I share the concern expressed by Roberto and Andreas. Starting with the effort to establish ODF for use in civil administration in Massachusetts, it was clear that no US civil authority, at any level up the governmental hierarchy, was prepared to invest what was necessary to achieve *actual* substitutability among standards-compliant implementations and to identify and have addressed (via procurement policies and technical means) their requirements for genuine cross-product/-platform interoperability. This does not seem to be something that governments can take on as a public good in the present reality.
It is perhaps also no surprise that "interoperability" assessment among ODF implementations appears to be more of the "works for me!" variety. I could make a living if there were a bounty for every bug I find practically anywhere I attempt to interchange documents cross-product. The fact that there are now deviations between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice is particularly discouraging as is the fact that the pair-wise deviations are even greater with respect to interoperability with the Microsoft Office counterparts, whether via ODF or via OOXML. Hmm ... I was just presenting at an international workshop on technical aspects of this problem, centered around tracked changes. Just in developing my papers and the slides, I am going to need to spend considerable time reporting the bugs I encountered, along with a possible defect in ODF itself that I had not appreciated before. And I am ignoring, here, the problems of training and staffing that goes with making product substitutions in what we term office-productivity activities. There seems to be a lack of will and means for the adopters, and a lack of commitment among producers to cooperate enough to provide some reliable assurance of interoperability. Writing this has me be dispirited. I will recover. I have hope. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Roberto Resoli [mailto:robe...@resolutions.it] Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 08:52 To: dev@openoffice.apache.org Subject: Re: The City of Udine is moving from Windows for OpenOffice Il 18/09/2014 09:19, Andrea Pescetti ha scritto: > On 17/09/2014 Marcus wrote: >> Am 09/17/2014 09:36 PM, schrieb Vladislav Stevanovic: >>> Another goog news: >>> http://www.zdnet.com/another-italian-city-announces-its-ditching-microsoft-windows-for-open-source-7000033682/ >>> >> sometimes it's going fast. It's already on our homepage in the "Recent >> News" section. :-) It's also on Softpedia: http://news.softpedia.com/news/City-of-Udine-Planning-to-Replace-Windows-with-Linux-458963.shtml > It's another nice surprise from Italy! I know nothing about the Udine > migration (I've simply read the this article), but I hope that cutting > spending is just one of the reasons. I hope that too; we have seen too many failed migrations to FLOSS sw because the only expectation was cutting spending. > I would like that institutions do not behave as ordinary end-users, but > try to be more actively involved with the community (directly or through > consultants). Yes, I think this is also a key factor for a sustainable FLOSS adoption. bye, rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
