![[TEST] Document Foundation Community](https://communitytest.documentfoundation.org/images/discourse-logo-sketch.png){kind=logo}
Readers,
M$ is allegedly seeking to invest in "interoperability" and open
source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/microsoft-forms-subsidiary-engage-open-source-communities-190790.
Perhaps more for 'Groklaw', but isn't this a potential trojan horse to
pollute GPLv3? We will see true "interoperability" only when odf and
openformula become the defaults within m$o. Until then, please avoid
creation of m$ formats using LO and continue to promote odf.
Well, it is always good to promote ODF, but if you work in a business environment, you cannot get away from MSO's file formats. I create the documents in LO and save my copy in ODF, but I still have to send editable files to some people who's business or agency has not or cannot switch to LO. So for these people/businesses/agencies, I need to send them MSO file formatted documents.
Promote LO and ODF, but you still have to deal with those who have not switched over to LO and/or ODF. Most government agencies [USA] at all levels are not "allowed" to use any other office package but MSO AND are forbidden to install software on their computers, including screen-savers and such. I know of one that will not allow the use of USB devices as well. So, until everyone switches to ODF, we must continue to save some of our documents to MSO formates and send them off to others.
Hi 
To quote Battlestar Galactica "All this has happened before and will happen again".
Other companies have also tried opening OpenSource departments or sections that work on allegedly OpenSource projects with varying success. Quality of the licenses is checked by various people and organisations. "The Linux Foundation" and the "Free Software Foundation" are good. If the licenses allow people to check the code then the code gets checked too. If the licenses don't allow people to explore the code then it's not OpenSource anyway. MS's kernel contributions apparently got cleaned up by non-MS people because MS wouldn't clean up the code themsleves. NVidia's hybrid, partly OpenSource drivers led to big improvements in the properly OpenSource drivers and now NVidia cards seem to be better than Ati in Gnu&Linux even tho many of us would prefer to get Ati cards.
Most of us do have to continue to support MS formats but that doesn't mean we have to use them exclusively.
Have you ever worked in an office and found a bunch of people all smoke together or chip off down the pub together and become an unofficial clique that work together better and support each other more than the rest of the office? That sort of thing is beginning to happen with ODF users.
Regards from
Tom
Which pub? 
It is a "British" type of thing to say, but it works. But that is how the people got together to "talk treason" to get the 13 colonies out from under the British "overlords" and become the USA. That was the first real "social network" that I know of that changed history of my country.
Actually it is still done in the UK [as far as I heard] and is being done in one form or another in the USA. That is offline social networking, not online.
.
Hi
Lqtm. People often forget there is only really one pub but it must be massive and it can be difficult to get to all parts of it, particularly parts that are in other counties. Lqtm
Regards from
Tom
Well, it is always good to promote ODF, but if you work in a business
environment, you cannot get away from MSO's file formats. I create the
documents in LO and save my copy in ODF, but I still have to send
editable files to some people who's business or agency has not or cannot
switch to LO. So for these people/businesses/agencies, I need to send
them MSO file formatted documents.
You could send in odf, which m$ is supposed to support. Growth in the
quantity of odf documents, together with people complaining to m$
(instead of complaining to LO!), the long term effect is to force m$
to improve compatibility with odf, _not_ vice versa! The analogy is
one of the worse technologies: flash. Thankfully, successful marketing
of apple products increased the quantity of non-flash devices and
therefore the demand for other technologies, e.g. html5.
Promote LO and ODF, but you still have to deal with those who have not
switched over to LO and/or ODF. Most government agencies [USA] at all
levels are not "allowed" to use any other office package but MSO AND are
forbidden to install software on their computers, including
screen-savers and such. I know of one that will not allow the use of
USB devices as well. So, until everyone switches to ODF, we must
continue to save some of our documents to MSO formates and send them off
to others.
Such organisations were often forced to use m$ie6, whilst the world
moved forward to using safari, opera, firefox, etc.. The world did not
wait for m$ to improve their web browser! Therefore, the claim that
everyone must simultaneously change to odf is a fallacy.
