France Leading Charge Against OOXML

Bergkamp10 writes "As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format waits in ISO limbo, South Africa, Korea, and the Netherlands are now actively pursuing the alternative Open Document Format instead, said the ODF Alliance. The Alliance now claims 500 members, and by their count 13 nations have announced laws or rules that favor the use ODF over Microsoft's Office formats. Those nations include Russia, Malaysia, Japan, France, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, and Norway. The French have been the most aggressive in their rejection of Microsoft's standard; nearly half a million French government employees are being switched to OpenOffice. There has been no similar move in the US, though in a speech at Google last week Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for data to be stored in 'universally accessible formats.'"

Viva la french!

Viva la French for their choice of OpenOffice

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It's just an interim move until OnStrikeOffice comes out.

Re:Viva la french!

Look who's talking. How about the high-profile Hollywood screenwriter strike? And it's not "la French", it's "LES French".

I can't avoid feeling antipathy for the French, but I must concede to them, it takes balls to stand up for their rights the way they do. It's hard to be on strike and lose many days of pay.

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I don't think they lose pay when they go on strike in France. If they ever tried to introduce such a measure then the whole country would go on strike.

Oh hang on.........

Re:Viva la french!

Of course I realise it's just a cheap joke. But I am always puzzled by the contradictory sentiment given by our North American readers. They are always the first to advocate ones freedom to act in matters of employment with "If you don't like a job then go find another". Yet they ridicule the French and other countries whos workers act, to less radical degree, by temporarily withdrawing their services in protest at single issues in the workplace. Do people in the USA have no sense of proportion? Are they conditioned to believe that protesting is somehow less dignified than quitting? Or are they just racists?

I believe there is a strong connection between the Puritan work ethic and the Stockholm effect in conditions of kidnap. To some degree it's culturally normal for the North American to bond with his abuser, to tolerate abuse, to see those who reject abuse as weak and those who organise to collecitvely challenge abuse as "troublemakers". The puzzle, is that this flies directly against their stated values of freedom and democracy.

Re:Viva la french!

Conditioned?

Let me tell you a story.

A few years ago there was a song that got a lot of play at Republican campaign events, that had the lyrics, "I'm proud to be an American/where at least I know I'm free."

Now, being the kind of nerd I am, my immediate reaction was, "How do you know you're free?" and "What do you mean by at least?" I suspect the answer to the former is "Because I was told I'm free," and the latter is "I may not have control over my work or personal privacy, but it's nice to be told that I'm free nonetheless."

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Now, being the kind of nerd I am, my immediate reaction was, "How do you know you're free?" and "What do you mean by at least?"

In the context of that song, it means that "everything might not be perfect in my life, but even if I have nothing else, I have my freedom". You probably don't need to spend a lot of time reading between the lines there.

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So what you are saying is, along as you are not amongst the very worst you have no right to complain, no right to work to achieve a better society, that being the leading society is unimportant, that falling freedoms and workers rights are not a problem un

Re:Viva la french!

Here is my take on it as a libertarian/liberal.

We recognize that left unchecked, the workers will destroy the business. They have essentially done that in the united states. People with high school degrees used collective bargaining to get college level wages and even better retirement plans. Now the industry is collapsing under that weight.

We also recognize that the executive class is currently unchecked and looting and pillaging our large businesses at grossly abusive rates ( I personally cannot see the justification for paying *ANYONE* over about $10 million a year-- much less giving them $150+ million dollars for being fired).

America is big on capitalism. When constrained by social values, it produces a very good outcome. Unproductive activities are terminated fairly rapidly (and everyone loses their job). Costs are aggressively reduced. Until recently the result was more wealth for us on average with some short term damage to a lot, and a small group people's lives destroyed periodically as buggy whips, or osbourne's or whatever went out of fashion.

We also see that socialism will grow to the point that a lot of society becomes unproductive and leeches off of the working classes. Our welfare system was reaching a point that many people born in it, died in it and had more children who would enter the system and keep it expanding.

Until fairly recently, when the capitol requirements became so high and the existing businesses successfully set up fairly high barriers to new competition, it was fairly easy for an american who wanted to be rich to get out and start a business and make it work.

As the rich get a stranglehold on the company- as the republicans become identified with corporations and the wealthy more than with religious and ethical causes- this is going to change. I expect us to swing hard left very soon. High taxes on the rich, limits on executive compensation, limits on corporate power, stronger better social services nets.

