

Why I'm rejecting your email attachment - tjr
http://www.fsf.org/news/why-im-rejecting-your-email-attachment

======
codeslinger
I don't want to sound like an ass or ungrateful or anything, but the FSF needs
to wise up. People won't switch until the alternative is _a lot_ better than
what they currently have. Why would a normal person care about the file format
of an attachment? Hell, how many people even _know_ the format of the files
they are working with? (I mean the extensions, not the file layout or
anything) They just care about being able to open it. They have a raft of
better shit to be doing and that's how it should be.

tl;dr: Make OpenOffice 10x better than Office and you won't have to cajole
people to switch. Don't do that and we'll ignore you like we've been doing.

~~~
whalesalad
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. For those of us who live in
caves, this works, but for those of us who participate in the real world, it
doesn't. It's like a hippie telling me to _only_ buy locally grown organic
produce and boycot the rest, when it's cheaper and I really don't give a shit.

You're completely right. The alternatives are _garbage_. OpenOffice is an
absolute joke. My dad sent me this attachment, asking for some help doing an
animation. Let's compare the OpenOffice version, to the Keynote version.

Keynote: <http://grab.by/3r23> OpenOffice: <http://grab.by/3r25>

Until the app that I use to deal with these open formats is _equivalent_ or
better than MS Office or Keynote, I'm going to use it. I could care less what
format the document comes in... I've never had an issue opening something. I
worked out the issue my dad had in Keynote (the slide he needed help with was
not the screenshot, heh)

The FSF guys have never provided alternative solutions that actually work, and
yes, until then, I'm going to ignore their stupid bullshit.

~~~
mootothemax
You know what's even more annoying? The pool of talented developers working on
_two_ office suites for Linux! So, rather than everybody working on an MS
Office killer, we have crappy OpenOffice and an even craffier KOffice both
competing against each other for the title of who's crappiest. Grr!

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, the world _would_ be a much better place if everyone did exactly what I
told them to.

For me, anyway...

~~~
mootothemax
Heh, sometimes I think that the only thing OSS really needs for mainstream
success is a dictator ;)

------
rimantas
Wow. Starts to sound like Ford's freedom of color choice for his cars.

    
    
      By rejecting all files created in Microsoft Office and Apple iWork,
      you can send a strong message to your friends, colleagues and
      businesses that you do not support the actions of these companies.
    

Intersting. iWork lets me export document in PDF, RTF and plain text. I guess
that does not count, and I am going to burn in hell anyway, just because I
used something else than OO?

    
    
      By rejecting these files, you can open a friendly dialog with the
      person, and ask them to support a free society by using a free
      format like OpenDocument.
    

I guess one will have more chances to look like moron than „open a friendly
dialog“. And I still think that freedom means I can choose any tool and format
i like, not the ones that FSF tells me to.

~~~
loup-vaillant
(1) The only way for you to burn in hell will be to share the _default_ export
format of Office and iWork. Don't tell me you didn't understand that, I won't
believe you.

(2) Yes, that's makes you look like a moron. No, freedom doesn't mean that. If
you want to maximize _your_ (immediate) freedom, then I understand. If you
also want to be ethical and stop at the freedom of others, then you should
restrict yourself to open formats.

~~~
rimantas
1) It says nothing about _default_. Let me quote again:

    
    
      all files created in Microsoft Office and Apple iWork
    

2) How about others being ethical and not telling me what format to use?

~~~
loup-vaillant
1) You are understanding the letter, not the spirit. Open format for which
there exists a free software implementation are OK no matter what (short of
patents). That includes PDF, RTF, and plain text.

2) So you want total freedom, for yourself. Carried to it's ultimate
conclusion, your total freedom can have me enslaved, should you decide so.
More reasonably, your freedom to smoke oppose my freedom to breathe. And here,
your freedom to use proprietary formats and software oppose my freedom to
_not_ use them.

There is no way around that. Most of the time, the larger my freedom, the
smaller the rest of the world's. Some compromises are just better than others
at maximizing (or sharing) total freedom.

~~~
bruceboughton
1) Since when was PDF an open, friendly format. Didn't Adobe go after MS when
they tried to add PDF export to Word 2007?

2) His freedom to use any format he likes does not impact on your freedom not
to use those formats. You are free to ignore the documents he creates.

If I decide to invent my own language and speak only in that, that does not
impact your freedom not to learn my language.

(I'm not sure the analogies are making these arguments any clearer)

~~~
loup-vaillant
(1) Whoops, bad example. I suppose this is because of patents? (EDIT: this is
a genuine question, I really don't know)

(2) In that case, I have limited options: either I ignore the document, or I
keep my (more important) freedom. If you sent me an open format, I could have
my cake and eat it too, which ultimately results in more freedom.

------
adi92
I mostly share Google docs these days.. the user can download it in any format
he likes, if we he wishes to download it at all.

.odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the cloud.

On a related note, I hope we eventually have some sort of cloud-transfer
legislation, that makes it easy for people to move all their docs from Google
to say, Zoho without any hassles.. this would foster more innovation in the
online office suite space

~~~
loup-vaillant
> .odf may not win over .docx, but in the long run, both will lose to the
> cloud.

That would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. And I mean every
single word.

The number one reason why proprietary formats are bad is because they don't
give you full control of your data. Documents in the cloud give you even less
control, and no guarantee. No amount of legislation will prevent bad things
from happening (like, semantic analysis of your documents).

The cloud as we know it should die. Trust me, I am not the extremist, here. Or
better, don't trust me. Just listen to the arguments (one sided and very well
said): [http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-
Moglen-20...](http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-2010/)
(video, audio and transcript).

------
justinludwig
Do not send me an frigging OpenDocument! Send me a link to a web page. If it's
not on the web, paste the text into the email message. If it's not text, send
me a gif/jpg/png. If it doesn't fit in any of those formats, I don't want it.
And if it's a deck of slides, just fuck off already!

