I don't want to sound like an ass or ungrateful or anything, but the FSF needs to wise up. People won't switch until the alternative is a lot better than what they currently have. Why would a normal person care about the file format of an attachment? Hell, how many people even know the format of the files they are working with? (I mean the extensions, not the file layout or anything) They just care about being able to open it. They have a raft of better shit to be doing and that's how it should be.
tl;dr: Make OpenOffice 10x better than Office and you won't have to cajole people to switch. Don't do that and we'll ignore you like we've been doing.
Who's this 'we'? I already use Open Office and, for my needs, it is already 10x better than the alternative used at work. Better because (in Writer) bulleted lists are consistent, and it's easier to manage styles.
Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document.
As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".
Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in.
This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts.
Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists.
Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem.
End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.
Maybe because they made what we call "Linux" possible in the first place? (In case you don't remember, GNU pre-dates Linux. The kernel was just the last missing part.)
Besides the kernel, BSD systems aren't entirely GNU free. (They use at least gcc.) You could change the kernel, but replacing GNU is harder. When LLVM and the related projects are ready, that will be another story.
I give "Joe Six-Pack" arguments some credence since sometimes I am Joe Six-Pack. In term of Open Office that's usually, I don't care why the formatting is bungled I just want to be able to read copy and paste my specs.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. For those of us who live in caves, this works, but for those of us who participate in the real world, it doesn't. It's like a hippie telling me to only buy locally grown organic produce and boycot the rest, when it's cheaper and I really don't give a shit.
You're completely right. The alternatives are garbage. OpenOffice is an absolute joke. My dad sent me this attachment, asking for some help doing an animation. Let's compare the OpenOffice version, to the Keynote version.
Until the app that I use to deal with these open formats is equivalent or better than MS Office or Keynote, I'm going to use it. I could care less what format the document comes in... I've never had an issue opening something. I worked out the issue my dad had in Keynote (the slide he needed help with was not the screenshot, heh)
The FSF guys have never provided alternative solutions that actually work, and yes, until then, I'm going to ignore their stupid bullshit.
You know what's even more annoying? The pool of talented developers working on two office suites for Linux! So, rather than everybody working on an MS Office killer, we have crappy OpenOffice and an even craffier KOffice both competing against each other for the title of who's crappiest. Grr!
The most annoying part is that their functionality is tightly woven in with the rest of their application. Why would we need separate Word/Excel parsers? Couldn't you just separate common functionality to a shared library...
It's the GIMP problem all over again. If they would just separate each functionality into components, it would make it easier for others to create "shells".
I see potential for a lot of improvement in the GIMP and Photoshop interfaces, and someone with better design skills than me could potentially make a Photoshop-killer.
I think what people don't realize is that stuff like OO.org is just for show. The free software people don't use WYSIWYG slideshow generators or word processors; they already have tools that are much easier to use.
It's the rest of the world that refuses to use any model better than Powerpoint or Word, and they get exactly what they deserve -- a tedious way to make poor-looking presentations and documents.
LaTeX is not much easier to use than Word; it's incredibly more difficult to use. It requires you to remember or look up a bewildering number of strange-looking commands, a special syntax, etc.
LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step. The fact that you do not see what you get requires you to think a bit more abstractly. It is also less discoverable.
Once you get past that point (and I agree most people won't), I doubt you have to remember more things in LaTeX than in Word. I one case, it's special sequences of characters, while in the other, it's menus.
Also, this wasn't really about ease of use. The TeX back-end is definitely better than Word's or OOO's, and that fact ends some arguments. A well integrated WYSIWYG on top of that would be great, though.
LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step.
That's a bold statement that's backed up by no facts and makes no sense. If you were just to stop and think for a second, I bet you'd see how ridiculous it is.
LaTeX is more difficult than Word by about a dozen aspects. And here's a random list off the top of my head.
1) It's more difficult to see how what you're typing will look like.
2) It's more difficult to decide which one to download and install (there's just one Word).
3) TeX comes with its own set and philosophy of fonts that you have to learn, understand, remember and debug. Word uses the same fonts that come with the OS.
