French Government Recommends Standardizing on ODF 210
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "From the InfoWorld article:
All French government publications should be made available in OpenDocument Format (ODF), according to a report commissioned by the French prime minister. The new report
also suggests that France ask its European partners to do likewise when exchanging documents at a European level. It is recommended that the government will fund a research center dedicated to open-source software security as well, adds the article."
Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing a product with a business method.
A monopoly is created and maintained through business tactics (i.e. flooding the market with (initially) cheap product to kill off competition, strongarming resellers and OEMs, etc).
An open standard, on the other hand is just a tool. If a better tool is made available, there's nothing preventing the market from switching over to the new tool and phasing out the old one (i.e. the transition from ISA to PCI)
Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil (Score:5, Insightful)
Once Again Europe shows how it ought to be done... (Score:2, Insightful)
The French attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
So France is actually a pretty good place to promote ODF. It checks all the boxes. It's a standard. Any particular Francophone bits of it, the French government can influence by providing support. It is not anti-American but it is independent of America. Work on French support for ODF brings together France, Belgium, the doms and toms, Canada and Francophone Africa - so it is another small step in building links in the French speaking world.
And ODF should be relatively easy to sell to the bureaucracy. Gentlemen and ladies, this is a French solution to an international problem. No longer will we bound by the constraints of the Anglo-Saxons...
The only negative is that, in accordance with the immutable rules of French abbreviations, they will want to call it FDO.
Why doesn't this sort of thing happen more often ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the main reason why this sort of thing (ODF and open source in general) is not more widely accepted is money (tco, licenses, etc) or political/economic pressure (gates/bush pressuring someone to spend their $ the right way).
I think the main reason why ODF/Open source/etc is not more widely accepted is reluctance to change.
To butcher a Dune quote, "They think in circles. Their minds resist squares"
A lot of businesses (and lets face it, government administration is a business) know that pdf/ms-doc works, they have been using it for a long time. They are used to the crappy interface, they are used to the updates/pop ups/etc. They are used to the fact that it works and they are used to the error messages that pop up. They and their accountants are used to the monthly charges for PDF/office software.
It is very, very hard to beat/argue against that sort of habbit. Yes, to us logical slashdotters (l0lz111) ODF makes perfect sense. Its great, we should bathe in it, eat it and breath it. It has word 'open' in it? great! More please!
But a lot of the established businesses/governments/organisations, it is not the same. An argument "but it is cheaper" or "but it is better" can be meat with "but what we have works well enough" and "but we have always done it this way and there has never been a problem" and then there is of course "why fix it if it isn't broken?" and "ok but what if we change over and it doesn't work?"
It is very hard to argue against established procedures/models/etc. What is plain to technical people is not always so to managers and accountants (often the same person). My point? More technical people in management.
So yeah, big cheers to the French government. they are definitely doing the right thing, in the right way.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why doesn't this sort of thing happen more ofte (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't think of a computing standards process that has hurt innovation. Certainly there are plenty examples of standards that have succeded versus their proprietary counterparts (TCP/IP instead of NetBEUI or AppleTalk, the HTTP and HTML instead of MSN or Rainman (AOL's proprietary page definition language)).
If someone has a great new idea, why can't they get it added to an existing open standard? Or even create a competing open standard. If it is innovative enough, it will be adopted. Standards aren't a monopoly. Standards still have to compete for mindshare.
The problem with open standards, for companies like Microsoft, is that they discourage lock in. If every word processor could edit all your files with full fidelity, you would have a lot less incentive to stick to Microsoft Word. If all server software worked perfectly with Microsoft Windows clients, there would be a lot less Microsoft server licences sold.
Re:ohhh, finally a standard! (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing that this hasn't happened yet, though, isn't it? Europe's entire IT economy dependent on a single corporation somewhere in the US, and they don't seem to mind.