Well, it is always good to promote ODF, but if you work in a business
environment, you cannot get away from MSO's file formats. I create the
documents in LO and save my copy in ODF, but I still have to send
editable files to some people who's business or agency has not or cannot
switch to LO. So for these people/businesses/agencies, I need to send
them MSO file formatted documents.You could send in odf, which m$ is supposed to support. Growth in the
quantity of odf documents, together with people complaining to m$
(instead of complaining to LO!), the long term effect is to force m$
to improve compatibility with odf, _not_ vice versa! The analogy is
one of the worse technologies: flash. Thankfully, successful marketing
of apple products increased the quantity of non-flash devices and
therefore the demand for other technologies, e.g. html5.Promote LO and ODF, but you still have to deal with those who have not
switched over to LO and/or ODF. Most government agencies [USA] at all
levels are not "allowed" to use any other office package but MSO AND are
forbidden to install software on their computers, including
screen-savers and such. I know of one that will not allow the use of
USB devices as well. So, until everyone switches to ODF, we must
continue to save some of our documents to MSO formates and send them off
to others.
I wonder if someone in the USA could sue and win because the MSO format is a proprietary format thus requiring users to buy a proprietary product for best results. If an agency used only odf formats that are readable by any number of free and proprietary products then users are not forced to purchase specific product for best results.
Hi
The question is a moving target and seems to be moving in our favour. More people are using LO/OOo now even if it's often alongside MSO.
Also it's about how much power and control you have. There are many circumstances where you are totally at the mercy of other people and have to accept what they use. A single job-seeker signing up with agencies, an office worker that has to comply with company policy, a company reliant on customers who could easily go elsewhere. However there are many places where you can grab power and demand that people treat you with some consideration. So grab when you can and just gently push the rest of the time and gracefully give-in but have another go a while later.
Just my tuppence
Regards from
Tom
It can be misleading to say something like this (yes, it's true) without also saying *why* these policies are in place.
To keep the explanation simple, it's the ability to support the hardware and software out there, and ensure security of the system as a whole, and do so with diminishing resources.
Been there, done that.
Sadly, we will soon be rolling out Microsoft Office to most of our employees due to the poor support for the new MS xml file formats (we get a ton of these from external clients/vendors, and complaining to them and begging for them to send the older file formats is simply not an option).
I am hoping that Microsofts licensing will allow me to set up a Terminal Server and provide 'shared' access to Office (ie, once the max number of sessions is in use, other users will get some kind of 'sorry, all instances of MSO are in use, please try again later), so we don't have to buy a license for everyone...
No, the long term effect, for those doing business, is anyone doing this becomes a laughing stock to the clients/vendors they work with... it is the ODF format that will be deemed broken, NOT Microsofts poor support of it.
Am 17.04.2012 13:50, e-letter wrote:
Readers,
M$ is allegedly seeking to invest in "interoperability" and open
source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/microsoft-forms-subsidiary-engage-open-source-communities-190790.Perhaps more for 'Groklaw', but isn't this a potential trojan horse to
pollute GPLv3? We will see true "interoperability" only when odf and
openformula become the defaults within m$o. Until then, please avoid
creation of m$ formats using LO and continue to promote odf.
If MS publishes announcements like this one, this is the best indicator that nothing will actually happen. It's the usual appeasement blah blah towards the public sector.
They just have to wait for their users (and LibO) to spread more OOXML documents. Then they have pushed their new de-facto standard.
Oh, whatever. And this sent from a "gmail" account. Yea.
Intermediate free software required.
It appears to be time for an intermediate translation software be made available.
Similar to those that change image types between png, jpg and tiff.
The idea is a free translation software that sits in between the file and the program calling for the file.
When the file is called, the intermediate delivers to the program in the file type requested.
The intermediate software filter should be freely available for all operating systems.
The consumer installs once and is never bothered again with this issue. Updates are backgrounded.
This also isolates issues of files not correctly importing/exporting and removes it as an issue from the program the user wants.
Those who claim proprietary cannot claim foul, can remain isolated and cannot claim foul when not forthcoming with assistance.
Whaddayathink?
Hi
+1
but if we keep gently pushing, where we can, things will keep making progress. It does help to have louder campaigners such as FSF and Richard Stallman. It would be great if e-letter could join FSF if he/she hasn't already.