4) You need to learn what the hell "DVI files" are and what to do with them. Word prints to your printer or saves in a number of familiar formats in addition to its proprietary ones.
5) Word makes it easy to include a diagram, a drawing, a photo. TeX has different competing "drawing packages", all arcane, all hard to learn and use, all have caused many a dissertation author to curse in despair.
6) You're a journalist or a writer under contract or a translator. You need to know how many words you've written. Word can tell you immediately. TeX? Go online, look for a tool or a script, there's half a dozen, none standard, most probably obsolete or not maintained anymore.
7) Because Word is WYSIWYG, quick iteration is possible: try something, see it's not working, immediately back out and try something else. TeX's cycle is slow and breaks the flow of thought.
8) Word has hierarchical menus, context menus and tooltips, together they make it relatively easy to find some functionality if you don't remember the exact keystroke, command or menu item. Most of the times, you know where to look and quickly scan a dialog box to find what you need. In TeX, you need to remember dozens of commands, or tediously search for them in docs or online.
9) It's rare/difficult to do a local change in Word that screws up an entire page or document; it's trivial to do so in TeX.
10) When you screw something up in Word, you see what went wrong and can quickly undo it. When you screw something up in TeX, you're bombarded with arcane error messages.
11) You hardly ever need to fix up a Word installation or understand the hierarchy of its directories, include files, etc.
12) Word trivially exports to HTML, the great universal language of our times.
(1), (7), (9) and (10) are directly related to the compilation step I was talking about. Of course the iterations are slower, and of course a little error in the source code will break the whole document. Also, (1) is a feature, not a bug: LaTeX is designed to separate presentation from content. It is supposed to be trusted as far as "look" is concerned. Exceptions are few and far between.
(2), (4), (6) and (12) are off topic: I was assuming LaTeX was already installed, like word often is. DVI files can be viewed by evince, which makes it as easy as a pdf file (and no, the absence of a reasonable default document viewer on Windows does not count). Counting words isn't the word processor's job. HTML doesn't solve the same problem as Word and LaTeX.
I already said (8): "It is also less discoverable". Plus, LaTeX aware editors (like TeXmaker) do have those menus, making (8) false when you use them.
I don't understand (3). I just use the pretty default fonts, and that's it. Unlike Times New Roman, they're good enough. I never needed to mess with them. Did you?
(5) and (11) are fair enough.
LaTeX suffer from the fact that it is just a bunch of TeX macros. I believe even Leslie Lamport would describe it as an ugly hack. TeX need better front-ends. A set of mark-up languages, of limited purposes each, would be great. Markdown could be a good start.
Apparently, most of you only value short term convenience (If you did, you would use open format as much as you could, even if it means worse current software). No wonder the world is build on exponential growth and depletion of limited resources.
EDIT: Please someone tells me where I am wrong. I don't care about downmods, but I do care about being corrected, or else I stay wrong.
1) You assume that using proprietary formats is only short term value. Why do you think it is?
2) You assume, that everyone going with open formats would improve software. Why should it happen, exactly?
I honestly tried various versions of OpenOffice at least a dozen of times and gave up. I have no hope it can get rid of that Frankensteiny feel.
And I have no idea, why and how average office worker (who spends most of the time working with those documents) should know the difference between proprietary and open formats and which is which. In most cases format question will boil down to "this is garbled" and "this looks fine".
(1) It's about freedom. It's the control of your data. The absence of vendor lock-in. We are more vulnerable when we are entrenched in a proprietary model. In the long run, it will be things like cloud computing, semantic analysis of your output, and even outright spying. Things are already pretty bad right now, and will be worse over time if we don't fight that lucrative model.
(2) In the case of popular software, where a popular alternative already exist, I do (although even if I am wrong, (1) is way more important). Also, I suspect you can't use OpenOffice because you are used to word. My brother, who is not so used to Word, actually prefer OpenOffice. It is a bit like 3DsMax vs Blender. I know no one who learned one first and liked the other.
