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When the UK government announced plans to shift to the .odf Open Document Format, and away from Microsoft's proprietary .doc and .docx formats, Microsoft threatened to move its research facilities out of the UK.
The prime minister's director of strategy at the time, Steve Hilton, said that "Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said we will close them down in your constituencies if this goes through" "We just resisted. You have to be brave," Hilton said.
Although I am not a great lover of Microsoft, I'm not sure that this is any different than many other companies who will try to protect their profits - and, arguably, the jobs of their employees - when they can see the potential for the loss of business. But perhaps other companies are a little more subtle - especially when it is obvious that official papers will one day become public knowledge.
[Editor's Comment: This submission has been significantly edited - comment is not attributable to sigma]
[Editor's Comment: Please see public apology regarding this story.]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BK on Saturday May 23 2015, @01:42AM
My observation has been that most open standards movements have had a strong nationalist component. Microsoft is seen by Germans and UKians and so many others as an outsider or even an invader and this perception forms a significant fraction of the support for such endeavors. But the fact is that Microsoft is a global company. Hurting them hurts more than America.
You see the same thing in the USA when the "buy American" folks run up against the hard realities that the Toyotas and VWs that they love to hate are actually built in the USA these days. The home office may be overseas, but the job losses will be local if you lead a campaign against those brands.
Blackmail is vile wherever it happens. But we make choices based on the apparent consequences every day. I agree it would be great if there were no consequences. It sucks when people tell us about them.
If the campaign for .ODF is all about open standards and open source and penguins, then great. After all, open standards supporters won't care if jobs are lost at closed standards operations. They deserve it after all. But if the open standards campaigners were leaning on nationalists to be the "useful idiots" who would vote their way for other reasons ... then maybe they suck too.
Dishonest politicians of all types are a problem. Even if you agree with some of them.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ryuugami on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:33AM
You see the same thing in the USA when the "buy American" folks run up against the hard realities that the Toyotas and VWs that they love to hate are actually built in the USA these days. The home office may be overseas, but the job losses will be local if you lead a campaign against those brands.
This goes the other way, too: you can buy as many iDevices as you like, the factories are still gonna be in China.
If the campaign for .ODF is all about open standards and open source and penguins, then great.
The problem with using proprietary formats for government business is that it essentially creates a government-supported monopoly. If you need MS Office to fill in a form your government requires you to submit, you are forced to buy it. The government itself also can't shop around for a better offer: it's MS or nothing. To get rid of the monopoly removing that requirement is a necessity, whether you subscribe to the penguins or not. With that in mind, I'd expand your statement to "If the campaign for .ODF is all about removing a government-enforced vendor lock-in, then great."
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 2) by BK on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:38AM
I wouldn't dare to disagree, especially with the way moderation works around here.
But open formats, when one is supported, or more supported, by a particular vendor or product, still represent the government picking winners and losers in the market-place. ODF is only as universal as vendor support. Would you propose to mandate that?
When the Germans come up with ODFA, must that also be supported? ODFR for the Russians? ODFL for the Liechtensteiners? In the end, this just creates another monopoly by creating barriers to entry.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @05:10PM
No. With open standards, anyone can make software that supports them. I'd go even farther and say that the government shouldn't use proprietary software at all. The government should promote transparency and education, and proprietary software spits on both of those things.
(Score: 2) by BK on Saturday May 23 2015, @07:30PM
Fine. Agreed even.
But if this is truly right, sell it that way. If the politicians who must support such a measure understand and support its substance, they'll be able to correctly balance it with the job prospects of their constituents. But if they think they are supporting a nationalist agenda (and so don't really understand the issue the issue you are advocating), they will be vulnerable to persuasion when they realize that the national issue isn't so clear cut and that local jobs are at stake.