What if tomorrow US law causes Microsoft to make changes to Windows (say, to enforce the DMCA somehow), and Microsoft decide to keep a single code base in the rest of the world (less effort, since the changes are deep in the kernel)? If asking Microsoft politely for a 'clean' version fails, how would you prevent this scenario - legislation? Might work, but only partially (witness the fines from recent history against Microsoft in the EU). This is only one example, admittably highly speculative; but nations need to consider worst-case scenarios.
And this is to say nothing about nations which have a less-friendly relationship with the US. What if the US and China find themselves at war tomorrow, and Microsoft immediately stop releasing patches for Chinese IP addresses? Will the Chinese IT war effort be contingent upon successful hacking of WGA and so forth? Yes, this is a possible fix, but again - how can they not consider the worst-case scenario where this does not work very well?
More than Napoleon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than assuming a cult of Napoleon and the Revolution, I would say they just are better bureaucrats. A lot of US political culture assumes the market "takes care of itself", and is almost ideologically against state intervention, to the point the US are the last country still using medieval units of measure because no one enforces the metric system.
In France (and most other countries in Europe) the government can own large strategic companies (Renault, for example) and that's considered alright; I do not know what US citizens would say if Bush tried to buy Ford for the government for "strategic economic reasons". Frenchmen are mostly fine with the idea of a state intervening directly into the economy.
Now that's true that politicians in charge of the economy can do a lot of bullshit, but so can CEOs (one word, Enron). The French system may be stiffer and less adaptable, but allows top-down decisions to trickle down better.
Probably FOD, "Format OpenDocument", as OpenDocument is a proper noun.
Buying support (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't doubt that Microsoft will fight this and attempt to drag it out as long as possible, but I'm not convinced that Microsoft will be able to buy its way into French politics, or many other countries. The US Federal Government is quite an unusual form of democracy when compared with the rest of the world, considering some of the things that seem to go on. Not every democracy is designed such that mega-corporations to fund both sides of a two party system and effectively buy their favourite policies. If it were so easy outside the US, I doubt Microsoft would have had so many problems with the European Union already.
Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil (Score:3, Insightful)
In general commercial terms, I agree that legislation shouldn't (usually) require companies to avoid innovation -- that's how innovation happens, after all. With government entities, though, I have no problem with solid standards being adopted for communicating information. I'd quite happily accept a mandate stating that government documents have to be available in ASCII text, although these days HTML would probably be better since it'd allow for better markup and internationalisation.
The problem with innovative technologies is that with a few exceptions, they typically focus on the largest part of the market, and this ignores all sorts of niche markets. (eg. Disabled people, people who don't use Windows or have access to a major web browser, people who don't have cell phones, and whatever else.) This is where standards shine, if they're designed well, because it lets the people in the niche areas develop their own tools for handling the standard formats instead of having to hope that someone in the commercial world will decide it worthwhile to take notice of them. The fact that they're standards means that there's enough time (without change) for tools to actually be developed and be useful. And this is why organisations whose job it is to communicate should be adopting standards to do so, rather than trying to innovate too much.
Besides, vanilla or not, there's nothing wrong or limited with ODF if your goal is to communicate information, and this is what most government entities will be aiming to do.
Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil (Score:5, Insightful)
The grandparent would seem to be a reasonably well masked troll, since the counterpoints to this statement are obvious and well rehearsed here on slashdot. But I'll throw my 2 cents into the pot.
In addition to the other fine comments regarding standards, let us not forget that this proposes an exchange standard. There's nothing stopping anyone from using propietary MS Word formats all the way until they need to send the document to someone in the French (and hopefully later the EU ) government. Well, there's nothing stopping anyone as long as MS implements the standard. Do they?
The problem with the current situation is the presence of de-facto propietary standard. Other word processors can't compete because everyone already has Word, and thus people buying new software want ot be able to read and write the latest propietary Word documents. MS exploits this, using it as a tool to ensure the eventual adoptation of it's newer version releases. This is good short term business strategy, but it's harmful for the rest of us. In that sense one can see this as the workings of the free market. If MS were a more benevolent monopolist, allowing open access to its document standards so other OS's and Word Processor developers could follow their standards, there would almost certainly be less anti-monopoly activity against them. One could say they are following, in tradtional corporate strategy, a greedy algorithm to formulate its strategy.
