One city's move to open source

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open format means accessible documents: For apublic administration whose work is to bemade for the public, I think that the rationale for supporting open formats that anyone can read, use and modify without being required first to buy a Microsoft product that runs on a Microsoft platform is anexcellent decision.
The core of the decision is to support open formats that in the long run remain as a standard that canbe implemented and used on all platforms (including Windows).
I don't think that Microsoft will sustain its position of not supporting Open<ocument. The documents are creations of users, and users have the legitimate right to create and exchange documents without requiring the use of a third party software.
In the past, the "OpenDocument" standard used to be RTF, until Microsoft decided to compromize it somuch that it was no longer interoperable.
I see the OpenDocument initiative really important, and with the same importance as the adoption of HTML and XML as worldwide interoperable open standards for the web.
People that still want to use Word will request the support of OpenDocument in Office, or they will moveto other softwares.
I am really sure that even if Microsoft does not want to support this format, there will be plethores of extensions for MSOffice that will provide the necessary converter addons (including those in the OpenOffice package) that will allow Word or Excel to process these OpenDocument files (both for reading and saving).

The world needs open standards, and these standards create more value and allow more innovations. They are good for the business. Let's not forget the huge benefits and business opportunities that HTML and XML have generated worldwide, and even Microsoft has made huge profits from it, once it decided to embrace (partly) the interoperable web standards.

I hope that Microsoft will not repeat its past errors when it first attempted to create a proprietary web technology in MSN. Thanks now, this technology was abandonned in 1997, and I don't think that Microsoft hasto regreat this decision. The same is true for other important interoperable standards like:
* ISO 10646 and Unicode that hasreplaced the nightmare of incompatible charsets
* JPEG, MPEG, PNG, SVG, that did the same in the interoperability of the many graphic formats
* the TCP/IP protocol stack that has completely replaced the proprietary NetBEUI or IPX/SPX networking stacks
The key here is not being open-source, it's the fact that they are open formats, that anyone can implement without being restricted to using a single-vendor licencing scheme and softwares.
These standards allow archiving andreusing the work for a long time. They caneven be reimplemented later once a major vendor has decided to nomore support it. For future software migrations, open standards mean that theses creations will remain usable and useful with their widely available documentation, even when those that have initially created their implementations have stopped working on them. It's a benefit for future generations of programmers and users that will be happy to rediscover in the future what was made on today's computers. They will also ease the future migrations of technologies. For the long term, open standards mean huge economies (remember the cost and nightmare of Y2K migrations when lots of undocumented proprietary and incompatible softwares had to be migrated).
Remember the huge historic benefits that have been seen by the worldwide adoption of standards like the SI metric system, the universal coordinated time, worldwide calendars, coordinated geodesic systems: trains run securely on time and can cross the country borders, planes fly securely in the sky in their routes, even with bad weather conditions.; Posted by: PhilippeV Posted on: 12/09/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use