Re: [Fsfe-uk] Health Service departments unable to read AbiWord attachments

[Adam Bower]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 06:33:37PM +0000, John Seago wrote:
> Today I had occasion to send an email with a copy of a letter which I had 
> sent to my Primary Care Health Trust to the Healthcare Commission, I sent 
> the letter as an AbiWord attachment, the  Healthcare Commission tell me 
> that " the format is not recognised.". Now as the Healthcare Commission 
> deals with complaints about service, to whom should I address a complaint 
> about their use of an operating system that cannot open AbiWord 
> attachments?

I would ask why you chose Abiword as a format to send to them? Could the
letter have not been sent as html or a .pdf? To be fair, I don't know
which applications I have available on this machine to look at Abiword
format files (well, I just discovered that Abiword is installed as part
of Gnome, but I didn't actually know that until I checked).

I'm not really certain of the issue you are trying to raise here, as
technically they could be using a Free Software operating system but
part of that may not include Abiword (for example). So are you asking
them to adopt Abiword? again, the other question to ask is do they only
ask for letters of complaint to be delivered in a proprietary non-free
format? If they did that then it would be much more of a real position
to be argued and one that I would want to take up with the local NHS
trust my MP and possibly the members of the cabinet who are involved
with IT and healthcare.

Thanks
Adam
-- 
jabberid = address@hidden
AFFS || http://www.affs.org.uk/ || Not a filesystem