ODF failivormigu ja vaba tarkvara võidukäik
ODF Alliance 2008 a. kokku võtva raporti kohaselt täieneb riikide nimekiri, kes lähevad organiseeritult üle avatud ODF ehk OpenDocument failivormingule, pidevalt. Eriti aktiivsed on praegu ODF kastusele võtmisel kiire majandusarenguga piirkonnad Lõuna-Ameerikas ja Kaug-Idas. Brasiilia, Uruguai jt toetavad riiklikul tasandil ODF failivormingut ja sellega seotud tarkvaraarendust. Sellel on loomulikult selged majanduslikud põhjused: eelistatakse arendada oma kohalikku IT tööstust ja mitte lasta rahal riigi majandusest välja voolata Microsofti jt suurkorporatsioonide taskutesse. Kuid ka arenenud riigid, nagu Saksamaa, Holland, Norra, Belgia jt on teatanud riigi- ja kohaliku omavalitsuste üleminekust või ettevalmistuste tegemisest üleminekuks ODF failiformaadile.
Viimaseks liitujaks ODF-i kasutusele võtvate riikide nimekirjaga on Vietnam. Vietnami info- ja kommunikatsiooniministeerium on andnud riigisektori asutustele juhtnöörid minna ülle avatud lähtekoodiga tarkvarale ja ODF failivormingule. Määruse kohaselt peab 2009. aasta 30. juuniks kõigile valitsusasutuste IT-osakondade arvutitele olema installeeritud avatud lähtekoodiga tarkvara. Kõik arvutikasutajad peavad oskama seda kasutada ja vähemalt pooled peavad tarkvara tundma väga hästi.
Tarkvaratoodete all mõeldakse eeskätt OpenOffice’i kontoritarkvara, Mozilla Thunderbirdi, vabavaralisi e-posti serverite lahendusi ning Mozilla Firefoxi.
Group: 2008 Progress Shows ODF Will Prevail
It was a good year for Open Document Format (ODF), which gained support from governments across the world in 2008 as its backers continued to promote it as an international standard for XML-based document exchange, according to the ODF Alliance.
Despite the fact that ODF’s rival, OOXML — a format created by Microsoft for its Office 2007 suite — was also approved by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) earlier this year as an international standard, ODF Alliance Managing Director Marino Marcich believes that ODF will eventually win out as the dominant standard for document formats.
“I think that we’re dealing with two formats to accomplish the exact same task,” he said Tuesday. “At the end of the day, two formats for the same task just generates confusion and cost.”
Marcich cited progress ODF made in the year and outlined in the ODF Alliance’s annual report as proof that ODF will eventually beat OOXML. Governments around the world are currently setting interoperability guidelines for the technology used in their agencies, and are standardizing file formats a part of that decision.
ODF has now been approved as a technology standard for document exchange in 16 countries, including Brazil, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Russia, and Germany, according to the report. In the Netherlands, government agencies must select ODF-supported products in technology purchases of €50,000 (US$69,920) or more, and in Brazil ODF also has been mandated for use in government agencies.
OOXML, on the other hand, is only being piloted alongside ODF in Denmark, and only the U.S. state of Massachusetts has approved OOXML as a standard, he said.
ODF also gained more support among word-processing applications from major technology vendors, Marcich said. Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword and OpenOffice.org’s desktop and portable applications all now support ODF as a file format.
On the contrary, “I can count on my left hand how many .docx’s I’ve received,” he said, referring to the file extension for default Office 2007 files. However, to be fair, the OOXML/.docx implementation in Office 2007 differs from current OOXML specification, which has been altered through the standards process and is now known as ECMA 376.
Still, it’s true that the default file format for exchanging most Office documents now is .doc, the default binary document file extension for Office before Office 2007. Even Marcich acknowledged that “the old binaries dominate the landscape” right now.
Unlike Marcich, Microsoft still believes there is room for more than one XML-based file format, said Dough Mahugh, a Microsoft senior program manager for Office interoperability, in an e-mail Tuesday.
“Microsoft is committed to interoperability, transparency and user choice,” he said. “That is why we are supporting additional formats going forward; after all, users have always wanted access to multiple formats, and now they have even more options.”
