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Norwegian Minister: No More Proprietary Formats
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jun 27, 2005 02:01 PM
from the say-that-might-work-elsewhere-too dept.
from the say-that-might-work-elsewhere-too dept.
Been on TV writes "The Norwegian Minister of Modernization today at a press conference in Oslo declared that proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communcation with government. He also calls for all parts of government to have a plan ready by 2006 for use of open source solutions. Taking great care not to mention the name Microsoft directly, but rather referring to 'the spreadsheet almost everyone uses' or saying this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media, the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."
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Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Two quick (and largely similar) stories:
-I was at a Rona recently getting some bags of gravel for a project. A gentleman walking by saw my gravel, at this point 9 bags on my cart, and suddenly decided that he needed gravel. It was obvious that he didn't intend to buy gravel, but seeing me buying gravel made him believe that there was something interesting about this gravel, and he should follow.
-Again at a Home Improvement store, yesterday I was at Home Depot and a gentleman was standing there trying to decide which soil to buy, asking the clerk to help him out, when I pulled up and started loading some "magic soil" into my cart. Instantly his mind was made up, and he started loading up. Seeing two people loading up, suddenly several other people pulled their carts over to get some of this deal. Of course I chose this soil completely randomly.
Both were cases of a social proof, and it's much like everyone waiting for the first one to leave a party. For these reasons this sort of event, even when it's a small, seemingly inconsequential Scandinavian country, are very much noteworthy. Often it's the pebbles that precede a landslide.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
That's almost as good as "Mostly Harmless."
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Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Much as I love Norway, Norwegians and Nemi, Peru is the one leading the way on this. They got their first and are even mandating open source software for all government use.
Still, great to see the Vikings joining in.
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Re:True (Score:5, Insightful)
Get a clue. That argument might have worked on some people 5-10 years ago but now that we have IBM and SGI making super computers with linux, you can hardly convince even the most naive among us.
Doesn't really matter anyways since MS is already going to open standards for the next Office.
The format is not so open anymore when you consider that basically all GNU software will be prohibited from using it. Without any real good BSD licensed Office software out there (as far as I know) what's the use?
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hardware.slashdot.org? (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is as it should be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Peru? (Score:5, Informative)
there once was a troll from Nantucket... (Score:5, Funny)
who told Microsft to go screw,
he said we don't need your proprietary formats
with Linux we'll reformat,
And now they're doing it in Norway, too!
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Easy solution for Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Norway's GDP: $183 billion
Norway's Military spending: $4 billion
Microsoft's revenues: $36.8 billion
These numbers indicate that the best way for Microsoft to solve this issue is to simply raise an army and invade Norway. Don't be suprised if Norway is renamed to Billgatsia sometime in the next few years.
Re:Easy solution for Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
The_Petroleum_Fund_of_Norway [wikipedia.org] : $170 billion
Norway has far more cash in his pockets in this fund alone than Microsoft in total.
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Additionally... (Score:5, Funny)
and he added: my sister was bitten by a prøprietary førmat ønce...
Now if US companies would get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I left a message with them and explained the problem but I think it will take a LOT of people (hint, hint) to email companies who use proprietary formats before they'll get the message.
Open Source is not very important (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now I'm looking at an OS browser showing HTML with CSS. There are som jpegs around and some png's as well. If Microsoft or other company had their way, all of those formats would be secret, closed and patented and the software should be licenced from them.
Open Source is nice and efficient way of writing code, but real freedom is inside open standards.
As it is now, every government and every company has a lot of unreadable documents sitting around on their disks. They only become readable, when a licence is paid to MS or Adobe etc. And who knows, how long these companies will be around? And what if they choose to abandon old platforms and try to force everybody to use the newest Longhorn 2020 Ultra Plus for $499 pr. licence? This is not freedom.
What if I work for some government office and would like to make a nice, indexed and searchable database of my Word documents available to the public. Where is the innovation, when the standards are closed and secret and unreadable for my programmers
Knowing what's inside your own documents is essential. Specially if you are a government.
I hope that EU will look at Norway and learn. There's not much hope for the US I'm affraid. Too much corporate influence inside the political system.
Re:Hrmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This is an emergency!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Norway is an OPEC member - NOT (Score:5, Informative)
They do, however, have a lot of oil.
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Office 12 with XML. Doesn't matter. It's MS. (Score:5, Insightful)
The *format* will be open (it's just plain XML), but the data it contains (the binary thing) is not. What if that ASCII-encoded-binary-field contains key formatting data? How do you expect to properly view the document?
See the trend? Microsoft is continuously trying to charge access for your *own* data! Just like DRM!
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Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft pulled this "don't switch to alternatives just yet, the next version of Office will have an open format" trick the last two versions of Office. And you're falling for it a third time? Don't you people learn from repetition? I think Bush said it best, or tried to: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"
There is no doubt that there will be something "non-open" about the formats when Office 12 arrives. Microsoft are playing this game of "we're moving the direction of moving open formats", the catch is that they will forever just be "moving in that direction" - they'll never "arrive".
I suspect that in a few years you'll be posting on slashdot again with "don't bother switching to OpenOffice 3, Office 13 is going to have an open format".
Microsoft will give up their proprietary formats when you pry them from Bill Gate's cold, dead fingers --- the core of their entire business model is that nobody else is compatible with Office.
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Re:The horror, the horror! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The horror, the horror! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The horror, the horror! (Score:5, Informative)
Check out their GDP per capita: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_ppp_c
Index of Economic Freedom is good too, although a bit socialist:
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/c
Norway can afford to do what it wants. They are very rich (being one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world helps), and aren't even in the European Union nor do they use the Euro. The Norwegians I know are also very well educated, and tons of good software comes from
Their drug laws aren't as terrible as those we have in the United States either, nor do they have the death penalty, etc etc..
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Re:The horror, the horror! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Can someone please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that proprietary formats -- by definition -- cannot guarantee free access to the information they contain, and free access is essential to the functioning of a democratic government.
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Re:Here's the (open) fomats (Score:5, Informative)
Please read this entire document carefully to understand your rights. [microsoft.com]
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