Personally, i think the french have it right. I prefer to work 37 hour weeks myself and usually find a way too. It is ridiculous that after decades of constant productivity improvements we STILL have to work 8 hours a day to earn a living- I suppose it is an artifact of the 24 hour day. 7 hours is reasonable but perhaps 6 hours is what we should drive for- or 8 hours 4 days a week.

I was talking to a labor lawyer on a flight last year and he said that labor's ability to strike effectively in the us has basically been removed. For example- you can't do industry strikes if I understand him correctly.
So if you want to strike against amalgamated butter, all the other butter companies keep churning it out. Back in the 60's, you could shut down butter production period by striking at all companies- and even the butter delivery companies.

We are not conditioned to see striking as worse than quitting. We have less unions tho. So when a union effectively strikes and takes away our ability to get garbage collected or police protection- we just get pissed at the strikers. And really- there is an ongoing debate on whether vital services people should have a right to strike.

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A capitalist will make a profit doing whatever he can that is profitable. If he can make a profit from working his workers 16 hours a day he will do so. If you want to work 7 hours a day then he will fire you and get one of the 4% of workers that are unemp

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it's not "la French", it's "LES French"

Considering that he wrote the first word in Spanish and the last word in English, it probably doesn't matter if the middle word isn't proper French.

Re:Viva la french!

Oh well, I guess I'll burn some karma for this topic.

How about the high-profile Hollywood screenwriter strike?

High profile? Are you kidding? Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears, and Lindsy Lohan got more press coverage for drunk driving in one day than this entire strike has garnered this entire time. In fact, the last I heard in the news was how the Screenwriters are screaming conspiracy because they're NOT getting the air-time they want!

And it's not "la French", it's "LES French".

You're right, but I think he was going for "la France" as that's the popular phrase, but this isn't French class. Would it be too ironic to call you a French grammar Nazi?

I can't avoid feeling antipathy for the French

Why?The France are generally great people (as much as I love to give them the hardest time about their poor government programs, shitty service at banks and government offices, or their military victories [albinoblacksheep.com]). Speaking as an American who's engaged to and has been dating a French woman for over 4-years. By no means am I an expert, but I've a fair share of French Culture, sometimes the hard way.

but I must concede to them

That would be a first. You'd definitely take them by surprise. ;P

it takes balls to stand up for their rights the way they do.

See, now I know that you don't understand the French. It doesn't take balls. It doesn't take much at all. Striking in France is practically a hobby. They... Do... It... All... The... Time... Seriously, I cannot remember a time I was in France that didn't have strikes (or riots). I only laugh when CNN or some other outlet covers it as some sort of "end of France" like story.

Sadly, there's a group of people (usually college students) that don't even know half the facts about what they're striking about. All they want to do is participate in a strike. Strikes also go far beyond "right". Just ask all the students and professors that where forcibly turned away from their classes (during important exams no less) by other students that were protesting. "My 'Rights' trump yours" is a more realistic motto for for some.

France is also as media driven as the U.S. All it takes is one news broadcast or paper to say "train works will have to work more for less" to send all government workers on Strike without understanding the situation. Simply put, protest is part of the French culture. Just ask Marie Antoinette, who took away their baguettes and she lost her head. =P

It's hard to be on strike and lose many days of pay.

Tell that to the endless number of people who are not striking and cannot make it to their jobs against their will because they rely on public transportation. How about the harm to their countries economy? For what? The reasons for these strikes are just asinine. They're not trying to abolish the train system, striking to show what it would be like to not have trains isn't going to make a point. They're not trying to layoff the train work force. Striking to show how less workers would mean less trains and poorer service is not going to make a point.

In fact, that extra 6 billion euros a year they will get for moving the retirement age back to 55, instead of 50, could be spent to INCREASE the number of jobs available. Something that France still needs badly. But this small group of French activists don't see it like that. It's "more work, less pay" and that's how the media totes it. Good thing the majority of France isn't that stupid and support president Sarko's reforms despite the hardships the monopolist unions are trying to strangle the French citizens with by forcing them into submission and making their lives hell.

The real story about the recent train strikes isn't the

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Unions are financially supported by workers. So, if they have funds to cover for strikes, good. It's their money, they do whatever they want with it.

About French politics, I can't argue with you, I don't know enough.

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Since the French tend to reverse everything when translating from English, wouldn't Office Open XML become Open Office XML (or possibly XML Open Office)? Am I the only one who things MS had a major case of trademark infringement on this one calling their

Korea

I am surprised Korea is on the list. I remember a story here on slashdot about how many websites there relied on active x code that was incompatible with Vista, so much so that very few in the country were expected to make the switch to Vista.

