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A comment on Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major savings. Parent comment

Re:Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major s... by bad_user on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @08:30AM (#10418729)
OOXML only pretends to be text based, but that's not true and it only pretends to be "open" and that's not true either.

The real open format is ODF, which Microsoft is supporting somewhat but with warnings and only because they were forced to do it. That's still better than Google Docs though as GDocs can only import ODF. Which is quite ironic.

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Re:Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major s... by dogma1138 on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @09:18AM (#10418906)
They weren't forced to support anything, ODF is an OASIS standard these days MSFT of which is a founding member.

There was quite an upheaval when ODF development moved into OASIS from W3C and included quite a few patents, and OpenOffice at the time wanted to drop support for the new ODF features.

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Re:Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major s... by bad_user on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @09:27AM (#10418957)
I should clarify - Microsoft was forced by their clients to do it. Amongst Microsoft's most important clients are governments, many of which demanded the use of standards for documents, like PDF for viewable documents or ISO/IEC 26300 for editable documents, which is the ODF standard. Some government institutions in Europe even moved to LibreOffice. Google does not have such clients for their online office suite. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption
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Re:Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major s... by dogma1138 on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @09:37AM (#10419000)
"Forced" is used way too loosely, many people use the NATO example but they never read the fine print.

NATO calls for a recommended support for ODF, but a mandatory support Office Open XML

Office Open XML: Mandatory: Standard ECMA-376, Ed. 1: December 2006, Office Open XML File Formats.

Open Document Format:

Recommended: ISO/IEC 26300:2006, Information technology -- Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.

https://nhqc3s.hq.nato.int/Apps/Architecture/NISP/volume3/ap...

Same goes for many other examples especially from the governmental sector.

If MSFT wanted to bury ODF they might have managed to do so, since they've managed to get it under OASIS and tag a RAND clause into the ODF license they really don't care. EEE :)

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Re:Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major s... by bad_user on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:37AM (#10419410)
So I'm not aware of any RAND clauses or harmful patents that made it into the ODF standard. Quite the contrary, afaik ODF is under "RF On Limited Terms", which means that all patents must be licensed for everyone's use, for free, with some provisions that are reasonable. We are not talking about RAND. And I'm not a lawyer, but if the FSF supports ODF and given they've got lawyers and have had a no compromise policy, I trust that ODF is safe. See: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/odf-oasis.html

So care to provide some references?

PS: I wasn't thinking of NATO, but of individual countries. ODF (and not OOXML) is mandatory in France, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Russia and it's becoming mandatory in Italy.

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