Re:fair? (Score:2, Insightful)
What does that have to do with "IT economy" ? (Score:3, Insightful)
What does that have to do with the IT sector? Or do you mean that the entire economy is based on IT?
If it's the former, then that's wrong. IT is (or shoud be) just a tool that you use to get your work done. That's the same whether it's coordinating a fleet of taxis or running a governement or anything else. "making" and "selling" software is such a miniscule part of the economy that it's truly bizarre that it is such a focus of attention.
Pretty much every aspect of society and the economy nowadays is depended in someway on using ICT for most basic activities.
That's pretty scary when you consider that nearly each and every board room, meeting room and government office has a system that is exposed to the net with what amount to standardized backdoors into the system. Yes standardized, the same exploit working on 90% of the desktops can be called standard. In many cases there are even microphones built into or attached to the systems which can be activated.
That's really scary when you realize that no one outside of the original vendor can do code audits. It's the only one with access to or use of the source code. So in principle anything could be hidden there on purpose or by accident, by the vendor or by intruders. So called Anti-virus programs detect massproduced intrusion tools, but only after they've been collected and analysed. Custom or targeted intrusions using code that is not wide spread have a much lower chance of detection.
So making a backdoor for the one brand /model of system gives you a backdoor into not just part of the IT sector, but really a majority of the rest of the EU economy. France's move is a good one. Moving to open standards for government documents, will enable at the least diversification. Who knows how big the final gain will be. Few if any really predicted how (pre-spam) e-mail (aka SMTP + ISO-8859-x) would take off and drive advancement. Few if any really predicted that the WWW (aka HTTP + HTML) would take off and drive all kinds of improvement. However, everyone, even Chairman Gates' fanbois and catamites, is experiencing a need for document interoperability. Interoperability is something which we have seen can only be provided by open standards, in this case OpenDocument.
Re:The French attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
And the US has a confused view of the French. Especially recently.
Re:You can have any flavor you like, if it's vanil (Score:5, Insightful)
The first four you mention are all openly defined and stable, if perhaps encumbered with patents. They're implemented by literally thousands of small and large software applications. DOC is a messy unpublished format (I hesitate to use the word "standard") and it's a great effort for other vendors to reverse-engineer it, a situation MS is very happy with and is unhappy if required to use a less obscure format.
As for "it's what people have always used", you are obviously very green (well, in comparison with myself). In the early 80s, "everyone" used WordStar. In the late 80s, "everyone" used WordPerfect. Only with Windows did MS leverage its inside knowledge of the OS and its drivers to take a lead with WinWord. The early versions took great pains to be able to use WordPerfect files (which of course were also prorietary, but well-understood) and to emulate its features.
By all accounts, the DOC format is full of kludges and is not somethgn to be proud of or emualte by choice. I doubt I am alone in having Word documents corrupt spontaneously, or balloon unaccountably to gigantic sizes.
Re:Breaking news from Paris (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has threatened to invade France to reimpose "order" on the chaos of the ODF. France has pre-emptively surrendered.
This idotic attempt at making fun should not call for an answer, but it is offensive enough that I'm making one. France casualties in WWI alone were higher than the total of USA casualties among all wars they fought, american civil war included, while our population ratio has been a steady one fifth of yours (sources : http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004615.html [infoplease.com], http://europeanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/bl ww1castable.htm [about.com]). WWII was a sad mess, we were thrown to war without adequate preparation by politicians who betrayed us, and we were beaten fair and square by Germany (which was a nation of strong warriorship traditions too). So, I don't think we need to take any lesson of fighting spirit from anyone, considering that after France liberation in WWII our Free French Forces kept fighting along with Allied forces all the way up to Berlin.
But if you still want to dig into this, let me just remind you that we're currently the only european nation with independent nuclear power with a worldwide strike capacity (usa included, in case you ask).
We are currently a pacific nation, and being perceived as harmless may not be bad advertising ; but don't get fooled by your own propaganda. We're not in the habit of making the same mistakes twice, and any hostile power would have a surprise trying to play fool with us.