Now, it should be clear why a non-tech person should be able to tell proprietary format from free ones: it is about a very basic, universal concept: freedom. So they'd better learn the necessary technical skills before they lose their freedom.
This has happened before. When most people didn't know how to read, those who did had a tremendous edge. They could access more ideas, and therefore have more choice, more freedom. The printing press magnified this effect, and ultimately lead to the generalization of democracy in the western world. The catch is, you have to learn to read before you benefit that. And until you do, you will have a hard time to see the need.
Exactly. Right now OpenOffice is good, but it needs to be so much better; based on past experience, I don't trust that a document created in OO won't look like crap when opened in Word. The reverse happens often enough to be a concern.
Oh, and please don't bring out the "fix it yourself" argument; enough time has passed, OO should be better already.
in principle there are good ideas behind this proposed "only accept Open Document file formats idea", wouldn't it be constructive for this article to mention that microsoft word actually supports that format? (at least according to wikipedia).
Personally all my writing etc for anything nontrivial is via latex, a file format which happily enough is human readable (and much moreso than word or odf or whatever), and I can be reasonably confident that if i want to regenerate any documents i have in 20+ years, these files will likely be still machine readable barring cosmic radiation flipping bits or computers switching from binary to ternary representations etc.
In all seriousness though, for all but the simplest of documents, theres a lot of ways that meaning formatting/data can be lost when two different word processors are respectively creating and reading a document file, and thats even ignoring how with a lot of these programs the formatting for a document will be rejiggered if these two computer have different default printers!!
I use latex for pretty much all documents too, including presentations. Everyone can open PDFs, and they print nicely. However, I have not been able to explain why I prefer latex to anyone so far. People just see this weird format that requires an extra step to get a "proper-looking" document, and claim not to see the difference in typography between LaTeX and Word. And no, I don't go around preaching latex to word users - they ask me first :)
I like this idea, to get business to take it seriously it would be nice to attach along with it an academic study on worker productivity in OpenOffice versus MS Office.
Do not send me an frigging OpenDocument! Send me a link to a web page. If it's not on the web, paste the text into the email message. If it's not text, send me a gif/jpg/png. If it doesn't fit in any of those formats, I don't want it. And if it's a deck of slides, just fuck off already!
I get what you are saying, and there are a lot of good reasons to believe in using the basic file formats (read: old formats, not better formats), but I think that this is a poor way of looking at the spreading of information.
While a .txt file is accessible anywhere, it is certainly not always more readable. Just because someone could write their thoughts out in a linear fashion, doesn't mean they should. Slide decks are great, and they are sometimes the best option for presenting vital information to a large group of people.
There are good reasons for wanting very basic encodings of thought, but there are also very good reasons to make things more complex (internally) to make them more simple (externally).
Also, OpenDocument is hard to use, as is OpenOffice.
OpenDocument is available now, as is free software such as OpenOffice.org that allows anyone to create OpenDocument files at no cost.
OpenOffice may be free, but it certainly comes at a cost. For starters: the cost of learning a new UI. And the cost of dealing with compatibility issues while most other people are still using Office.
For my own needs, OpenOffice is fine. But for those who write a lot more documents, and have more invested in Office, the time cost alone is likely to outweigh the price difference.
I mostly share Google docs these days.. the user can download it in any format he likes, if we he wishes to download it at all.
.odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the cloud.
On a related note, I hope we eventually have some sort of cloud-transfer legislation, that makes it easy for people to move all their docs from Google to say, Zoho without any hassles.. this would foster more innovation in the online office suite space
> .odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the cloud.
That would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. And I mean every single word.
The number one reason why proprietary formats are bad is because they don't give you full control of your data. Documents in the cloud give you even less control, and no guarantee. No amount of legislation will prevent bad things from happening (like, semantic analysis of your documents).
The cloud as we know it should die. Trust me, I am not the extremist, here. Or better, don't trust me. Just listen to the arguments (one sided and very well said): http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-20... (video, audio and transcript).
