On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, Uri Even-Chen wrote:
Peter wrote:
Right. And public libraries, county registrars, notaries, lawyers, the
courts, the police, the government standards office and three dozen other
categories of people who keep records for slightly longer than 2-3 years
(not to say more than 2000 years in certain cases) should use Word formats
because they are 'compatible'. This year. What about next year ? We upgrade
? On taxpayer's money ? Suuure we do. How many times do you think this
trick is going to work ? A visit from a nouveau riche 'illustrious' person
and we give it another go ? Maybe not.
I am surprised that no opposition politicians have taken this small matter
of squandering public funds on a pyramid scheme of 'upgrading' and done
something about it in their political campaign. After all, there is a lot
of money to be saved. Just think about how many licenses it costs to keep
the .gov.il computers upgraded and 'compatible'.
I think there should be a standard for office file formats, and the
standard should not be owned by MS. MS don't want a standard, they
Agree.
don't want to be compatible with other softwares. They own the market.
I think there should be a standard so people will choose their office
software for features and not for compatibility. It's not good to the
market to have a monopoly.
Agree. But unless you want a committee to elaborate a standard (shudder)
like H323 (re-shudder) then you need to pick the best solution that
exists at the moment and standardize it. That is the proven way. That's
the way it was done with C for example. And the standard has to be
open, as in free beer.
Peter
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