Reversal: Australian Govt picks ODF doc standard over Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Reversal: Australian Govt picks ODF doc standard over Microsoft

delimiter.com.au

191 pointsrenai_lemay41 comments

Great news!

Check out this map of ODF adoption in the world [1]. Purple is mandatory standard, green is officially approved. Governments around the world are really pushing ODF forward.

... Now just get my uni to move off of docx and I'll be a happy programmer :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OpenDocument_adoption_worl...

This is great! Thanks for the link. The ODF situation is better than I would've hoped!

I live in Iceland and ODF isn't being used by any government institution that I know of (and I've worker in/for government quite a lot). Is it possible the NATO mandated use of ODF applies only to official NATO documents?

Very likely, the map doesn't say the full story.

In Iceland in particular (and I'm guessing a lot of countries have the same situation) what'll happen is that the Ministry of Education will publish some official recommendation about what formats should be used, or that free/open source software should be "strongly considered".

Then what happens in practice is that everyone just ignores that recommendation and buys proprietary software anyway, feigning compatibility with existing systems, re-training costs etc.

So in practice a government recommendation about ODF can mean absolutely nothing unless you really make it mandatory. So this map on Wikipedia is effectively useless as an indicator for "adoption". It's probably actually a map of what governments have made feel-good press releases about ODF.

I live in the US and my government certainly doesn't give me files in ODF. They're either PDF or doc/docx.

I live in Italy and never saw any form of official document in ODF. In fact, most of them come in doc/docx where they could just as well used PDFs.

Well, Microsoft Office supports ODF and can use it as the default for all new files. At least since the 2010 version. If even MS recognizes that ODF has won, we have no reason to use OpenXML.

Not sure why you are being voted down, but I tend to agree that ODF is the standard to use. Not sure if MS have agreed that they believe it should be the standard to use though :-)

To be fair OOXML supports features that have been in Office for a really long time and ODF simply does not.

That said, for moving data around, ODF is the format to use; use OOXML only when you need explicit Excel/Word/PPT compatibility.

Regarding downvotes, I'll take a guess - OP's post says:

>[MS office] can use [ODF] as the default for all new files. At least since the 2010 version. If even MS recognizes that ODF has won, we have no reason to use OpenXML.

That leap of logic just doesn't compute... By the same token, since OpenOffice / LibreOffice can be set to use OpenXML as default, they've admitted that OpenXML has won. Being able to use each other's formats should be viewed as an attempt to move into each other's markets, not as declaration of victory.

OpenOffice has to support OOXML because they have always positioned themselves as supporting everything under the sun. They supported .doc from the start.

Microsoft has traditionally supported only their own formats, so their decision to adopt an open source format is much more meaningful than OpenOffice's decision to support OOXML.

What technology do govt departments across the world use to maintain trustworthy records?[1]

Some Indian departments use pdf with DSC for this. Interested if there are alternatives.

[1]: http://www.epa.gov/records1/faqs/rks.htm#q4

Also interesting with this update is the suggestion[1] to use open source multimedia DirectShow filters including LAV Filters and ffdshow. LAV Filters appears to ship with DeCSS code[2] -- something which appears to be legally usable within Australia, for most purposes at least, as per §132APC(1) of the Copyright Act 1968[3].

Further to the above, widespread adoption of open source multimedia libraries on government computer networks would appear to further lock in a future for Australia where software patents are not recognised.

[1] Page 19 of http://agimo.gov.au/files/2013/05/SOE-Build-Guidelines-Windo...

[2] https://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/source/browse/#git%2Fco...

[3] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/...

I'm not an expert on government documents, so I am wondering: what formatting does the Australian Govt need?

Why wouldn't plain text suffice?

Even for long documents with structure, gamefaqs has shown us that plain text can be used effectively there as well.

Not to mention Org Mode... but there's about a zero chance of emacs being picked up as 'standard'.

Perhaps Emacs could me made to produce ODF.

org-odt-export-to-odt

http://orgmode.org/manual/OpenDocument-Text-export.html#Open...