ODF or not, no "open" office document format is going to catch on until everybody can cheaply and painlessly open them. That means a variety of editing suites and viewers installed by default or trivially installable across every major PC and mobile platform. Let's face it: OO.o isn't for everybody, it isn't a quick install, and you are not going to convince a majority of people to use it. There needs to be other major alternatives (that's the point of the "open", right?) catered to all devices/OSes.
To that end, I don't think you can create an office document format that is wholly divorced from the client that reads, views, and writes it. Even if I believed that you could agree on a perfectly future-proof and extensible data format, you would need a whole suite of tests available so that clients could test that they are rendering them to the screen and print {pixel|point}-perfectly. The closest analogue we have for this scenario is HTML, and look how imperfect the browser space still is; and browsers don't even need to provide editing functionality for what they are rendering.
People should really learn to use computers. At least a little. They should at least be able to painlessly install popular programs. Before they do, no amount of free software will save them.
We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort to install (you need at least a few clicks). So we have to teach.
> We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort to install (you need at least a few clicks).
Why not? People don't want to learn how to install software. They want to do their jobs. Apple (with the App Store) and Google (with Chrome) understand that.
Because that would mean "installed by default". And until such software is widespread on the targeted platform, that won't happen.
If the (very low) level of pain of the Apple store is low enough for you, then yes, that's definitely possible. We just need a "Free Software Store". The repository system found in Linux distributions is very close (or even on spot, depending on the UI wrapper). Maybe such a system would be desirable on Windows. That could ease the transition to fully fledged Linux systems.
Wow. Starts to sound like Ford's freedom of color choice for his cars.
By rejecting all files created in Microsoft Office and Apple iWork,
you can send a strong message to your friends, colleagues and
businesses that you do not support the actions of these companies.
Intersting. iWork lets me export document in PDF, RTF and plain text. I guess that does not count, and I am going to burn in hell anyway, just because I used something else than OO?
By rejecting these files, you can open a friendly dialog with the
person, and ask them to support a free society by using a free
format like OpenDocument.
I guess one will have more chances to look like moron than „open a friendly dialog“.
And I still think that freedom means I can choose any tool and format i like, not the
ones that FSF tells me to.
(1) The only way for you to burn in hell will be to share the default export format of Office and iWork. Don't tell me you didn't understand that, I won't believe you.
(2) Yes, that's makes you look like a moron. No, freedom doesn't mean that. If you want to maximize your (immediate) freedom, then I understand. If you also want to be ethical and stop at the freedom of others, then you should restrict yourself to open formats.
1) You are understanding the letter, not the spirit. Open format for which there exists a free software implementation are OK no matter what (short of patents). That includes PDF, RTF, and plain text.
2) So you want total freedom, for yourself. Carried to it's ultimate conclusion, your total freedom can have me enslaved, should you decide so. More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe. And here, your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose my freedom to not use them.
There is no way around that. Most of the time, the larger my freedom, the smaller the rest of the world's. Some compromises are just better than others at maximizing (or sharing) total freedom.
(1) Whoops, bad example. I suppose this is because of patents? (EDIT: this is a genuine question, I really don't know)
(2) In that case, I have limited options: either I ignore the document, or I keep my (more important) freedom. If you sent me an open format, I could have my cake and eat it too, which ultimately results in more freedom.
1) Are you sure you understand the spirit as intended by FSF?
They could have that formulated the other way, say "rejecting all files in proprietary format", but what they wrote is different. Why?
2) Where do you get that stupid idea that I want freedom for myself only? If I happen to like Pages I just use it. You are free to use whatever you want, be it Word or OpenOffice. FSF on the other hand wants me to ditch everything in favour of that ugly piece of software. Why should I?
More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe
Very wrong analogy.
And here, your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose
my freedom to not use them.
No, it does not. I will use what I want, you use what you want. How me using iWork forces you not to use OpenOffice?
And please, don't mix proprietary formats and software — they are not the same. As I said, I can produce pdf or rtf or plain text in Pages.
All this is just a lame attempt to replace quality with politics.
