ODF News: ODF 1.2, European Support for ODF, LibreOffice and More
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-10 08:54:28 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-10 08:56:13 UTC
Standard
Last Wednesday, March 26th, on Document Freedom Day, OASIS submitted Open Document Format 1.2 standard to the ISO/IEC JTC1 Secretariat for transposition to an International Standard under the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) procedure.
Plug.and.socket 142One of the two articles of faith that Eric Kriss and Peter Quinn embraced in drafting their evolving Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) was this: products built to “open standards” are more desirable than those that aren’t. Superficially, the concept made perfect sense – only buy products that you can mix and match. That way, you can take advantage of both price competition as well as a wide selection of alternative products from multiple vendors, each with its own value-adding features. And if things don’t work out, well, you’re not locked in, and can swap out the loser and shop for a winner.
Europe
Last week Monday, five European public administrations published a new call for tender, to further improve interoperability between free and open source office suites and the ubiquitous proprietary alternative. This is the second time that the German cities of Munich, Leipzig and Jena, the Swiss Federal Court and the Swiss Federal IT Steering Unit have issued such a call. ICT specialists have until 30 April to submit proposals.
The office suites' interoperability project is again managed by the OSB Alliance, a trade group representing open source service providers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
According the alliance's press release, one of the main features to be developed concerns change tracking between open source and proprietary office suites. The public administrations issuing the call want to improve the specification of change tracking, and make this part of the Open Document Format ISO standard.
Such a policy would help the South Tyrol government in its new IT approach, increasing its use of ICT solutions based on free and open source, the governor says.
South Tyrol's new policy was announced on 11 March. Responding to emailed questions, Governor Kompatscher said that the region is in favour of using free and open source solutions not only for new IT solutions, but also when upgrading existing IT components. "We've started to review our license costs. If there are free and open source alternatives, and where the costs and risks of changing are justified, we will switch to these."
LibreOffice
Misc.
The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the Document Liberation Project, in an effort to empower individuals, organizations, and governments to recover their data from proprietary formats and offer a mechanism to transition that data into open file formats.
There was a time when office compatibility was a bit of a problem on Linux, but with the latest office suites out there available for Linux, this is not an issue anymore. The applications here mimic MS Excel’s behavior, so switching to one of them should be pretty straightforward. Exporting and importing to and from MS Excel format works as well, and there aren’t many compatibility issues (however, the native format these programs use is the OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Links 25/06/2025: Elon Musk’s Lawyers Caught Lying, WhatsApp Faces More Bans
- Links for the day
- Wayland Pushers Lose the Argument, Use LLM Slop and Chatbots to Make Up Arguments for IBM
- Another new low and low blow
- What is "MATA"?
- Think of it as GAFAM or "Meta"
- WebProNews is a Slopfarm
- Please avoid linking to WebProNews
- Another "Told You So!": XBox Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Many Recent Reports Were Chaff and Spin), Many Other Divisions Affected
- With mass layoffs at Microsoft the world would be much better
-
- BetaNews Beginning to Show What Its True Goals Are
- The 'new' BetaNews won't be about journalism. It's trying to sell things.
- Microsoft Has Lost "The War"
- We'll soon see the 9th or 10th wave of Microsoft layoffs in 2025 alone
- Slopwatch: A Wreck and a Dreck, "Flooding the Zone With Dreck" or Flooding the Web With Junk
- "Slopwatch" continues today because we have many new examples
- Links 25/06/2025: Thwarting More Software Patents, Overlap Grows Between EPO Corruption and Illegal Kangaroo Patent Courts in EU
- Links for the day
- Brian Fagioli Created Another Slopfarm Targeting "Linux" After BetaNews Became a Slopfarm of Phantom Accounts and Pseudonyms
- Mr. Fagioli even had slop about a dead Torvalds (hypothetical) as clickbait
- Wayland is Perfect, Nobody Can Escape Its Perfection! (Or Not)
- Do not form on opinion on Wayland based on politics
- Moral Duty for "Linux Sites" to Speak Out Against LLM Slop
- My wife has long complained about "Linux bloggers" keeping quiet and thus passive about a growing problem: slop
- In Recent Hours Google News Promoted at Least 3 Slopfarms That Relayed Linux Foundation Propaganda Made by Bots or LLM "Bullshit Generators" (as Dr. Stallman Dubbed Them)
- Google is circling down the drain and Google News too is hopeless
- Linux Journal is a Slopfarm, It's Experimenting With LLM 'Authors'
- Is Slashdot next?
- Microsoft LinkedIn is Dying and Many More Layoffs Are on the Way
- LinkedIn is just a failed acquisition of Microsoft. It causes losses and debt.
