ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out 74
Andy Updegrove writes "As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, has appointed a Managing Director with strong European experience (Marino Marcich), and is lobbying countries globally to vote for ODF in ISO. Overall, the picture is one of a growing organization that plans to be around for awhile, and particularly hopes to make its impact in Europe, from which a large number of its members have arrived, where governmental interest in ODF is highest, and risks to government CIOS therefore lowest."
Full list of members: (Score:5, Informative)
I note that Apple is not a member - I suggest all slashdotters write to Apple to support ODF & join this alliance. After all, Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
Re:Full list of members: (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenOffice.org also does not run natively on Mac OS X. There is a clunky X11 version which is slow and horrible. I've heard of Koffice running on OS X but not seen it working myself.
So, with no native applications using ODF on the Mac it's not surprising that Apple aren't a current supporter. I agree that AppleWorks and iWork should add on support for it in the future. I would be great to see an ODF framework released for the Mac that can translate between PDF/Quartz and ODF that would allow documents to be saved in and imported via ODF easliy for all applications in the future. This would be a huge boon for OS X, just like native support for PDF was to me when OS X was first released.
Re:Full list of members: (Score:1, Informative)
NeoOffice, on the other hand, is an OO.o fork that runs just fine and is much ahead of the OSX X11 version of OO.o. Too bad it's still based on OO.o 1.1 and can only read ODF...
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
Too bad such a thing doesn't make sense. PDF/Quartz is a presentation format, and contains information like "draw this character at these coordinates," while ODF needs semantic information like "this text string is the title of the document, which happens to be of type 'thesis.'" Converting from
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
What I said didn't make sense was going backwards -- from PDF to ODF, which is what I thought you were asking for in your previous post (i.e. instantly having "ODF support" from all applications by virtually "printing," which is how the PDF support works).
Re:Full list of members: (Score:1)
The quicker they open all their code, the quicker people are going to do it. FOSS people are generally only interested in helping people who reciprocate.
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
Re:Full list of members: (Score:1)
On reading though that again, I realised that I was using "they" to refer to Apple, when in fact, grammatically, it was representing OO.o. Another human here
Re:Full list of members: (Score:1)
Keynote does some pretty fantastic stuff that is probably not compatible with the ODF presentation format. Otherwise, it would be great, even if ODF has to be revised to handle keynote.
Re:Full list of members: (Score:2)
They're not. [apple.com]
ODF support would be nice though.
Re:Full list of members: (Score:1)
Re:138....? (Score:3, Informative)
This is encouraging (Score:2)
- Andrew
Re:This is encouraging (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Document Format (odf, or
As it stands right now, ODF is nothing more than a rallying cry. The geeks of the world are tired of being held a slave to business demands. They don't want to have to support Microsoft Word, they want more flexibility, more control, and more fun. As of right now, they don't have the tools to do any of it. The tools are easy enough to build, given the right motivation, but what tools nee
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
> from anywhere in the enterprise, with flexible security and controls that integrates into the enterprise architecture.
> That might seem like a lot of buzzwords jammed into one little sentence, so I'll expand on that. Instead of saving your
> document to a file, it will save it into a server. The server will save the document, and save subsequent changes. It
> will have the
Re:This is encouraging (Score:1)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
there were some talks about svn ability to pipe data through other software for storage or ability to work on "container" files (like zip in odf), but that would still be insuffici
Re:This is encouraging (Score:1)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:1)
So, the whole thing would be like SVN on steroids, with a nice GUI i
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
if i understood you correctly, keeping files on a shared location is in no way comparable to versioning server that can branch data, merge changes, manage commits/updates...
Re:This is encouraging (Score:1)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:1)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:1)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
- Andrew
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
Proprietary standards should be unnecessary with languages like XML (though it does create rather verbose files). It's not open formats that are needed, it's
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
Re:This is encouraging (Score:2)
The hard part (Score:3, Insightful)
The hard part will be keeping infighting to a minimum. Many times, organizations like this set out with great intentions and admirable goals, only to become very ineffective when infighting and internal empire-building take place.
Re:The hard part (Score:1)
Re:The hard part (Score:2)
Agreed. North American infighting is far more efficient.
Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
I have a lot of reservations about getting the government involved with open source standards. The whole idea of government in the first place seems anti open source, anti competitive to me.
Then there are privacy concerns. Nowadays, governments all over the world are bent on destroying our civil liberties. Especially since they are so involved in forcing DRM and copyrights on us. Once they are involved, what's to stop them from forcing design decisions upon the stand
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:2)
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but...
Yes, you're just being paranoid. Governments are run by civil servants who just love standards and if they come on board then it forces everyone else to. If you can only submit somethign to your local govenment in ODF then you're not going to use M$ Word, are you? Unless, of course, M$ Word has embraced the ODF. See how it works.
And, at the end of the day, if governments use ODF to write the plans for the Doomsday Machine it's not a misuse of the ODF anymore than it'
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not a government action...these are members of governmental organizations participating to come up with a standard. Governments become a problem when they mandate (they got da guns, doncha know) a standard without really working through an open process. In this case, there are enough other players, and there is no good way to mandate via force, so that this remains an open participatory exer
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
By making it difficult to impossible to pass documents easily to other programs, Microsoft has forced a monopoly of convenience. An ODF standard, with enough large organization participants, can make interactivity simpler, make translation seamless, and open the door for other players in the Office Suite game.
