a highly elegant and simple format. I'm certainly not aware of anything anyone has done to make it "extra complicated".
Now unicode itself is massively complicated but afaict that is mostly a reflection of the fact that some human languages refuse to fit nicely into the model of "a sequence of characters placed next to each other from left to right".
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And exFAT.
No kidding. MS still pursues violators of that silly long-filename patent. And they STILL demand a cut from Android distributors for other patents they refuse to disclose to the community!
Lotus (Score:5, Insightful)
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It worked better because Windows (286, 386, 3.1) Graphical Device Interface was designed for Excel, and other programs couldn't get the same performance out of Windows that Excel could.
Re:Lotus (Score:5, Informative)
Excel also succeeded because it had no format lock-in. Because it could WRITE Lotus 1-2-3 just as well as it read it, there was no risk to using Excel and finding that it didn't perform as well as Lotus.
Lotus was the incumbent at the time. 1-2-3 was the killer app that drove adoption of the PC. Yes, Excel worked in pretty graphics mode. Yes, Excel was better than 1-2-3. But you've seen management clinging like limpets to older solutions to things just because of their elevated perception of risk. If Excel hadn't been able to read 1-2-3 files perfectly, it would never have happened.
It's exactly the same reason why people won't migrate from MS Office to LibreOffice - because it's not entirely compatible, and everyone else uses it. It's all but impossible to make an entirely compatible program though - because even the MOO-XML formats are just a serialization of binary structs and even *puke* Windows API calls. Office isn't a standalone program - it only works on Windows.
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Closed formats are a buffer for mistakes or resting on laurels.
Maybe, but "closed formats" is what ensured Microsoft a quasi-monopoly for the past 25 years.
MS will do a bad job like Outlook Web Access (Score:3)
I always wondered why Microsoft weren't terminally ashamed that they were the only company in the world that could
1. produce a very good web based email/calendar client
and
2. yet have it not work properly on any browser other than MSIE
surely that fact hurt them when bidding for contracts?
But I don't doubt that their ODF implementation will be equally poor.
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2. yet have it not work properly on any browser other than MSIE
What? My wife uses Firefox and Chrome with outlook.com every day. What doesn't work properly, exactly?
But they support it already (Score:2)
What is this rubbish? Didn't we have these talks a long time ago already?
- Office 2007 and Office 2010 support ODF 1.1
- Office 2013 also supports ODF 1.2
Go open your Microsoft Office, and the option to save in OpenDocument is right there in the Save As dialog.
Whether anyone actually uses it, is the real question.
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What is this rubbish?
This rubbish is Office 365.
Didn't we have these talks a long time ago already?
No. This is about Office 365, not about Office for Windows.
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What is this rubbish? Didn't we have these talks a long time ago already?
- Office 2007 and Office 2010 support ODF 1.1
- Office 2013 also supports ODF 1.2
Go open your Microsoft Office, and the option to save in OpenDocument is right there in the Save As dialog.
Whether anyone actually uses it, is the real question.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+o... [lmgtfy.com]
"Office 365" refers to subscription plans that include access to Office applications plus other productivity services that are enabled over the Internet (cloud services), such as Lync web conferencing and Exchange Online hosted email for business, and additional online storage with OneDrive and Skype world ...
It doesn't seem to be the same as Office 2007 or Office 2010 or Office 2013.
There was a bit of a clue in the name, but we don't read articles and we don't even read th
WTF? (Score:2)
Second, ODF is a dog with flees. Unless two or more word processors actually support the same feature sets, it doesn't actually support a standard format beyond very very basic functionality. Different word processors (or other office products) regularly differentiate themselves from each
More info from gov.uk on what actually happened (Score:2)
https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]
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I keep hearing this "LibreOffice is great for basic tasks" thing, but whenever I ask for concrete examples people tend to avoid the subject. It covers all my basic needs, but maybe there is something I'm missing? Maybe Office got a better templating system or something I dunno...
For word processing though, I vastly prefer the OO/LO paradigm of creating an actual document structure instead of the Office way of having to mark the text and apply styling to it.
