6 ms·

Why I'm rejecting your email attachment

15 points by tjr 17y ago

codeslinger 17y ago
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.
- _sh 17y ago
  Who's this 'we'? I already use Open Office and, for my needs, it is already 10x better than the alternative used at work. Better because (in Writer) bulleted lists are consistent, and it's easier to manage styles. Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document. As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".
  - dschobel 17y ago
    I think OP's generalization that most average technology users don't care one iota about the openness of their tech so long as it 'works' is dead on. Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in. This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts. Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
      - mootothemax 17y ago
        Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists. Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
        ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem. End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.
  - bruceboughton 17y ago
    By the same token, one could ask why the FSF always assume anyone cares about their militant brand of open source.
    - loup-vaillant 17y ago
      Maybe because they made what we call "Linux" possible in the first place? (In case you don't remember, GNU pre-dates Linux. The kernel was just the last missing part.)
      - bruceboughton 17y ago
        Sorry s/anyone/everyone/
      - qw 17y ago
        What about BSD? There are alternatives out there that doesn't require GNU.
        loup-vaillant 17y ago
        Besides the kernel, BSD systems aren't entirely GNU free. (They use at least gcc.) You could change the kernel, but replacing GNU is harder. When LLVM and the related projects are ready, that will be another story.
  - flogic 17y ago
    I give "Joe Six-Pack" arguments some credence since sometimes I am Joe Six-Pack. In term of Open Office that's usually, I don't care why the formatting is bungled I just want to be able to read copy and paste my specs.
- whalesalad 17y ago
  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 http://grab.by/3r23 OpenOffice: http://grab.by/3r25 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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      Yeah, the world would be a much better place if everyone did exactly what I told them to. For me, anyway...
      - mootothemax 17y ago
        Heh, sometimes I think that the only thing OSS really needs for mainstream success is a dictator ;)
    - qw 17y ago
      The most annoying part is that their functionality is tightly woven in with the rest of their application. Why would we need separate Word/Excel parsers? Couldn't you just separate common functionality to a shared library... It's the GIMP problem all over again. If they would just separate each functionality into components, it would make it easier for others to create "shells". I see potential for a lot of improvement in the GIMP and Photoshop interfaces, and someone with better design skills than me could potentially make a Photoshop-killer.
- mootothemax 17y ago
  Exactly. Right now OpenOffice is good, but it needs to be so much better; based on past experience, I don't trust that a document created in OO won't look like crap when opened in Word. The reverse happens often enough to be a concern. Oh, and please don't bring out the "fix it yourself" argument; enough time has passed, OO should be better already.
carterschonwald 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 :)
bretpiatt 17y ago
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.
justinludwig 17y ago
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 17y ago
  '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.
jsankey 17y ago
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.
jimmyjames 17y ago
The FSF: sinking into irrelevance, one press release at a time.
adi92 17y ago
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
- jballanc 17y ago
  ...but when you're transferring your cloud docs from one provider to the next, what format should they be in during the transfer?
- loup-vaillant 17y ago
  > .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-2010/ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-20... (video, audio and transcript).
pak 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    > 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 17y ago
      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.
rimantas 17y ago
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 17y ago
  (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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.
andybak 17y ago
And in other news - geeks with beards lose clients.
jrockway 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    I believe they didn't know what program to use to edit .txt files. Yeah.

15 points by tjr 17y ago

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.

_sh 17y ago
Who's this 'we'? I already use Open Office and, for my needs, it is already 10x better than the alternative used at work. Better because (in Writer) bulleted lists are consistent, and it's easier to manage styles. Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document. As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".
- dschobel 17y ago
  I think OP's generalization that most average technology users don't care one iota about the openness of their tech so long as it 'works' is dead on. Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in. This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts. Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"
    - mootothemax 17y ago
      Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists. Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem. End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.
- bruceboughton 17y ago
  By the same token, one could ask why the FSF always assume anyone cares about their militant brand of open source.
  - loup-vaillant 17y ago
    Maybe because they made what we call "Linux" possible in the first place? (In case you don't remember, GNU pre-dates Linux. The kernel was just the last missing part.)
    - bruceboughton 17y ago
      Sorry s/anyone/everyone/
    - qw 17y ago
      What about BSD? There are alternatives out there that doesn't require GNU.
      - loup-vaillant 17y ago
        Besides the kernel, BSD systems aren't entirely GNU free. (They use at least gcc.) You could change the kernel, but replacing GNU is harder. When LLVM and the related projects are ready, that will be another story.
- flogic 17y ago
  I give "Joe Six-Pack" arguments some credence since sometimes I am Joe Six-Pack. In term of Open Office that's usually, I don't care why the formatting is bungled I just want to be able to read copy and paste my specs.
whalesalad 17y ago
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 http://grab.by/3r23 OpenOffice: http://grab.by/3r25 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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    Yeah, the world would be a much better place if everyone did exactly what I told them to. For me, anyway...
    - mootothemax 17y ago
      Heh, sometimes I think that the only thing OSS really needs for mainstream success is a dictator ;)
  - qw 17y ago
    The most annoying part is that their functionality is tightly woven in with the rest of their application. Why would we need separate Word/Excel parsers? Couldn't you just separate common functionality to a shared library... It's the GIMP problem all over again. If they would just separate each functionality into components, it would make it easier for others to create "shells". I see potential for a lot of improvement in the GIMP and Photoshop interfaces, and someone with better design skills than me could potentially make a Photoshop-killer.
mootothemax 17y ago
Exactly. Right now OpenOffice is good, but it needs to be so much better; based on past experience, I don't trust that a document created in OO won't look like crap when opened in Word. The reverse happens often enough to be a concern. Oh, and please don't bring out the "fix it yourself" argument; enough time has passed, OO should be better already.

carterschonwald 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 :)

bretpiatt 17y ago

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.

justinludwig 17y ago

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 17y ago
'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.

jsankey 17y ago

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.

jimmyjames 17y ago

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

adi92 17y ago

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

jballanc 17y ago
...but when you're transferring your cloud docs from one provider to the next, what format should they be in during the transfer?
loup-vaillant 17y ago
> .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-2010/ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/ISOC-NY-Moglen-20... (video, audio and transcript).

pak 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  > 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 17y ago
    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.

rimantas 17y ago

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 17y ago
(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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.

andybak 17y ago

And in other news - geeks with beards lose clients.

jrockway 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  I believe they didn't know what program to use to edit .txt files. Yeah.