Regards from
Tom
Hi
Interestingly apparently many US government agencies and departments use Gnu&Linux for most of their server-side and infra-structure but had to cave into users demands for MS on their desktops.
An interesting quiet little press release appeared on the DistroWatch website a few days ago.
http://distrowatch.com/
Scroll down to the note written 2012-04-13
"A new version of Lightweight Portable Security (LPS),
a Linux live CD with strong privacy protection features created by the
United States Department of Defence, is out. Version 1.3.3 is a
maintenance release, updating Firefox, Flash, Adobe Reader and OpenSSL,
and adding Thunderbird and Pidgin to the "deluxe" edition. From the changelog: "Changes
in version 1.3.3: updated Firefox to 10.0.3 ESR; updated Flash to
11.2.202.228; updated OpenSSL to 0.9.8u; updated Adobe Reader to 9.5.1;
updated Encryption Wizard application to 3.3.2; added Thunderbird 3.1.20
and DAVmail to LPS-Public Deluxe for S/MIME email support with MS
Exchange OWA; added Pidgin 2.10.2 (with SameTime support); added VMware
View 1.4; added option for OpenDNS DNSCrypt; added Firefox extension
HTTPS Everywhere 2.0.1; added Firefox extension NoScript 2.3.7 (disabled
by default)." Download (SHA256) the live CD images from the project's download server: LPS-1.3.3_public.iso (176MB), LPS-1.3.3_public_deluxe.iso (377MB)."
Shamelessly copy&pasted from the DW site. See the original here
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07201
if it has scrolled off the bottom of the DW front page.
Err, i bcc'd one of the main people, probably the top person at DW just to keep him in the loop
Regards from
Tom
MS has always been the choice for the OS in almost all cases, AFAIK, but the actual programs used varied widely years ago. My agency generally preferred Word Perfect as the word processor, but when (I think) a government wide survey was taken as to an across the board single word processing program to aid document sharing, WP lost out to Word. Lots of unhappy people in my agency who had to redo all their macros, templates, etc.
That surprises me not as far as the servers go. It seems the general impression of US Fed employees is they are, in general, not terribly bright in a lot of areas, where my experience is just the opposite. Especially the tech guys. They are well aware of the advantages of Linux.
The agency I worked for didn't use Linux on any servers, AFAIK. Not because they may not have wanted to, but the support load the tech people had to provide so far exceeded their abilities to do a good job, they were always making decisions in a direction of having everything the same, to at least try to give everyone the help they needed.
The problem, despite the big government hoopla, is there's just not enough human beings to do the job well for the tasks assigned. (Not going into the question of efficient operations, etc, as much of that is caused by people outside individual agencies, not the average employee.)
The average employee is prevented, intentionally, from having anything more to do with the servers other than using them to store their data on. I was a supervisor, and I was at my last unit for 5 years before I even knew I could do that. No one bothered to tell me I actually had access to the server's hard drives for file storage. Our unit didn't even have a dedicated IT position, it fell to the administrative officer (total department personnel size of 1) as one of many collaborative duties, and when he passed away, it was given to me as a similar collaborative duty. I was Chief of Maintenance (total dept. size of 3), as well as Environmental officer, Safety Officer, Fleet Manager, and I don't remember what else.
Hi
Before Linux most of those servers would probably have been using Unix. A fair percentage moved from Unix to Bsd too. There are apparently other unix-based OSes out there and a few other odd ones that form almost all the remaining percentage.
Regards from
Tom
Before Linux most of those servers would probably have been using Unix. A fair percentage moved from
>Unix to Bsd too. There are apparently other unix-based OSes out there and a few other odd ones that
>form almost all the remaining percentage.
That could be, that timeframe was long before I was that knowledgeable about computers.
The fed gov department I worked for used MS's server program. This department had mostly small units scattered across the country, and a few overseas. It would be plausible, that when the IT guys in Timbuktu needed onsite help with a local server, the familiar desktop interface simply made it easier to get the job done.
Or, it was part of an overarching negotiating agreement on the purchase price of X number of copies of Windows.
Or, a bit of both! LOL