Microsoft has agreed to support ODF in Office as part of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which is due out between February and April 2009, and eventually it will implement the current OOXML specification in Office 2007 as well.
Last week, Microsoft publicly outlined how it would implement ODF in that service pack release and expects to in the next several weeks to release implementation notes for ECMA 376 as well.
However, Marcich expressed concern over the implementation of ODF revealed by Microsoft last week, saying it has raised some eyebrows among ODF proponents for not being in line with how the ODF specification is currently implemented.
“It suggests that Microsoft will deviate substantially from the course taken by other vendors,” he said. “This could break interoperability.”
ODF proponents have reason to worry, as the process to ISO approval for OOXML was riddled with complaints that Microsoft acted unscrupulously, the standards process was not implemented properly and the specification approved was too unwieldy to implement.
Mahugh, however, defended Microsoft’s planned implementation of ODF, saying the company is “confident” in it, which is why Microsoft “took the step of publicly disclosing the principles and priorities that guided our development, released our implementation notes, and are supporting DII events around the world,” he said. DII, or the Document Interoperability Initiative, is a group Microsoft created to foster interoperability between different document formats .
Mahugh added that Microsoft encourages other ODF implementers to “provide a similar level of transparency and participate positively” in the company’s DII events.
Vietnam Starts New Year with Open Source (and ODF)
Vietnam will ring in the Tet New Year on January 26 this year, and 2009 will be the Year of the Buffalo. For government servers, it appears that it will be the year of a few other animals as well, including the GNU and the Firefox.
This, according to Vietnam.net Bridge, which reports that yesterday the Ministry of Information and Communication issued an instruction to the State Agencies of Vietnam to move rapidly to open source software. More specifically, “by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.” According to the article, the instruction is also applicable to provincial and municipal Departments of Information and Communications. By December 31, 70% of these offices must be in compliance.
Specific products mentioned for implementation include the following: OpenOffice, Mozilla ThunderBird and Mozilla FireFox email software, and Vietnam’s own Unikey typing software. This would represent the 17th government to throw it’s support behind ODF, based upon the count being kept by the ODF Alliance.
The article also alludes to requirements for conversion of work habits and documents as well as installation and training, requiring that agencies increase the percentage of documents and information exchanged using the new software. By December 31, 2010, “all staff at these agencies must be able to use open source software in their jobs.” IT associations have been asked to assist state agencies in meeting the requests contained in the plan.
Intriguingly, the new policy requests that “computer traders not sell PCs installed with cracked software, but open source ones.” This is presumably directed at resellers that would have to reconfigure inventory to deinstall purchased (and pirated) proprietary software, or order new hardware with that software lacking. But it may also be aimed at business partners of proprietary software vendors that may be asked to bundle traditional proprietary products in order to tempt government workers to continue to use the products with which they are familiar, rather than making use of the new open products for which they will be trained.
It’s hardly a surprise that Vietnam should make such an announcement. It has an increasingly sophisticated and growing IT industry, and like the governments of many other emerging nations, is interested in keeping IT budgets down while expanding IT services, as well as nurturing its own IT industry rather than shipping all of its IT budget dollars abroad. For nations throughout Asia and South America in particular, open source (and open standards compatible with open source) are becoming increasingly incorporated into enterprise infrastructure guidelines and procurement requirements.
Moreover, Vietnam (and other asian adopters of open source software) need not limit their procurement to occidental free software. The Asianux consortium includes numerous companies in its membership, including one Vietnamese company as well as China’s Red Hat, Japan’s Miracle Linux and Korea’s Haansoft. Presumably Vietnam will look to Asianux 3.0, Linux server offering that is not only optimized for Asian use, but for government use as well. Asianux also offers Linux based mobile, and mobile Internet products as well.
Those not familiar with Unikey can find a rather out of date English language version of the Unikey.org site here (both the Vietnamese language and English language home pages appear to have last been updated in 2006). On a quick Web search, the version referred to there (4.0) appears to be the most recent – and that release is designed to run only on various Windows platforms.
The full text of the original Ministry order (courtesy of Google Translate) is pasted in below.