~~~
kes
'And if it's a PDF, you can go to hell!'

I get what you are saying, and there are a lot of good reasons to believe in
using the basic file formats (read: _old_ formats, not _better_ formats), but
I think that this is a poor way of looking at the spreading of information.

While a .txt file is accessible anywhere, it is certainly not always more
readable. Just because someone _could_ write their thoughts out in a linear
fashion, doesn't mean they should. Slide decks are great, and they are
sometimes the best option for presenting vital information to a large group of
people.

There are good reasons for wanting very basic encodings of thought, but there
are also very good reasons to make things more complex (internally) to make
them more simple (externally).

Also, OpenDocument is hard to use, as is OpenOffice.

------
pak
ODF or not, no "open" office document format is going to catch on until
everybody can cheaply and painlessly open them. That means a variety of
editing suites and viewers installed by default or trivially installable
across every major PC and mobile platform. Let's face it: OO.o isn't for
everybody, it isn't a quick install, and you are not going to convince a
majority of people to use it. There needs to be other major alternatives
(that's the point of the "open", right?) catered to all devices/OSes.

To that end, I don't think you _can_ create an office document format that is
wholly divorced from the client that reads, views, and writes it. Even if I
believed that you could agree on a perfectly future-proof and extensible data
format, you would need a whole suite of tests available so that clients could
test that they are rendering them to the screen and print
{pixel|point}-perfectly. The closest analogue we have for this scenario is
HTML, and look how imperfect the browser space still is; and browsers don't
even need to provide editing functionality for what they are rendering.

~~~
loup-vaillant
People should really learn to use computers. At least a little. They should at
least be able to painlessly install popular programs. Before they do, no
amount of free software will save them.

We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no effort
to install (you need at least a few clicks). So we have to teach.

~~~
bruceboughton
> We can't dumb down free software to the point it demands absolutely no
> effort to install (you need at least a few clicks).

Why not? People don't want to learn how to install software. They want to do
their jobs. Apple (with the App Store) and Google (with Chrome) understand
that.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Because that would mean "installed by default". And until such software is
widespread on the targeted platform, that won't happen.

If the (very low) level of pain of the Apple store is low enough for you, then
yes, that's definitely possible. We just need a "Free Software Store". The
repository system found in Linux distributions is very close (or even on spot,
depending on the UI wrapper). Maybe such a system would be desirable on
Windows. That could ease the transition to fully fledged Linux systems.

------
carterschonwald
in principle there are good ideas behind this proposed "only accept Open
Document file formats idea", wouldn't it be constructive for this article to
mention that microsoft word actually supports that format? (at least according
to wikipedia).

Personally all my writing etc for anything nontrivial is via latex, a file
format which happily enough is human readable (and much moreso than word or
odf or whatever), and I can be reasonably confident that if i want to
regenerate any documents i have in 20+ years, these files will likely be still
machine readable barring cosmic radiation flipping bits or computers switching
from binary to ternary representations etc.

In all seriousness though, for all but the simplest of documents, theres a lot
of ways that meaning formatting/data can be lost when two different word
processors are respectively creating and reading a document file, and thats
even ignoring how with a lot of these programs the formatting for a document
will be rejiggered if these two computer have different default printers!!

~~~
nzmsv
I use latex for pretty much all documents too, including presentations.
Everyone can open PDFs, and they print nicely. However, I have not been able
to explain why I prefer latex to anyone so far. People just see this weird
format that requires an extra step to get a "proper-looking" document, and
claim not to see the difference in typography between LaTeX and Word. And no,
I don't go around preaching latex to word users - they ask me first :)

------
jrockway
Reminds me when I was doing a project for a $major_pharmaceutical_company and
provided them with the deployment docs for my software as a plain text file.
They said, "we can't read this" and insisted that I give them a .doc file.
(cut, paste, "save as .doc", and everyone is happy. wtf?)

This sort of behavior is harmful (and dumb), so I am glad the FSF is calling
it out.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Let me guess: you used UNIX line endings, right? Or were your text files not
named "*.txt"? Anyway people should learn to use their computers, at least a
little. If they don't, even free software won't really gain them any freedom.

~~~
jrockway
I believe they didn't know what program to use to edit .txt files.

Yeah.

------
jsankey
_OpenDocument is available now, as is free software such as OpenOffice.org
that allows anyone to create OpenDocument files at no cost._

OpenOffice may be free, but it certainly comes at a cost. For starters: the
cost of learning a new UI. And the cost of dealing with compatibility issues
while most other people are still using Office.

For my own needs, OpenOffice is fine. But for those who write a lot more
documents, and have more invested in Office, the time cost alone is likely to
outweigh the price difference.

------
andybak
And in other news - geeks with beards lose clients.

------
jimmyjames
The FSF: sinking into irrelevance, one press release at a time.

------
bretpiatt
I like this idea, to get business to take it seriously it would be nice to
attach along with it an academic study on worker productivity in OpenOffice
versus MS Office.