Perhaps Emacs could X

is nearly always true. Provided X is actually possible.

I would love to see government department information documents with ASCII art headings and Tables of Contents.

The same formatting any other large organization which creates a variety of documents might need.

Things like tax forms, license applications, instruction manuals, reports, plans, ...

Nobody wants to read or maintain ugly plaintext files. We don't even use plaintext in technical documentation, we use various markup languages, even if it's just ReST or Markdown.

Government archiving rules often mandate use of digital signing. In the US, NARA has rules about what count as "trustworthy records" along these lines.

E.g., see http://www.epa.gov/records1/faqs/rks.htm

OOXML, PDF, and ODF each have a standard "container" and key management model that makes this a whole lot easier than plain text.

Doesn't "plain text" have a standard "container" in the form of MIME that also allows attaching things like signatures in a standard format?

7-bit ascii has been around for a lot longer than these formats which mostly represent a dump of the state of a formatting engine into something like XML in a file tree and compressed with PKZIP.

I was thinking of something like this when I wrote my comment. MIME does function as a container model, but it's not plain text and it could only be a standard with supplementation. But there's a UNIX-y sense in which this is all human-readable text representations.

I'm not really familiar with the internals of ODF, but OOXML, while it does capture quite a lot of UI state, is actually quite clean and represents the intuitive document structure rather well.

I'm wondering if it could have something to do with the level of encryption enabled by ODF documents? It's no secret the Australian Gov't has come under sustained hack attacks of late, so maybe this was the catalyst?

So does this mean that all that money Microsoft put into getting this 'standard' through ISO was wasted? It would be a delightful slice of schadenfreude if now everyone was refusing to use it. I remember that the main reason they wanted the ISO to bless it was so that governments could use it.

They should NOT go for ODF 1.1. Instead they should push for ODF 1.2. Someone needs to tell them.

The standard has to be pragmatic. 1.2 is still new enough to make support an issue. MS Office 2013 was just released with native 1.2 support in January.

Correct me if im wrong - no computer out of the box can not open Australian Govt documents anymore?

Every computer that has access to the internet can open them in Google Docs. Every Tablet or Smartphone with Polaris Office can. Every Chromebook can.

Also in what way would the Microsoft "Standard" be different?

Only for the MS time limited crapware installed on all the Windows Laptops?

I can open any MS Word document with any computer out of the box. Without installing _any_ crap or having account at Gevil (and uploading anything). On OSX Textedit, on Windows Wordpad, and so on. On iOS any MS doc as attachment. In that way Microsoft Standard is different, i can view the docs without doing nothing, only "standard" ODF documents i can not view on standard computer.

Texedit on Mac opens ODT, as does Wordpad on Windows.

While word pad did add support for docx files in Windows 7, I wonder how good a viewer it is for viewing complex documents that have complex formatting applied. I do not know but I suspect that the results may be less than stellar. I suspect the same is true for the other programs as well.

I know MS published docx as an open spec but in my experience I find that only MS programs are able to maintain document fidelity in viewing the documents. When you use other viewers there is almost always something that looks a little off.

Does anyone know why you don't have same viewing results for complex docx documents when viewed under different viewers ?

> Correct me if im wrong ...

You're wrong.

Wordpad on Windows and TextEdit on OS X can open .odt files. I've just tested in Mountain Lion and Windows 7 to verify it.

I think you misunderstood his double negative - it translates to 'all computers can open AU Gov documents out of the box now?' and I think you are agreeing with him that this is true.

Should have gone for RTF. More widely supported.

unfortunately RTF is not rigorously standardized, some basic elements of documents are, but lots of stuff is still adhoc, and not really suitable for an encompassing editable document standard.

On the other hand I suddenly thought about HTML/CSS. I think HTML for reflowable and PDF for fixed would be awesome. The only thing is that you need a very good wysiwyg editor for html that's as good as word yet produces clean code.

They might not want to base their financial calculations on Microsoft Excel, after what they heard a few months ago.

Because some idiot may get the formulae wrong? I don't think there was an actual Excel bug recently, just PEBKAC errors.

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