Group items tagged

"A study published by the Norwegian "Direktoratet for forvaltning og IKT" (Agency for public adminstration and ICT) comes to the result that OOXML is not suitable for being used by the Norwegian government. The study is available online in Norwegian. Amongst the reasons that are given are that the standard with its more than 6000 pages is not appropriate; it is not suitable for collaboration; and there is only one software that can implement it and produce the respective file format. Norway recommends pdf for electronic document exchange of documents that don't need to be edited and ODF (open document format) for all other documents."

"What Paoli fails to point out, however, is that HTML, PDF, and OOXML have very different use cases. OOXML and ODF directly compete, and having two competing, noninteroperable formats is no benefit."

"when you want to unzip an ODF or OOXML file, there is no bash completion for those documents types. I hacked the /etc/profile.d/complete.bash file of my Suse box to make it work."

"It's clear that all these examples match the same pattern. Now the question is: how long will they manage to fool everyone? I have to admit that in many countries this strategy works well enough. Many important people in Portugal were convinced that OOXML and the interoperability announcement were honest and transparent initiatives. What will they think in face of this ODF implementation nonsense? Haven't things gone too far?"

"While OOXML-compliant software seems conspicuous by its absence, ODF goes from strength to strength: there is literally no contest between the rival standards in this respect."

Linus on standards