(2) Sorry for the confusion, that was careless. Of course your using proprietary software doesn't restrict me directly, unlike your sending me documents in a proprietary format. Now you should still ditch them, because once you're hooked, who knows what evil scheme they could put upon you? (like expensive updates, or even spying)
Now, to make it clear, I still use proprietary software (mostly games). But when I do, I am not proud of it, and I tell myself I should stop, eventually.
All this is just a lame attempt to replace quality with politics.
I am not sure I follow here. The FSF has been about politics from the very begining. From the begining, the FSF asked everyone to ditch proprietary software, even in favour of worse alternatives (quality wise). Quality always came second. What did you mean?
Reminds me when I was doing a project for a $major_pharmaceutical_company and provided them with the deployment docs for my software as a plain text file. They said, "we can't read this" and insisted that I give them a .doc file. (cut, paste, "save as .doc", and everyone is happy. wtf?)
This sort of behavior is harmful (and dumb), so I am glad the FSF is calling it out.
Let me guess: you used UNIX line endings, right? Or were your text files not named "*.txt"? Anyway people should learn to use their computers, at least a little. If they don't, even free software won't really gain them any freedom.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 94.1 ms ] threadtl;dr: Make OpenOffice 10x better than Office and you won't have to cajole people to switch. Don't do that and we'll ignore you like we've been doing.
Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document.
As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".
Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?
This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts.
Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.
You're completely right. The alternatives are garbage. OpenOffice is an absolute joke. My dad sent me this attachment, asking for some help doing an animation. Let's compare the OpenOffice version, to the Keynote version.
Keynote: http://grab.by/3r23 OpenOffice: http://grab.by/3r25
Until the app that I use to deal with these open formats is equivalent or better than MS Office or Keynote, I'm going to use it. I could care less what format the document comes in... I've never had an issue opening something. I worked out the issue my dad had in Keynote (the slide he needed help with was not the screenshot, heh)
The FSF guys have never provided alternative solutions that actually work, and yes, until then, I'm going to ignore their stupid bullshit.
For me, anyway...
It's the GIMP problem all over again. If they would just separate each functionality into components, it would make it easier for others to create "shells".
I see potential for a lot of improvement in the GIMP and Photoshop interfaces, and someone with better design skills than me could potentially make a Photoshop-killer.
It's the rest of the world that refuses to use any model better than Powerpoint or Word, and they get exactly what they deserve -- a tedious way to make poor-looking presentations and documents.
Once you get past that point (and I agree most people won't), I doubt you have to remember more things in LaTeX than in Word. I one case, it's special sequences of characters, while in the other, it's menus.
Also, this wasn't really about ease of use. The TeX back-end is definitely better than Word's or OOO's, and that fact ends some arguments. A well integrated WYSIWYG on top of that would be great, though.
That's a bold statement that's backed up by no facts and makes no sense. If you were just to stop and think for a second, I bet you'd see how ridiculous it is.
LaTeX is more difficult than Word by about a dozen aspects. And here's a random list off the top of my head.
1) It's more difficult to see how what you're typing will look like.
2) It's more difficult to decide which one to download and install (there's just one Word).
3) TeX comes with its own set and philosophy of fonts that you have to learn, understand, remember and debug. Word uses the same fonts that come with the OS.
4) You need to learn what the hell "DVI files" are and what to do with them. Word prints to your printer or saves in a number of familiar formats in addition to its proprietary ones.
5) Word makes it easy to include a diagram, a drawing, a photo. TeX has different competing "drawing packages", all arcane, all hard to learn and use, all have caused many a dissertation author to curse in despair.
6) You're a journalist or a writer under contract or a translator. You need to know how many words you've written. Word can tell you immediately. TeX? Go online, look for a tool or a script, there's half a dozen, none standard, most probably obsolete or not maintained anymore.
7) Because Word is WYSIWYG, quick iteration is possible: try something, see it's not working, immediately back out and try something else. TeX's cycle is slow and breaks the flow of thought.
