Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty. It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile. If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept
Back in the land of reality governments have decades of office documents Ina proprietary format that need to be delt with so any office suite at least in the beginning need to access to them as written.
It’s almost as if a suite’s capability to open a format is not tied to its default format.
According to the article, Euro-Office defaults to Microsoft’s format, instead of .ods, so the whole “sovereignty” argument sure seems to be getting kicked down there road for later, while being used for maximum marketing.
There are also decades document management systems, databases and other 3rd party tools that only speak ooxml. Defaulting to odf guarantees that documents will be incompatible, which will cause unnecessary friction.
All it takes is one high up civil servant to hit this issue, say “The MS tools never did this”, and the entire transition will be in jeopardy. The people using these tools want to create documents that are compatible, that is ALL they care about.
HDDVD and betamax lost the format war. So did ODF. Its time to move on.
Again they have decades of documents that need to be dealt with so of course its going to default to MS format, I figured people would get that. I use Softmaker office for the exact same reason because in the real world I need to deal with the format.
It does because governments have to interact with people, companies, and governments that use MS Office. They can probably get along internally with whatever format they choose but that doesn’t apply to their customers.
Back in the land of reality governments have decades of office documents Ina proprietary format that need to be delt with so any office suite at least in the beginning need to access to them as written.
It’s almost as if a suite’s capability to open a format is not tied to its default format.
According to the article, Euro-Office defaults to Microsoft’s format, instead of .ods, so the whole “sovereignty” argument sure seems to be getting kicked down there road for later, while being used for maximum marketing.
It’s just standard corner-cutting hypocrisy.
There are also decades document management systems, databases and other 3rd party tools that only speak ooxml. Defaulting to odf guarantees that documents will be incompatible, which will cause unnecessary friction.
All it takes is one high up civil servant to hit this issue, say “The MS tools never did this”, and the entire transition will be in jeopardy. The people using these tools want to create documents that are compatible, that is ALL they care about.
HDDVD and betamax lost the format war. So did ODF. Its time to move on.
Again they have decades of documents that need to be dealt with so of course its going to default to MS format, I figured people would get that. I use Softmaker office for the exact same reason because in the real world I need to deal with the format.
You are not making sense. What formats can be opened and read has nothing to do with what format the software defaults to (when writing).
It does because governments have to interact with people, companies, and governments that use MS Office. They can probably get along internally with whatever format they choose but that doesn’t apply to their customers.
Seems like a good way to spread adoption of ods then!
Except it won’t people will just playing the handoff game with pdf’s further solo ing things down.
Euro office is doing things the right way
It would be a great way to piss people off.
Libreoffice accepts both. Why Eurooffice can’t is a wonder truly worth of research
Sarcasm
I just want an excuse to have an inside look at EU’s inner working on tech