Comment by PontifexMinimus
3 years ago
> Standard is microsoft office
Then change it. By law if need be, and have all government departments go over to Libre Office at the same time.
3 years ago
> Standard is microsoft office
Then change it. By law if need be, and have all government departments go over to Libre Office at the same time.
They tried that, but the question is how do you write the law? In the end they settled on requiring that govt. departments use ISO standards to store docs (which at the time was only ODF).
Microsoft then tried to get their format ratified as an ISO standard. But everyone complained that their spec did not actually specify how to implement, instead it said things like "In accordance with output from Word 2007". So after a bit of back and forth MS realized that they did not want to _actually_ document what they were doing. The solution? Pack the committee with MS shills to vote yes on every proposal by MS. Urgh.
One of the negative flow on effects was that these new committee members only cared about voting for things that MS had instructed them to vote on - so other standards and issues stalled due to a lack of a quorum. It was super disappointing looking at this from the sidelines at the time.
Here is a link that explains a small part of the history: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...
> but the question is how do you write the law?
I would have defined Libre Office as the reference implementation. Other software is allowed to the extent it reads/writes those files formats correctly.
I would also have mandated open source.
Well, that is one solution, but I would not want to have a urgent problem at that specific time.