Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3627 mails)
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Re: [SLE] MS Word, Federal standards, and Linux
- From: Paul Abrahams <abrahams@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 12:13:58 -0400
- Message-id: <3B2B85C6.FF50658@xxxxxxx>
peter hollings wrote:
> A great idea! Why should our tax dollars go into any proprietary
> technology? Why not have a requirement that applied at the time of purchase
> that said that the purchased software must save its information in open
> formats? Why should our government buy software that stores information
> (e.g., word processing documents) in a proprietary format that not only is
> non-public, but under the terms of the purchaser's license cannot be reverse
> engineered? The public has a strong interest here and it seems that it's
> not being exercised for some reason, perhaps ignorance.
Well, the Word format is, I suppose, de facto proprietary, but that could be
changed. I doubt if the format itself is patentable. What I'm proposing is
to open up a closed format but not discard it.
Paul
> A great idea! Why should our tax dollars go into any proprietary
> technology? Why not have a requirement that applied at the time of purchase
> that said that the purchased software must save its information in open
> formats? Why should our government buy software that stores information
> (e.g., word processing documents) in a proprietary format that not only is
> non-public, but under the terms of the purchaser's license cannot be reverse
> engineered? The public has a strong interest here and it seems that it's
> not being exercised for some reason, perhaps ignorance.
Well, the Word format is, I suppose, de facto proprietary, but that could be
changed. I doubt if the format itself is patentable. What I'm proposing is
to open up a closed format but not discard it.
Paul
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