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A Question of Choice (Linux Journal)
Glyn Moody takes a
look at the Initiative for Software Choice. "So let's look a
little closer at this Initiative for Software Choice. It certainly has an
impressive list of members - hundreds of them. They mostly seem to be
small companies, and nothing wrong with that. But wait, there are couple
of bigger fish among the minnows: EDS is there, and a certain outfit called
Microsoft."
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A Question of Choice (Linux Journal) Posted Oct 18, 2006 3:12 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] So I guess this means that they are out to protect 'My right to choose'.. As long as the software I choose runs on Windows.
Sounds fair to me!
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 5:08 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] ISC's approach is more subtle than that: they don't want governments to use any criteria other than price and immediate technical capabilities in order to evaluate software purchases. They say that they want software to be judged only on its "merits". But they really mean that certain merits should be ignored—such as vendor-independence, transparency, or the ability to hire/encourage local developers.
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 6:33 UTC (Wed) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] That's the gist of it. They want certain merits to count, and other merits to not count, you're free to choose, but you should ignore certain properties of the product you're buying when doing so.Some things that can count:
On the other hand, principal, long-term issues should be ignored, putting any weigth whatsoever on such issues would harm your own choice. (or if not that, then atleast the wallets of proprietary software-companies)
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 7:04 UTC (Wed) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link] Stimulating the local software-developers instead of being dependent on, and sending lots of money to, a single US megacorp is irrelevant.That in particular is ironic, since their FUD is that FOSS would be bad for the European software industry...
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 8:01 UTC (Wed) by chaneau (subscriber, #6674) [Link] This one is really scaring (for them) and in fact it could be a little too late. In the coming month I'll take part in four different events, three of them regarding the use of open standards in governmental bodies, the fourth about the use of free software in local administration Let's take an example, the main reason for administrations (here in Belgium but I supposed it must be the same everywhere) to continue using the office suite from Redmond, is the fact that all the official channels transmit their information in .doc or .xls files, but now that entire bodies of the federal government (the justice department and the finance) are switching to Linux and open document formats, there is no reason to continue to use that particular piece of software. Of course you can't just dismiss them that easily, because when they found out you are using "alternatives" they come and see your boss (usually he's the one who has no clue on that particular subject) and you start spending time defending your choices, so what do we do ?? we use stealth tactics, for example, the department of justice deployed thousands of pcs running Linux very very quietly (no press release no announcement), so when "they" found out it was too late, here when I deployed OpenOffice.org (around the build 638), the users complained about not having word and excel anymore (the solution was simply to rename the shortcuts). And when our Open license came to a term and that the guy from Microsoft offered to renew it, he was very surprised to discover that we had no need of any kind of license as there were no server or desktop running Windows anymore That's why they fear that thing about open standards so much, remove the need of a proprietary office suite and most of the time you also remove the need of a proprietary OS.
Good for you! Posted Oct 18, 2006 16:23 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] Thanks VERY MUCH for being right in there fighting for this. You and khim below are doing the hard work, and I appreciate everything you can do this way. Thank you!
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 10:39 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Open standards that can be read by any compliant software instead of proprietary undocumented standards is completely irrelevant. Even for those agencies that are required by *law* to be able to read all documents for a minimum of 100 years. This is very important argument. Actually to make situation even more apparent I usually ask people to print small "Misrosoft Word" document for me first. They happily start up MS Office to print it (or sometimes WordPad when I say that it does not even have a lot of formatting) and... see totally mangled text with a lot of strange characters. Usual reaction is: "it's broken document, nothing we can do about it". And my counter is "no, it's perfectly correct document created in Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS - and it was "state of the art" wordprocessor just 15 years ago. From the same company which talks so much today about compatibility but can not even supply you with tools to read your own documents created just 15 years ago! After such demonstration my words about importance of the open standards become clear - and it's even easier to explain why access to the source is also very good thing. You see: while you can grab Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS today you can not run it in your brand new Windows XP Professional x64 Edition since it lacks suport for the DOS programs! And that's only 15 years after document was created! And it's illegal to use this version if you don't keep 15 years old license around. And even if you ignore it and use it anyway - you can open the file, but you can not convert it to something readable by today's MS Office! In short: you are stuck. You need to play quest to convert this document today - and 50 years down the round the quest may be so hard that it'll be unsolvable. If you do have the sources - you can always ask someone to look at it and change it to make it compileable (you still can compile 30 years old C programs included in Unix Version 1)! If you bet that "Microsoft will help you" then I'll ask simple question: it does not help you now - why do you expect help tomorrow ?
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 13:52 UTC (Wed) by azhrei_fje (guest, #26148) [Link] Bravo! And an excellent demonstration of the compatibility argument. Thank you for providing it. (PS: I don't suppose you would make that document available for others, would you? :))
File ? Make your own! Posted Oct 18, 2006 16:47 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I don't suppose you would make that document available for others, would you? I'm not sure I'm entitled to do it: I usually just use october.doc file from the aforementioned archive (this file is sample document included in Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS so we can be pretty sure it's correct Word Document file, right?)... Eveyone who still have DOS or DOS emulator (including Windows up to but not including Windows XP Professional x64 Edition) can grab it and unpack it - but I'm not sure if it's legal or not... I don't know what exactly precludes Microsoft from icluding appropriate convertor (AFAIK MS Office 97 still had it) but the fact remains: right now Microsoft does not offer such convertor for it's own old MS Word (I think you can probably dig it in some KB article or in MSDN, but the fact is: it's already a challenge). Why do you believe it'll provide such a tool in the future for today's (MS Office 2003) or tomorrow's (MS Office 2007) format ? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
a little too glib Posted Oct 18, 2006 16:25 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] This is a wonderful tactic. You and chaneau above have my admiration and thanks for all your efforts. This is what it takes to beat them at their own game.
a little too glib Posted Oct 20, 2006 17:49 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Try the same demo with WordPerfect :-)
I have a copy of WP5.1+ for DOS (released in 1994). If I give it a document created with the latest WP13/WP2007/whatever it's called, IT WILL READ IT CORRECTLY!
WP6 was also released in 1994. It uses THE SAME fileformat as WP13, and is forward and backwards compatible. (And if it weren't for MS nasty tricks, WordPerfect probably wouldn't have changed the file format, and I'd be saying "WP5.0" instead of WP6 - which was released some time in the mid 80s!
Cheers,
A Wonderful Panel Discussion! Posted Oct 19, 2006 4:51 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] I wanted to point out a wonderful panel discussion - this was a discussion at the World Summit on the Information Society. Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens gave 20-minute keynotes discussing free and open source software, followed by a guy from CompTIA (that is behind the Institute of [no] Software Choice). The guy from CompTIA rambled on excessively and at a speed such that you could not understand him. A gentleman from Intel followed and said little, after which a UN ambassador spoke of how the freedoms of free software are aligned with what the UN seeks. Mark Shuttleworth gave the last speech. There were a few questions asked of the participants afterwards. The big issues were pro-free-software legislation in countries like Brazil (which the ISnC opposes for obvious reasons) and software patents. I'm absolutely pleased to say that the guy from CompTIA had his rear handed to him! It was really amazing to see how simply having the right message and being on the right side of an argument makes your statements so much more powerful.
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