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posted by janrinok on Friday May 22 2015, @11:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the threatened-or-lobbying? dept.

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.]

 
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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by BK on Saturday May 23 2015, @12:23PM

    by BK (4868) on Saturday May 23 2015, @12:23PM (#186844)

    The ODF is not about open source or penguins. ODF is a open file format.

    But people who like penguins like ODF. The [sarcasm] tag is hidden but present.

    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.

    I'm pretty sure that's called "PDF".

    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.

    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.

    You have so misunderstood the whole idea of open data formats.

    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]

    --
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @02:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @02:07PM (#186865)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @02:14PM (#186867)

    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.