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Comment by SwiftyBug | Hacker News Reader

It really pisses me off when some kind of public service demands documents in the format docx or expects one such document to be filled and uploaded. They can't truly assume that every single citizen must have a license of Microsoft Office.

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Symmetrically, every administration needs a form system and it annoys me that the French tax office didn’t open-source theirs, because it is decently good (Cerfa).

There actually is an open-source form system already: Démarches Simplifiées https://github.com/demarches-simplifiees/demarches-simplifie.... It's maintained by the French government and used by hundreds of administrations. Totally agree that Cerfa would benefit from being open too

docx is supported by OpenOffice/StarOffice/FreeOffice/whatever it's called this month.

Come on, it's just LibreOffice. OpenOffice/StarOffice have been more or less discontinued for the last decade. FreeOffice, I've never even heard of. There's no need to be so damn obtuse.

Technically, yes. But there's always something that doesn't render well.

There are a quite a few issues in the implementation to be honest. Almost at no point I was working with DOCX on LibreOffice and I could tell the document was being served the way it was originally intended to be served.

It has been called LibreOffice [1] since the fork from OpenOffice [2] which in turn was developed from StarOffice [3]. The fork and name change from OpenOffice to LibreOffice was due to the former coming under the control of Oracle, a company known for its militancy with regard to licence enforcement. The experience with the way Oracle stewards the Java brand and technology shows they do know how to handle free software so it may have been unnecessary to fork the project but that aside, two name changes since the inception of StarOffice in 1985, one of which on the boundary of the closed-source office suite going open source, the other on a takeover by a known licence warrior is not bad and not too hard to follow.

LibreOffice, remember?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

.ODF is supposed to be the default

Not in the EU as a whole. Its down to states.

It has various levels of adoption in individual European countries and regions (in the EU and beyond) with a number (such as the UK) making it the standard for document exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption#Europe

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