Microsoft only has guns/monopoly because of government protection of their patents. Without this cartel, open standards would pro
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
In the beginning of Microsoft Word when they were not the uber suite, they suppo
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:2)
A democratic government getting involved in open standards, in so much as using them, allows that government to be free of vendor lock-in for itself and its citizens viewing and using its own documents.
As for privacy concerns, surely you would be more worried about a government that sticks with proprietry or secret standards and formats for its documents than one, that considers a well designed and documented standard with no apparent DRM involved?
As for causing deat
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
Seriously, you might want to take a chill pill, ritalin, or whatever you use to calm down. I used to work for the US government and I can tell you that they are so far in bed with Microsoft that they aren't going to support ODF at all unless Microsoft does. Microsoft's usual "embrace and extend" strategy won't work with ODF, so they are trying to ignore it for the most part. If I was you, I'd stop worrying about whether ODF mig
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
Yes, I do believe all governments, including the USA, are evil. Also, your point about them being in bed with Microsoft is well taken.
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:2)
Microsoft's usual "embrace and extend" strategy won't work with ODF, so they are trying to ignore it for the most part.
What makes you think this? Right now they are still attempting to push several less standard "standards" so they have less work, but should those efforts fail what is stopping them from using the usual embrace and extend? HTML is a more stringently defined and controlled standard, but they've managed to embrace and extend it just fine. No, they are not ignoring it because they have no ot
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
Politicians != Government (Score:2, Informative)
I think you're confusing government bureaucrats with politicians. Having worked for a government IT bureau, I can say that open documents would be welcomed and would have made our lives a hell of a lot easier. My team was charged with managing the 13 step process of bill creation and adoption for the legislature, which included no less than 6 legacy program
Re:Oh great, the government again (Score:1)
Yes you are paranoid -govts and standards (Score:2)
Any real interoperabilty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there a free, small and easy to install plug-in that provides ODF import in popular versions of MS Office?
I can't just send ODF files to people with attached note "Download 50MB of OpenOffice or switch to Linux and KOffice".
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:2)
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:2)
No point complaining about size when the nearest competitor is much larger... If you don't like downloading 75mb of openoffice, you can always buy a copy on CD.
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:2)
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:2)
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lastly, what about when Office2007 comes out, and the formats change? It'll take months or years for people to reverse-engineer the new formats.
The other thing that bugs me is that it's mostly basic text that people are sending in Word form. I mean, it's like a list of twenty names and times, and they make a Word file that could just as easily be a
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:1)
You can if they ask you to.
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:5, Insightful)
It never ceases to amaze me the lemming mentality of Business when it come to using propriety formats and how they seem to think that it allows for portability and interoperability (Biz talk) when that format is under the control (ie. Intellectual Property) of one company. What is even stranger is that format sometimes cannot even be read properly by the same companies software after a few years. So if you are part of a council, hall of records
Please look at the history of standards, get yourself in the right frame of mind before you do and it is quite fascinating, particularly when you relate it to today's society.
Yes I have worked in a Standards Laboratory hence my signature.
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:1)
Well, most companies are not worried about document formats, they just want to be able to communicate with anybody (within the company or outside of it) in a straightforward way. At the moment, using MS Office provides the way to do that
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:2, Interesting)
Same interoperability we've had for years.
Re:Any real interoperabilty? (Score:1)
Obligatory Russia joke.. (Score:1)
Show Me Da Money! (Score:2)
If ODF can help a taxpayer-funded government save $$$ in the long run, it sounds like a good thing.
I totally agree with the security & privacy reasons for ODF, but cutting costs may be more important to some gov'ts (read: voters!) This is not an anti-vendor, just pro-taxpayer.
risks to government CIOS? (Score:2)
It is "Communication Institute for Online Scholarship" or the plural of "Chief Information Officer" according to Google.
The original article has "CIOs" (note the lower-case "s") suggesting the latter usage, but it still could be anything. Creepy Informal Office Sleepover?
A decent writer/editor would have corrected, explained or expanded that.
YAMLF? (Score:1)
Wow an open source markup language for sharing documents! What innovation! >:->
I wonder if it'll become as highly used as TeX, Postscript or RTF?
Marino Marcich ? European ? (Score:2)
In his resume they focus on his Latin American experience, maybe the ODF is confusing Europe and Latin America ?
(on the up side Mr Marchich employer is using apache on FreeBsd so they cannot be all bad
Anyway it is a little bit worrying when the people that are supposed to support the "good side" are using the same processes as the "bad guy".
I would not mind if the ODF alliance would hire M. Marchick as a consultant,
Re:FRIST STOP (Score:1)
Just remember: (Score:2)
Now, why would you - you, not some corporation, but you, personally - want to shut anyone out?
Sharepoint, but for ODF documents (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately (or fortunately for my income), one of my consulting customers liked an early prototype and bought out the rights (unfortunately making it proprietary) and funded me for several months to improve it. They had me discard the OpenOffice.org backend and only support Microsoft Office documents, which was also too bad.
There are now some good open source projects like Daisy that support ODF.