- Gemini Links 25/06/2025: Combinatorial Music and Self Hosting
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman Coming Back to Europe This Autumn to Give More Talks
- His last talk in Europe attracted about 400-450 people
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, June 24, 2025
- Social Control Media, Technology & Catholicism: Synod on Synodality review and feedback
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- How Many More Women Will Managers at Microsoft Strangle and Tell to Kill Themselves (or Try to Kill)?
- The world needs to know what happened
- The New BetaNews: 7 New 'Articles', All of Them LLM Slop
- BetaNews is basically defunct. Nobody writes there anymore.
- statCounter Estimates Only 1 in 300 Iranians Would Use Microsoft for Search
- Iranians don't quite trust Microsoft
- Gemini Links 24/06/2025: ftpd on FreeBSD and Online Small Web Magazine
- Links for the day
- Google News Does Great Harm by Promoting Slopfarms as Legitimate News Sites
- Slopfarms are sites which are 100% LLM slop
- Links 24/06/2025: Trouble at "Open" "AI" and ‘Siarhei is Free’
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/06/2025: Stimulants and Subscription Costs for DRM
- Links for the day
- When the Microsoft Aggressors Rely on Several Law Firms ('Attack Dogs', 'Guns for Hire'), Not Just One, Lawyering Up Against Techrights (Acting on Behalf of Americans Against UK Publishers)
- From serving customers at some restaurant he has moved on to bullying people with demand letters
- Links 24/06/2025: OpenAI [sic] May Soon Die (Too Much Debt) and Social Control Media Accused of Being Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda Amplifier
- Links for the day
- Nirbheek Chauhan in Planet GNOME Explains Why Wayland Pushers Are Losing
- "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- Polygamy, from Catholic Synod on Synodality to Social Control Media & Debian CyberPolygamy
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Only a Third of or 1 in 3 Web-Connected Devices is a Desktop or Laptop, According to statCounter
- we can expect Android to widen its lead
- The Days Are Getting Shorter, the First Half of 2025 is Almost Over
- We're gratified to see significant increase in traffic and also positive feedback on the work we do
- Turning GNU/Linux Into a Political Football
- X (not the site) is Free software
- X Server Still Works for Many People
- A lot of people will grow suspicious of Wayland boosters/pushers if they persist and insist on using these tactics
- Exactly a Week Ago "BetaNews Staff" Said "Betanews Is Growing Alongside You". Since Then Every Article (All by "Camila Nogueira") Has Been LLM Slop.
- BetaNews is basically a slopfarm
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, June 23, 2025
- The "Tarzan Effect" in Compilers and Software
- What happens when you forcibly make things 'work', either by hacks or by disregarding warnings (like those that compilers tend to issue)?
- Gemini Links 23/06/2025: Mass Tourism, Hair Love, and Google Gemini as a Googlebomb
- Links for the day
- Law Firm Burgess Mee Does Not Fully Deny Participating in Abusive Litigation for Serial Strangler From Microsoft
- I am not unfamiliar with these tactics
- The Modus Operandi of Wayland Pushers: Make It Political
- do what I say or you're a nazi...
- Links 23/06/2025: RFE/RL Contributor Vladyslav Yesypenko Released, Recording Industry Cutbacks
- Links for the day
- Brett Wilson LLP Solicitors (M): Over 99.9% of Our E-mail is Self-Marketing, We Send You 3.5MB E-mails for Less Than 1KB of Text
- Why would tech people entrust legal matters to such people?
- Peter Moon's (Computerworld) Interview With Richard Stallman
- Stallman: If you want freedom don't follow Linus Torvalds
- At What Point Does Outsourcing Constitute Malpractice?
- Brett Wilson LLP's new staff page is misleading
- United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sailing to GNU/Linux, According to statCounter
- countries in that region will quickly learn the price of neglecting digital sovereignty
- From Do Your Own Research to Do Your Own Search
- The Web is full of garbage; search engines amplify this garbage
- More People Moving to Geminispace?
- at age 6+ Gemini Protocol seems to have gained some maturity and it seems like more people use it
- Permutation in LLMs Does, Inevitably, Change Meanings and Therefore LLMs Cannot Properly Rephrase or Summarise Texts
- LLMs lack actual grasp or comprehension of what they spew out
- Links 23/06/2025: Many Security Breaches, Population Declines
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/06/2025: "America at the Crossroads" and OpenWRT Surgery
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 22, 2025
- Pure Dove
- Different means different, and sometimes those who "deviate" from "the norm" have a point
- Censorship is a Sign of Weakness Which Invites More Censorship Attempts
- revolutionaries don't succumb to pressure from bullies
- Why It's Unlikely That LLM Slop Will Dominate the Web in the Long Run
- Slopfarms will eventually perish (they have no actual value) and "survivors" on the Web will be sites that never depended on search engines and social control media
- GNU/Linux in Argentina Now Measured Near 5%
- Like in central Europe, they must be seeing an increasingly hostile US
- BetaNews is Fake News, Composed by LLM Slop
- nothing in BetaNews is written by humans anymore