Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 21:09 UTC, submitted by Rahul
The battle between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft's Open Office XML was long, and here and there rather nasty, but it appears as if we finally have a winner. The company behind OOXML already conceded by announcing it would implement support for ODF in Office 2007 SP2, but now it has also said it quite literally: ODF has won.
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Member since:2006-01-16
But why would they release the lock-in? That doesn't make sense to me. If I were at the decision table of M.$ I'd most certainly do anything to keep Office in the government BUT also keep the lock-in as much as possible.
IMHO making a "not-so-compliant" ODF capable Office possibly with "neutral" stamp-giver (yes it's compliant, we say so) would be the best solution.
You must understand that 99% of government officials who do the choice are morons. They get a paper saying "must be ODF compliant" and they look at it, ask the person who's trying to sell them the solution, get a "yes and here's 1000$ for your trouble" and we're done. Nobody can get blamed, not easily anyhow.
Member since:2007-02-17
But why would they release the lock-in? That doesn't make sense to me. If I were at the decision table of M.$ I'd most certainly do anything to keep Office in the government BUT also keep the lock-in as much as possible.
IMHO making a "not-so-compliant" ODF capable Office possibly with "neutral" stamp-giver (yes it's compliant, we say so) would be the best solution.
You must understand that 99% of government officials who do the choice are morons. They get a paper saying "must be ODF compliant" and they look at it, ask the person who's trying to sell them the solution, get a "yes and here's 1000$ for your trouble" and we're done. Nobody can get blamed, not easily anyhow.
IMHO making a "not-so-compliant" ODF capable Office possibly with "neutral" stamp-giver (yes it's compliant, we say so) would be the best solution.
You must understand that 99% of government officials who do the choice are morons. They get a paper saying "must be ODF compliant" and they look at it, ask the person who's trying to sell them the solution, get a "yes and here's 1000$ for your trouble" and we're done. Nobody can get blamed, not easily anyhow.
Of course people can get blamed ... considering that it is easy enough to test compliance.
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument_Compliance_Testing
If I were a Sun person, and I had tendered StarOffice, or if I were an IBM person, and I had tendered Lotus Symphony, or if I were Corel, and I had tendered WordPerfect, and a clerk had awarded the contract to Microsoft Office and it didn't actually comply with the openDocument standard ... you can bet i would protest long and loud and kick up an almighty stink.
If I were the clerk, and I had given a high-profile government contract to Microsoft and I hadn't even bothered to check compliance of their offer when an easy test was readily available to me and lawsuits were threatening over it all ... I would be quite concerned for my job.
As I said ... the easiest thing for Microsoft would be to actually comply with OpenDocument ... then things would be more or less status quo except that no-one (including EU commissions) would any longer have a legitimate anti-trust beef with Microsoft.
Even FSF weirdos could not complain ... and since there would be no longer any real impediment to people running free software ... they would probably be glad of it all anyway.
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Member since:
2007-02-17
M.$ will provide some non-compliant ala-ODF format to it's office suite and that'll be enough for the government ****-heads to give it the stamp.
It's not about ODF itself.
You didn't get it.
It would actually be easier, probably far more effective, and cause far less trouble anti-trust-wise, and in the end serve exactly the same purpose, for Microsoft to make a compliant ODF format.
How would that hurt them?
Microsoft -> non-compliant ODF ... governments can still mandate a standards-compliant ODF product be purchased.
Microsoft -> compliant ODF ... cuts off the commercial air-supply of competing open Office suites for businesses ... there is suddenly no compelling reason for governments to get OpenOffice and Microsoft can resume making rumbles in the background about "open source software violates our patents" (but never actually showing where) without risking further trouble and fines with anti-trust committees any more.