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.
Thread beginning with comment 319329
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
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.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
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.