The alleged persuasion by MS could only work if the open standards folks lied first in the selling.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @09:32AM
The ODF is not about open source or penguins. ODF is a open file format. The idea it has is that it can be opened with as many editors as possible, so that you aren't locked in to one vendor for the rest of the time in the universe. The idea is that people, of whom there are like 65 million in the UK for example, are able to open the documents the government creates and the documents the people create for each other.
The other idea is that you can open the old documents, even when that one vendor you'd be stuck if it weren't for ODF, decides that the old format is now dead and you have a server room full of old documents that need to be opened at some point.
You have so misunderstood the whole idea of open data formats. Open source is an excellent idea, but open data formats does not require open source. The only reason microsoft maybe gets pushed aside when ODF is talked about is because microsoft is so much against open data formats, that it just doesn make sense to include them. It's like hiring a company to paint your house blue and they don't even have blue in their charts and their name is 'we don't paint blue'.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by BK on Saturday May 23 2015, @12:23PM
But people who like penguins like ODF. The [sarcasm] tag is hidden but present.
I'm pretty sure that's called "PDF".
Still called PDF. And, no matter what format you choose, at some point you will have an exabyte of data stored in that format when its coolness has expired and nobody supports it anymore. ODF, DOC, DOCX, and PDF are all vulnerable to this.
Naw. I just don't respect it all that much. Open formats are formats. More formats are not necessarily better. In fact more formats probably means more confusion. And in this case, selecting a format is more about picking a company or a product [or a nation] than it is about openness. Or penguins. [See! Sarcasm! Ok....]
Modern WPs programs seem to do fine opening .doc and .docx and can usually save back into these formats. MS products will usually open .odf. Everything saves into PDF now.
And then there's this. [xkcd.com]
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @02:07PM
PDFs require costly programs to edit, unless of course you use libre office (atleast that's a program i know that can do this) and include the original ODF inside the PDF, which then you can edit with atleast libre office. Or unless you make a form PDF, which you can then add text / check boxes to predefined points in the document. PDF is good to distributing static/semi-static texts, but not when you want to keep things editable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @02:14PM
And another point. If you want less file formats, then dump the propietary formats, so everyone can edit the same files. Selecting a format is becomes about "picking a company or a product [or a nation]", because propietary vendors do not want to support open formats. But select libre office, open office they both read/write ODF and many many others aswell. Sure there are problems between their compatibility as well, but that's mostly, because the development of the programs run at different paces. In the end they'll catch up.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday May 23 2015, @04:01PM
My observation has been that most open standards movements have had a strong nationalist component
There's a grain of truth to this, because open standards are required for competition. If there's an open standard then there are likely to be multiple suppliers that can interoperate with it and so there's a good chance that there will be a local one. For government purchasing, it's often a good idea that your core infrastructure is provided by people that you can haul up on treason charges if they intentionally provide compromised equipment (or, at the least, that security-cleared people can audit). This is not usually possible with a foreign company. Microsoft has provided the source code for Windows and Office to the UK government, kind-of, but not with enough infrastructure to build it, so there's no guarantee that the code that they've provided is the code that's being run. . It's basically only useful for GCHQ to find exploitable vulnerabilities in, not for them to be able to provide defence.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:53AM
Why "UKians"? It's British -- plain and simple.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday May 30 2015, @01:17AM
Usians and Ukians are those who are either not aware of or who are supporting the fascist regimes of the USA and the UK. They are certainly not American or British.
It would also makes sense to likewise talk of Ausians (instead of Australians) and Nzians (instead of New Zealanders). I'm not entirely convinced Canada merits something similar yet but if it does there's Canians.
So why use various abbreviations for the countries as a template for new swearwords? To differentiate between the ideals most of those countries are meant to respect and how far away from it the current regimes are. Millions of citizens of each country/federation died fighting against what those countries now are and many more paid a high cost in other ways.
Slightly confusing nouns with a metallic taste might kick a few more brains into action and maybe a few more will become a bit more observant about what is going on around them.
Feel free to pass this on. The more the better.
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