Montag Mai 14, 2007
Greg Papadopoulos blogs about software patents
In the context of today's news, you might find this blog entry by Greg Papadopoulos interesting.
( Mai 14 2007, 09:18:28 PM CEST )
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About Microsoft's lock-in strategies
""I'll just convert these back to the .DOC format the older versions use. That's most likely the version you have at school." I told her. But when I read the files in Word 2007 and eventually found the "Save As" entry in the new menu system I discovered to my horror it was grayed out. "This feature is only available in the full version of Office 2007." popped up a helpful little message. "Click here to purchase it." Getting increasingly worried, I decided to try a more desperate measure. I selected the whole file and looked for the "Copy and Paste" option. I might lose the formatting this way, but at least I'd get the text of the essay she'd written. Copy and paste were disabled in the same way, and with the same message.
Copy and paste were disabled. Think about the fear and paranoia that led to that decision in the product design meeting for the trial version. "We want people to save in the new formats. The new formats are better." So much so that all customer choice must be disabled by default. Choice is an optional extra, only available after purchase. The new Office .DOCX format happens to be incompatible with OpenOffice as well. Quite by accident I'm sure. What this means is that if you use the trial version of Office 2007 for thirty days, all documents you create will be completely unreadable by any other software unless you buy back access to your documents by purchasing the full version of the software. No easy way to get your documents out."
The full blog entry can be found here.
( Mai 14 2007, 04:11:31 PM CEST )
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ODF to be recommended in Norway
Andy Updegrove has some very interesting news to report:
"Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use. The text of the press release, as well as some of the statements made at the press conference where the announcement was made, are appended at the end of this blog post.
The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity. Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to "promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage."
According to the press release, the recommendation will be the subject of open hearings, with opinions to be rendered to the Cabinet before August 20 this summer. The Cabinet would then make its own (and in this case binding) recommendation to the Norwegian government."
His full blog entry can be found here.
( Mai 14 2007, 03:36:59 PM CEST )
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