[dundee] Digital freedom debate

[Andrew Clayton]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:41:15 +0000 (GMT), James Carter wrote:

> 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:

I think we're well covered here and video's coming along nicely.

> 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

Your assuming edit history doesn't get stored in the pdf.

> stone).  PDF is still a semi-proprietary format but essentially

It does seem to now be an ISO standard
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51502

> read-only and slightly easier to read/archive.  There's also an

Yeah, but of course you can easily get around that by opening the pdf
into OOo draw then saving it as ODF, then you can happily edit it and
re-export it as PDF again.

> 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.

Everything you've said there is pretty much a disgrace. Changing that
certainly seems to be a non-trivial task. Just gotta keep on at it...
 
> 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.

You said it, "lock in". 

You would choose to ditch MS Office and switch to OOo:- 

To avoid vendor lock in. 

To do away with licensing fees. I also don't buy the argument that any
savings in licensing fee's will be used up on re-training. WTF!? Yes
OOo probably doesn't mimic MS Office 100% (some people would probably
argue that's a good thing). But it can't be that far apart that you
couldn't get to grips with it fairly quickly. There's this little
thing called, "transference of skills".  

Better quality software. Coverity did some analysis on this a while
back and found that open source software generally had fewer defects
than they're proprietary counterparts. Personally I didn't find this
surprising and avoid proprietary software like the plague.

Better localisation and internationalisation. I don't know for sure,
but I'd guess OOo is translated into more languages. Of course being
open source that translation process is likely very open and if it's
not in your language you at least have the ability to translate it.

To know you'll be able to open that file you created 5 years ago. I
don't think the whole of MS Office can say the same.

That'll do for starters, I'm bound to be missing some...

> James

Andrew