Re: [Fsfe-uk] Open Formats workgroup progress report

[Tom Chance]

On Friday 23 Apr 2004 11:55, Ian Lynch wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 08:14, Marc Eberhard wrote:
> > Also as you mention office products, I wouldn't advertise PDF as a
> > replacement for Word documents as PDF is (for most people) not editable.
> > I'd rather compare proprietary office products with OpenOffice. The
> > OpenOffice format is well documented and can be supported by everyone. I
> > would sell this format as the alternative, not plain text, RTF or PDF.
>
> Agreed. As a longer term replacement its far more sensible because of
> its openness and XML relationship. In general the compressed document
> format is also more efficient than raw .doc etc. There is a chicken and
> egg situation in establishing any new standard where one is entrenched
> but the first part of doing that is to educate people.

Part of the problem with this approach, however, is that it wouldn't work. 
Trying to convince a company or organisation to switch wholesale to 
OpenOffice would be far more difficult than trying to convince them to 
convert their documents to PDF, or save them as RTF or HTML.

The idea of this campaign/workgroup is to give grassroots activists something 
they can work on and achieve without a huge amount of work. It took next to 
no work to get it through my Students' Union, and so it shouldn't be much 
more work in other orgs or companies.

Once you have established policies on open formats, then you can really start 
to push for Free Software, and the adoption of new open formats like 
OpenOffice's filetypes. Though I will include OpenOffice in the list, and 
when I expand it to cover how to save documents in open formats, I'll include 
a note about downloading and using OpenOffice.

Regards,
Tom