Re:Korea

So they know the pains of vendor lockin.

Re:Korea

how many websites there relied on active x code that was incompatible with Vista

God don't get me started. I spent a week working at a customer site in S Korea about a month ago. At one point I had to get a deb package for my laptop and asked if I could plug it into their internet facing network. But it was no-go. Whatever URL I put in got back a javascript redirect to a page apparently telling me I had to use IE. Not an easy thing to do in Ubuntu.

So I gave a USB stick to a Korean co-worker and he tried to download the same file. Again no go. Gets the same page. Then he gave me the USB stick back and retried the page on the off chance and the bloody thing worked. This machine only gets you to real web pages if you are on windows and don't have a USB storage device mounted. Its meant to be secure I suppose.

For some reason the Koreans just love hacks like that. I don't know why. I was happy to get back home after that.

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you have an ass and a half? What is that like 3 butt cheeks? wow

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My school (here in SK) fought some worm all last week. They couldn't get rid of it. They re-installed all the computers in the school (except my clean box), but couldn't get rid of it. I tried to tell them that they had better be patched up before they con

Barack Obama called for data to be stored in...

Barack Obama called for data to be stored in 'universally accessible formats.'

And all it takes is for Microsoft to say "Look, our document format is also universally accessible, we even have 'open' in the name," and most people would believe them. Good thing though, Obama seems to have some sort of grasp about the concept of computers and the interwebs.

Re:Barack Obama called for data to be stored in...

Good thing though, Obama seems to have some sort of grasp about the concept of computers and the interwebs.

Or just a good grasp of what his advisors tell him to say, in order to get the vote of the "Slashdot crowd."

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Then just hope he keeps listening to said advisors and work towards those advices, yes?

Re:Barack Obama called for data to be stored in...

I have no problem supporting a candidate who hires and listens to advisers that tell him to talk about the value of open file formats. Heck, acknowledging there's a problem that publicly is a great step. Compare that to another candidate, say someone named Willamy Blimpton, who listens to advisers that tell her to play down the issue or waffle so they can gain the support of Microsoft, and you'll see that the "he just listens to his advisers" isn't all that useful an argument.

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> we even have 'open' in the name,"

an old trick. from the brilliant series "yes minister"

Sir Humphrey Appleby, the supreme bureaucrat says, "I explained that we are calling the white paper 'Open Government' because you always dispose of the difficult bit in the title. It does less harm there than in the statute books. It is the law of inverse relevance: The less you intend to do about something, the more you keep talking about it."

Re:Barack Obama called for data to be stored in...

The less you intend to do about something, the more you keep talking about it.

That would explain this [microsoft.com] Vista site then.

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There's some irony in that Obama's technology proposal on docstoc is a Word document and that you can't download it without logging in.

Not France, the UK is!

The UK is even going as far as open sourcing their data!

Not quite that open yet

Would they let me cvs changes I made back in?

*ducks*

UK has a very bad record on this

The UK has had a policy of equal consideration for open source solutions for years now. Unfortunately there are still many cases of corruption -- Microsoft's recent "Schools 2000" (I think that was the name, but possibly not) program, for instance, where it gets a monopoly in every school, and cases where the best bidders on non-IT contracts have been told that they "said all the right things, except that they didn't use the word 'Microsoft'".

Unfortunately it's easy for a country to say it supports open standards, just as it's easy for a country to say it's "helping" in Iraq. Reality is often much different.

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I think you mean C2k - Classroom 2000, and the project has been rolled out across Northern Ireland as a test bed. The cost of the project is put at £400 million, for help for 400,000 students over the period of the project. For that money it's hard n

France...

There have been some very bad things happening lately in France like the Olivennes report which is to lead us to some massive and generalized internet filtering (this has already been discussed on slashdot here : http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/1355220&from=rss [slashdot.org]) and having a president who is a friend of major media corporations doesn't help in this regard. I guess the ODF support is at least something I can be proud of in my country. And I definitely hope it will last as Sarkozy makes me kind of pessimistic both for French and European future (sadly, not only in a technology-related fashion)

Two different replies to this.

From two coworkers not directly related to computer science:

- What? Everybody uses Word.

- Oh, dear god, please let them reach a consensus.

Guess which one works as the step between scientific writers and printing services.

