Re: Good news - UK government officially adopts ODF

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 11:46:08PM +1200, Rob Pearson wrote:
> Some good news,  back in February there were hundreds of submissions
> supporting ODF to be adopted as the UK Government standard for editable
> documents.   If you submitted, well done, as this was successful. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs
> 
> This isn't to be confused with open source software,  'Open Standards' also
> enable proprietary software vendors to flourish, plus allows all other
> businesses to break out of the stifling vendor lock-in environments
> currently creamed by Microsoft and their cross-licensed colluder Apple.
> 
> Now if our NZ government could change its recommendation from Microsoft's
> 'proprietary' OOXML file format to the Open Document Format.   And while at
> it,  change things so that our government websites are mandated to be tested
> on a minimum of a cross platform(vendor) web browser,  currently most are
> only coded/tested for Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft Windows
> operating systems, surprisingly this includes websites mandated to support
> 'web standards' today.

In total agreement! and while we're at it get businesses to stop
emailing in HTML. 

Wasn't there something in the last few years about reducing the
Government's reliance on Microsoft ... ahh ...

http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20090527-0908-Government_reliance_on_Microsoft.ogg

Wouldn't the next step be targetting the education curriculum, e.g.
teach email as a text based medium on an OS independant platform, rather
than "You wanna learn email"? then opening Outlook and explaining the
features.

Instead of teaching document preparation by immediately opening a word 
processor, and then pointing out all the features, it should be taught
in an OS independant, program independant way.

Unfortunately, I think the educators are influenced by the business
community - e.g. teach Word skills, Dreamweaver skills, etc. :(

-- 
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the 
oppressing." --- Malcolm X

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