8) Word has hierarchical menus, context menus and tooltips, together they make it relatively easy to find some functionality if you don't remember the exact keystroke, command or menu item. Most of the times, you know where to look and quickly scan a dialog box to find what you need. In TeX, you need to remember dozens of commands, or tediously search for them in docs or online.
9) It's rare/difficult to do a local change in Word that screws up an entire page or document; it's trivial to do so in TeX.
10) When you screw something up in Word, you see what went wrong and can quickly undo it. When you screw something up in TeX, you're bombarded with arcane error messages.
11) You hardly ever need to fix up a Word installation or understand the hierarchy of its directories, include files, etc.
12) Word trivially exports to HTML, the great universal language of our times.
(2), (4), (6) and (12) are off topic: I was assuming LaTeX was already installed, like word often is. DVI files can be viewed by evince, which makes it as easy as a pdf file (and no, the absence of a reasonable default document viewer on Windows does not count). Counting words isn't the word processor's job. HTML doesn't solve the same problem as Word and LaTeX.
I already said (8): "It is also less discoverable". Plus, LaTeX aware editors (like TeXmaker) do have those menus, making (8) false when you use them.
I don't understand (3). I just use the pretty default fonts, and that's it. Unlike Times New Roman, they're good enough. I never needed to mess with them. Did you?
(5) and (11) are fair enough.
LaTeX suffer from the fact that it is just a bunch of TeX macros. I believe even Leslie Lamport would describe it as an ugly hack. TeX need better front-ends. A set of mark-up languages, of limited purposes each, would be great. Markdown could be a good start.
EDIT: Please someone tells me where I am wrong. I don't care about downmods, but I do care about being corrected, or else I stay wrong.
2) You assume, that everyone going with open formats would improve software. Why should it happen, exactly? I honestly tried various versions of OpenOffice at least a dozen of times and gave up. I have no hope it can get rid of that Frankensteiny feel.
And I have no idea, why and how average office worker (who spends most of the time working with those documents) should know the difference between proprietary and open formats and which is which. In most cases format question will boil down to "this is garbled" and "this looks fine".
(2) In the case of popular software, where a popular alternative already exist, I do (although even if I am wrong, (1) is way more important). Also, I suspect you can't use OpenOffice because you are used to word. My brother, who is not so used to Word, actually prefer OpenOffice. It is a bit like 3DsMax vs Blender. I know no one who learned one first and liked the other.
Now, it should be clear why a non-tech person should be able to tell proprietary format from free ones: it is about a very basic, universal concept: freedom. So they'd better learn the necessary technical skills before they lose their freedom.
This has happened before. When most people didn't know how to read, those who did had a tremendous edge. They could access more ideas, and therefore have more choice, more freedom. The printing press magnified this effect, and ultimately lead to the generalization of democracy in the western world. The catch is, you have to learn to read before you benefit that. And until you do, you will have a hard time to see the need.
Oh, and please don't bring out the "fix it yourself" argument; enough time has passed, OO should be better already.
Personally all my writing etc for anything nontrivial is via latex, a file format which happily enough is human readable (and much moreso than word or odf or whatever), and I can be reasonably confident that if i want to regenerate any documents i have in 20+ years, these files will likely be still machine readable barring cosmic radiation flipping bits or computers switching from binary to ternary representations etc.
In all seriousness though, for all but the simplest of documents, theres a lot of ways that meaning formatting/data can be lost when two different word processors are respectively creating and reading a document file, and thats even ignoring how with a lot of these programs the formatting for a document will be rejiggered if these two computer have different default printers!!
I get what you are saying, and there are a lot of good reasons to believe in using the basic file formats (read: old formats, not better formats), but I think that this is a poor way of looking at the spreading of information.
While a .txt file is accessible anywhere, it is certainly not always more readable. Just because someone could write their thoughts out in a linear fashion, doesn't mean they should. Slide decks are great, and they are sometimes the best option for presenting vital information to a large group of people.
There are good reasons for wanting very basic encodings of thought, but there are also very good reasons to make things more complex (internally) to make them more simple (externally).
Also, OpenDocument is hard to use, as is OpenOffice.