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What, don't all scientific writers use some form of TeX? I'm shocked. Shocked to the core!

Re:Two different replies to this.

What, don't all scientific writers use some form of TeX? I'm shocked. Shocked to the core!

Some day they'll discover that Word's binary format is actually Microsoft's best attempt to encrypt TeX source. :)

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Some day they'll discover that Word's binary format is actually Microsoft's best attempt to encrypt TeX source. :)

Maybe not the binary .doc format, but you should take a look at Microsoft's Rich Text Format [wikipedia.org] and consider how much of it was inspired by (La)

Great, now the U.K. has to support Microsoft.

The general opinion of many of the Brits I've known has been: "if France is for it, there's got to be something wrong with it." Maybe the British can still support OOXML, but the French will pronounce the acronym as "oohjemel" while the British will annoy the French by pronouncing it "oxemul".

- Greg

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Actually, the french tend to invert acronyms (for example, "OTAN" instead of "NATO"), so I would expect them to use LMXOO.

Of course, now that France is surrendering to open formats, the americans will have no choice but to create a new "Freedom Office", co

Re:Great, now the U.K. has to support Microsoft.

We translate acronyms (how arrogant!)
AIDS = SIDA
kB = kO
OPEC = OPEP
And the list goes on. We do that less than the French speaking Canadians though... KFC = PFK is my favorite.

Re:Great, now the U.K. has to support Microsoft.

We translate acronyms (how arrogant!) AIDS = SIDA kB = kO OPEC = OPEP

Except for some wildly used acronyms like CD-ROM and DVD-ROM that the académie française decided would be written "cédérome" and "dévédérome", respectively. Pathetic... (I'm a native french speaker by the way).

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the french tend to invert acronyms (for example, "OTAN" instead of "NATO")

I really, really hope you're trying to make a joke and that you don't really believe that... The reason the French refer to NATO as OTAN is that they translate just about everythin

Really Accessible

Barack Obama called for data to be stored in 'universally accessible formats.'

Like printouts?

France submitted 591 comments on the OOXML spec

here they are: http://www.dis29500.org/category/countries/france/ [dis29500.org] nearly as much as the UK and more than twice the USA total. Raw totals of comments can be a bit missleading, but the UK, France and the USA were the top three in terms of numbers of comments. That kind of indicates the level of detail with which they looked at the standard, not the depth of feeling they have about it and how resistant they will be to MS lobbying during March (they have 30 days after the BRM to change their votes - it will be a crazy amount of lobbying and no doubt there will be more corruption/allegations of corruption)

Re:Barack Obama called for...

From what I have read about Obama, when he takes a position for/against an issue, he really educates himself about it before making the decision. He is not the type to just accept what his advisors tell him.

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When it comes to technology politicians are clueless, with few exceptions. However, the fact that he bothers to pander to someone about it means that the issue has made at least some headway.

Re:Barack Obama called for...

Apparently he's also pro network neutrality: http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/ [senate.gov]

Becasue OOXML is absolutely *not* open

>>Law that says i need to use odf format, is as bad as using M$.

Wrong. ODF is honestly open, OOXML is absolutely *not* open. In the OOXML specs there are several sections that essentially say: "do this the same as in Word-95" but the Word-95 specs are still closed.

BTW: ODF does not exclude msft. There are pluggins that allow ms-office to work just fine with ODF. Also, msft is entirely free to incorporate ODF if msft so choses. Msft's claims that ODF excludes msft is pure bullsh!t.

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Well, I also think that the big distinction is: You're allowed to use whatever format you damned well please. In most cases where they're talking about a government adopting "open formats", they're talking about using open formats for specific kinds of co

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But is the law saying that? If so, I agree, it's broken. OTOH, if the law says "Official document formats must meet critera FOO, BAR, and BAZ in terms of accessibility, etc..." is fine. If that precludes using OOXML, tough titty for MS.

Free choice for whom?

It makes perfectly sense for the government to standardize when practical on some formats for its own documents, so citizens won't have to have converters for zillions of different formats, just in order to talk to the government. In this regard, the government is like any other big organization, and should have the free choice you seem to advocate against.

Where the free choice of the government should be limited is that they should not be allowed standardize on formats that are entangled with legal limitations.

Apart from that, we can argue on technical merits on what formats to standardize on.

 

Re:ODF?

The ODF (that would be Foundation) was never in charge of the ODF file formats. They just had a confusing name. The ODF format was created by OASIS [oasis-open.org]