[dundee] Digital freedom debate

[James Carter]

Regarding proprietrary document formats for archiving purposes or otherwise, 
I've spend some time in the past thinking about this as an open source argument 
and generally think it leads to nowhere or a pointless fight, but things could 
change if there are better alternatives from the open source world:


1. It's easy to get a copy of M$ Office for practically free or very cheaply and 
the value of these proprietary "office" doucuments is actually very low although 
you'd be hard pushed to get them to delete them as they'd rather buy a new shiny 
storage array just in case.  Finished reports and public documents are generally 
put on the web in read-only pdf format if they are able to (not that they know 
the difference, it's mainly because they're worried about edits having been 
stored in the document and it feels more like a tablet of stone).  PDF is still 
a semi-proprietary format but essentially read-only and slightly easier to 
read/archive.  There's also an increasing amount of web based readers and other 
libraries for office documents even if still proprietary.

2. The Public sector loves spending money on Microsoft products as  it
gives them something relatively cheap compared with staff costs to spend  their 
money on rather than wasting it on "IT" and gives all staff  (including "IT") 
something to be 'productive' with.  This is the main  market for microsoft and 
most accountants rightly know it's better to  buy something off the shelf made 
somewhere else even if mediocre than employ any more IT  staff.  Many an excel 
loving accountant has asked me if software is  "microsoft compatible".  One has 
to remember excel and it's precursors  such as visicalc (free 27k download 
available here  http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm it runs on 
dosbox under linux no  problem) have possibly put some of these accountants in 
these positions in  the first place.

3. Because of paranoia about these formats, the newer office document formats 
from 2007 onwards use an easy to read and create  xml storage either in Open 
document format or microsoft xml format  (docx,xlsx), unzip them and have a 
look.  Infact, it's often one of those politically correct excuses they actually 
upgrade to Office 2007/2010 in the first place!

4. If you want to view or automatically archive office documents in something 
else, there are many great open source libraries out there to do so..for 
example.
  a) Nice command line word viewer called  antiword worddoc.doc > wordoc.txt
  b) As well as open office which is also possible to automate with java/c++ 
etc.
      there's also abiword and gnumeric that do a good job of opening .doc and 
.xls files
  c) for reading and writing office documents there are many open source 
libraries including
      http://poi.apache.org/ and http://code.google.com/p/php-excel-reader/

Some people are saying that recent budgets may change this and some people now 
use Open Office instead (what's the point of this if you've already got Office 
and don't value open source?) but this is yet to be seen because there's more 
and more for 'free' built into Office and Windows to keep it going 
(eg.Groove/Sharepoint etc.) and Microsoft sales people are quite good, as long 
as they can sell something they'll always be there and will lock you in to all 
that is Windows.

James


----- Original Message ----
From: Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net>
To: dundee at lists.lug.org.uk
Sent: Fri, 6 August, 2010 0:31:37
Subject: Re: [dundee] Digital freedom debate

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010 23:12:19 +0100, gordon dunlop wrote:

> On 5 August 2010 22:52, Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > Also a few years ago at linux.conf.au there was a talk about digital
> > preservation at the National Archives of Australia.
> >
> >  How many official government departmental documents are being made
> > in .pub
> or .docx format now. Nobody outside proprietary software can open
> them, unless anyone can tell me how to do it in open source software
> without using wine or the internet.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Writer OOo
writer can open .docx files.

Andrew

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