Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by t.branaman.

The Open Document Format (ODF) was designed to give control of documents to the originator of the documents, not to a software company that controls the format and access to the documents. Open standards are important in any industry - just think of the problems that we would have if every manufacturer set their own, mutually exclusive, standards. What if your Ford vehicle would only work with gasoline from Ford?

With computers, the default “standard” for office documents (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) is Microsoft Office. But this is not a true standard. It is simply the format used by the software that a majority of users use. The format is defined and controlled by one company (Microsoft), and that company can (and does) change the format at any time. Support for old versions can be dropped at any time, making it impossible to access documents written using the old versions. Information about the formats is tightly controlled, making it difficult or impossible for competitors to fully access documents created using these formats; the result is virtually no competition in office software. Microsoft also uses changes to the office formats to force users to upgrade to new versions of the office suite.

ODF gives control back to the originators of the documents - to you and me. Anybody is free to fully implement the standard, without restrictions. Implementations can be commercial or free. Microsoft claims to have an “open” format, but there are restrictions (including patents) that make their “standard” not truly open.

I have a handout from a talk I gave in June of 2008 that  contains information about ODF and Microsoft formats and products, including prices from various vendor’s web sites. Opinions in this document are my own, and are based on my own research. Feel free to pass it on to interested parties. If you have any questions about this information, you can email me at terry at tb-computing.com or post a comment about this entry.

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Friday, February 8, 2008 by t.branaman.

Almost everybody with a computer uses an office suite, though some only use the word processor. The most well-known office software is Microsoft Office. It is the de-facto standard, largely because Microsoft effectively has a monopoly on operating system and office software (they have been convicted by the courts in both the US and Europe).

I believe that there are inherent dangers in this situation. We are dependent on a single vendor for access to our own work. With laws that big companies like Microsoft and the media companies have gotten Congress to pass, software vendors have the legal as well as technical capability to lock our work away from us. They can, for instance, change software licenses unilaterally, without effective notification to end users, at any time. They can post the changes on their web sites, and claim that this constitutes “notification”, and that any such changes are legally binding. They can also make changes to the software automatically and without notification, via the Internet. This raises the possibility that they could change your perpetual license to a subscription, and disable your software if you do not pay up. By using unpublished formats and patented technologies in the formats they can make it impossible for you to access your documents. They have not done all of this yet, but there are signs that they are trying to move to subscriptions rather than perpetual (one-time) licenses. They already use unpublished formats and patented technology.

Access to your works also depend on the company continuing to support old file formats. Already documents created with early versions of office software, or with software created by companies that have gone out of business, can be impossible to access.

One solution to this set of problems is to use open file formats. With an open format, all of the information needed to access the documents is freely available. Anybody can create software to read or create documents using these formats. Access is not limited to a single vendor, or to developers who can meet the arbitrary requirements of the holder of required patents. A set of such formats exists: it is the Open Document Format (ODF). Anybody is allowed to utilize these formats, and any software that supports these formats can open documents created by any other compliant software. Some commercial vendors, as well as open source development teams, have created software that support ODF; Microsoft steadfastly refuses to do so (they also refuse to open their formats as required by court settlements). And, since the ODF formats are publicly available and supported by multiple developers, you do not have to worry about your documents becoming unusable in ten or twenty years (or less depending on the vendor’s actions).

One open source product that fully supports ODF is OpenOffice.org. This software is available for download at no cost, or can be obtained on CD from several vendors. It also has the ability to write files in the Microsoft formats, and to read most Microsoft Office documents with a high degree of success (a few don’t work completely because of the roadblocks created by Microsoft mentioned above). It provides a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation manager, as well as a simple database program. I have been using it for several years, and find it to be as good as, if not better than, Microsoft Office for my use. Give it a try. All it will cost you is a little time, and it could save you both time and money down the road.

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