Summary: OpenDocument Format, or ODF as it's commonly referred to, is spreading quickly throughout Europe after Microsoft failed to kill in in Britain last year

France, like the UK and parts of Germany, is joining the ODF revolution, making the European Union a lot more standards- and Free software-oriented. Germany, in the mean time, attacks OOXML on the basis of poor security. As a European Commission site put it the other day: "Using the proprietary OOXML document format, i.e. docx, pptx and xlsx, makes you more vulnerable to phishing and other attacks. Earlier this month, the Japanese anti-virus company Trend Micro published a blog post describing how the attack group "Operation Pawn Storm" uses spear-phishing mail messages with malicious Office documents to target the military, governments, defense industries and the media.

"Four years ago, Thomas Caspers and Oliver Zendel from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) already presented research results stating that most spear-phishing attacks targeting specific persons or a small group of victims are using "launch actions" in Office and PDF documents to have their malicious code executed."

We have written nearly a thousand articles about document formats and security aspects too have been covered. Now that France is moving to ODF, joining the UK and some parts of Germany, it it definitely worth revisiting this debate (more on security in our next post). Microsoft attacked ODF in Europe as recently as last year because the EU is gradually removing format lock-in (gateway to Free software), essentially saying bye-bye to Microsoft dependency. Without restrictions on choice -- or contrariwise -- if people are left to make rational choices, Microsoft will soon be history.

In the words of Gregg Keizer, "Office 365 customers pay Microsoft up to 80% more over long haul", so the 'cloud' nonsense too (giving Microsoft one's files, not just using Microsoft's proprietary formats) is a big and expensive mistake, especially where taxpayers foot the bill. Microsoft is making money from corruptible officials or fools who deem Microsoft essential "and lose custody of their own data," as iophk put it in an E-mail to us.

Prepare Microsoft to increasingly openwash itself, pretending that OOXML is "open", Office is "open", Windows is "open", and so on. ⬆