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Okay, God forbid, I'm actually going to try and treat this fairly. Firstly, recent incarnations of MS Word work using semantic styling, but don't force you to use it. This is much the same as in OO/LO. In general MS tools load files a LOT faster, and are more visually appealing (granted, eye of the beholder and all that), however they don't handle large files. Try opening a 400Mb .csv file in Excel vs in Gnumeric. As far as user friendly interfaces are concerned, I'd say they are both about equally klunky.
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Not to nitpick, but OOo/LO spreadsheet is named Calc, not Gnumeric. Gnumeric is part of the Gnome project, but yeah.
File loading speed is a fair point. Since LO use ODF which is a text-based format, it will always be slower than the binary formats of MSO. This is usually not a huge issue (a few seconds more) for all but the more obnoxious data formats. And if you have a 400MB+ spreadsheet, you really *should* consider moving that data to a *real* database, but yeah...
Other than that it seems that for the th
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I think its more a case of FOSS office is great at being everything but being Microsoft Office, it does not have the "looks like MS Office, works exactly like MS Office" comfort.
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Yeah. Most people use software like it was voodoo. This specific ritual gets you these results.
Any change to their rituals and they end up like a rabbit in the headlights. These rituals have been built up over a lifetime of use, without any real understanding of the primitives they are composed of.
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Agreeing with the parent and GP here. It was interesting a couple days ago, driving a rental car (Chrysler 200). The shifter was a knob/dial instead of the standard stick on the console. While it provided the same functionality, it seemed lacking...you couldn't tell w/o looking which position it was in, as you can with most sticks.
To the GP...I've heard and seen "deer in the headlights", but never a rabbit...they've always run away. I actually "tailed" (idling, so as not to hit him) one down a dirt road
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I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that LibreOffice would cover all my needs at work, but in my experience the conversion to and from .doc files has always had glitches. So here's what I hope should happen:
1. Make LibreOffice the default
2. Make MS Office one of those applications you have to order with an associated license cost.
3. Go through Group Policy options and set defaults to OpenDocument format
So if you prefer/need MS Office, you can have it but by default it'll save in the office-wide format. If
Re:Why we use office (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing that MS does for some buyers (this is certainly true for universities, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't true for other large organisations)is give them deeply discounted subscription licenses where the pricing model for those deeply discounted licenses is not based on the number of installations but on some measure of the size of the organisation as a whole.
From the point of view of the customer this initially looks like a great deal. As well as saving money on the licenses themselves they are freed from the need to track installations saving lots of money in license management and auditing. It's subscription based so they pay at a constant rate rather than bursts whenever a new version comes out making budgets easy to manage.
However once the customer is in such an arrangement they lose most of the incentive to reduce the use of the software or use cheaper/free alternatives. They would have to massively reduce their use of the software in question before buying and auditing individual licenses would be cheaper than the subscription. During the transition period of said massive reduciont they would be paying for internal auditing and accounting that would not deliver any benefit or serve any external purpose until the process was complete.
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I did the slides for a lecture with LibreOffice, after finding PowerPoint mostly unusable. The difference is that LibreOffice Presenter does not stand in your way, but actually helps you expressing what you think. With PowerPoint you always have to do it "their way". As an added benefit, I could work on the slides both on Linux and on Windows, with no compatibility issues whatsoever.
If you do not find people, then it is because you have not looked.
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Ah the lovely error where the file on disk gets corrupted when you save a large file. I learned backing up from that one.
Haven't seen it in years though.
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Yep.
Massage a document daily in MS word and the document will eventually get corrupted.
Then I had to use OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist back then) just to rescue my document from MS Word. The document is still going strong today, in ODF format.
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Indeed. Being a programmer who's moved further into the management zone, I'm having to cope with Office a lot more as my colleagues have a seriously restricted comfort zone when parted from the Microsoft teat for more than a few minutes.
The behaviour of both MS Office and LibreOffice infuriate me. As a relative novice (the last word processor I used seriously was Wordperfect 5.1 when I was at university), even the most basic, simple tasks seem so kludgy and clumsy.
It has got to the point where I'm consideri
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Re:Microsoft is EVIL! (Score:5, Funny)
My experience and opinion: Microsoft is the most EVIL software company.
Wow, that's a pretty bold statement to make here on slashdot. If you're really brave, you could say you quite like Star Wars.
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10 years ago, maybe. But Slashdot has changed somewhat and, reputedly, so has M$
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