Re:Breaking news from Paris (Score:4, Insightful)
As an American who has always been treated well whenever I've visited France, I'm somewhat embarassed by the tired old "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes. I think that America's popular disdain for France stems from a perception (much of it quite valid) that France has recently adopted certain foreign and domestic policies that work against our interests. In fact, it is a common perception in America that many of these French policies were adopted for the primary purpose of frustrating what the French people perceive (much of it quite validly) as American hegemony. Let's face it, while France was correct in opposing war with Iraq, your prime minister's (then foreign minister's) world tour to oppose the war wasn't purely for altruistic motives; France wanted to test the waters to see if it could unite other countries in opposition to American foreign policies in general. Many Americans also view France's foreign policies as over-reliant on diplomacy without any real teeth, especially when one party involved clearly can't/won't offer what the other parties require. Of course, France's over-reliance on diplomacy isn't as big a sin as America's disgusting under-reliance on it. Hopefully one day soon American and French foreign policies and methods will become most closer together, and "freedom fries" and "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes will just be an embarassing footnote in the history books.
Re:Breaking news from Paris (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with your reply. Up until Napleon's final defeat, and later France's humiliating loss in the Franco-Prussian War, France had for centuries been one of the most successful warrior nations on the planet.[...]That said, France does sometimes repeat its mistakes in war. From the citadel of Bitche up through the Maginot line and later Dien Bien Phu, France took a very long time to realize the limitations of fixed defenses.
Thank you for having taken the time to write a documented answer. Truth is, France hasn't really been an expansionist country for most of its existence, save Louis the XIVth and Napoleonics ventures. Most of the time, we had to fight in wars we didn't choose to engage in, inside our boundaries, with our civilians in the front line. This creates an enormous difference between us and the USA. We know the true price of war, we paid more than our share in blood. I don't think any US citizen can imagine the scale of it ; just to stick to recent history, 2 out of my 4 grand-grand fathers died in ww1, 1 was maimed for life. Only 1 on 4 lived through it untouched. Both my grand fathers were POW for 5 years in Germany in WWII ; luckily, none died, but it was a close call for one who faced execution after his 2nd evasion attempt. And we are a lucky family !
Nonetheless, we didn't do bad under those adverse conditions, retaining most of our boundaries throughout centuries. When we finaly ventured into expansion wars under Napoleon's rule, it took the whole Europe to ally to bring us back home. Even though, we left a legacy of laws and public services behind us, as well as seeds of democracy for most of the countries we invaded. But truly, we were never really at ease outside home. This explaining probably our choice of fixed defenses as a primary tactical tool.
As an American who has always been treated well whenever I've visited France,[...]I think that America's popular disdain for France stems from a perception (much of it quite valid) that France has recently adopted certain foreign and domestic policies that work against our interests. In fact, it is a common perception in America that many of these French policies were adopted for the primary purpose of frustrating what the French people perceive (much of it quite validly) as American hegemony.
There, I have to disagree, I fear (while I wouldn't treat you bad for your opinion). The clear feeling here is that you know jack about Islamic terrorism, to put it mildly, while we've been confronted to it for 20 years already. Mind you, the algerian GIA even hijacked a plane in the intent of throwing it somewhere in Paris, and we managed to forcefully land it, kill the terrorists and rescue the hostages before they had time to reach "La défense" tower. We had bombs in the subway, and we live with a combined army-police watching force in all stations and airport since then. In the same time, we gave support to Algeria get rid by themselves of their terrorists, with results. Not to say we are sheltred from terrorism, but we deal with it since longer than you, we have better overall results, and yet we didn't felt the need to invade Switzerland to make our point through, we didn't enforce anything remotely as coercitive as the PATRIOT act, and we didn't see fit to torture some unnamed prisonners on a remote island. I don't think that would have been supportive for us to go forward on the sloppy road the USA are on for the fun of it, and really, I think the reasons why we didn't go, and the way we explained them, were a much better support ; it takes a true friend to give impopular advices.