OpenOffice may be free, but it certainly comes at a cost. For starters: the cost of learning a new UI. And the cost of dealing with compatibility issues while most other people are still using Office.
For my own needs, OpenOffice is fine. But for those who write a lot more documents, and have more invested in Office, the time cost alone is likely to outweigh the price difference.
.odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the cloud.
On a related note, I hope we eventually have some sort of cloud-transfer legislation, that makes it easy for people to move all their docs from Google to say, Zoho without any hassles.. this would foster more innovation in the online office suite space
That would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. And I mean every single word.
The number one reason why proprietary formats are bad is because they don't give you full control of your data. Documents in the cloud give you even less control, and no guarantee. No amount of legislation will prevent bad things from happening (like, semantic analysis of your documents).
The cloud as we know it should die. Trust me, I am not the extremist, here. Or better, don't trust me. Just listen to the arguments (one sided and very well said): http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-20... (video, audio and transcript).
To that end, I don't think you can create an office document format that is wholly divorced from the client that reads, views, and writes it. Even if I believed that you could agree on a perfectly future-proof and extensible data format, you would need a whole suite of tests available so that clients could test that they are rendering them to the screen and print {pixel|point}-perfectly. The closest analogue we have for this scenario is HTML, and look how imperfect the browser space still is; and browsers don't even need to provide editing functionality for what they are rendering.
We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort to install (you need at least a few clicks). So we have to teach.
Why not? People don't want to learn how to install software. They want to do their jobs. Apple (with the App Store) and Google (with Chrome) understand that.
If the (very low) level of pain of the Apple store is low enough for you, then yes, that's definitely possible. We just need a "Free Software Store". The repository system found in Linux distributions is very close (or even on spot, depending on the UI wrapper). Maybe such a system would be desirable on Windows. That could ease the transition to fully fledged Linux systems.
(2) Yes, that's makes you look like a moron. No, freedom doesn't mean that. If you want to maximize your (immediate) freedom, then I understand. If you also want to be ethical and stop at the freedom of others, then you should restrict yourself to open formats.
2) So you want total freedom, for yourself. Carried to it's ultimate conclusion, your total freedom can have me enslaved, should you decide so. More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe. And here, your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose my freedom to not use them.
There is no way around that. Most of the time, the larger my freedom, the smaller the rest of the world's. Some compromises are just better than others at maximizing (or sharing) total freedom.
2) His freedom to use any format he likes does not impact on your freedom not to use those formats. You are free to ignore the documents he creates.
If I decide to invent my own language and speak only in that, that does not impact your freedom not to learn my language.
(I'm not sure the analogies are making these arguments any clearer)
(2) In that case, I have limited options: either I ignore the document, or I keep my (more important) freedom. If you sent me an open format, I could have my cake and eat it too, which ultimately results in more freedom.
2) Where do you get that stupid idea that I want freedom for myself only? If I happen to like Pages I just use it. You are free to use whatever you want, be it Word or OpenOffice. FSF on the other hand wants me to ditch everything in favour of that ugly piece of software. Why should I?
Very wrong analogy. No, it does not. I will use what I want, you use what you want. How me using iWork forces you not to use OpenOffice?And please, don't mix proprietary formats and software — they are not the same. As I said, I can produce pdf or rtf or plain text in Pages.
All this is just a lame attempt to replace quality with politics.
(2) Sorry for the confusion, that was careless. Of course your using proprietary software doesn't restrict me directly, unlike your sending me documents in a proprietary format. Now you should still ditch them, because once you're hooked, who knows what evil scheme they could put upon you? (like expensive updates, or even spying)
Now, to make it clear, I still use proprietary software (mostly games). But when I do, I am not proud of it, and I tell myself I should stop, eventually.
I am not sure I follow here. The FSF has been about politics from the very begining. From the begining, the FSF asked everyone to ditch proprietary software, even in favour of worse alternatives (quality wise). Quality always came second. What did you mean?This sort of behavior is harmful (and dumb), so I am glad the FSF is calling it out.
Yeah.