Document Freedom day
Happy Document Freedom day!
Today would be a great day to install OpenOffice.org or Lotus Symphony if you haven’t already. If you already use these great tools then today would be a great day to show them to someone else.
The Open Document Format is a well designed modern format which any system creating documents for use in a wordprocessor, spreadsheet or presentation tool can use. Over the last decade or so the free market in office suites has basically been destroyed by the Microsoft monopoly. This happened not because Microsoft were producing better software, the users of Smartsuite, Wordperfect etc. were really quite happy with their software. It happened because Microsoft got themselves into a position where the format of choice for exchanging documents was .doc and .xls and .ppt. It became the defacto standard. The other products reverse engineered this binary format so they could support this defacto standard, but people discovered that the best way to reliably interchange the Microsoft owned format was to use Microsoft software. Not much of a surprise there really. Microsoft won a lot of business by ensuring a lack of a level playing field.
Open Document Format or ODF is an XML based file format which is designed not to just be the format used by one application but by all of them. Microsoft could support ODF as a native file format for Microsoft Office if they wanted to. It is not a software engineering challenge that they can’t rise to. They don’t want to because it would end their convenient distorted marketplace. Moving to ODF as the normal way of interchanging documents between businesses in future will level the playing field and re-enable a free market and free choice of software applications.
The Microsoft binary formats are at the end of their life. Now is the time to choose which direction to go forward. Microsoft want us to use their OOXML format. They desperately want to protect their position and revenue stream, which is understandable,but not my problem.
Document Freedom is in your interest, tell someone about it today.