I want no monuments

It’s July 3 news that Microsoft will help the UK National Archives to get all its proprietary format files back to the future.

Sold as Microsoft will to “save the UK Archives”, Microsoft is actually recovering its own fault: as a matter of fact, most of the old, legacy format documents are Microsoft Word 97 (and previous versions) files. Formats that even the most recent Word can no longer read.

As reverse compatibility has never been an interest to Microsoft, the only way of recovering the docs will be to use virtualisation. They will install virtualised version of Windows95, Windows 3.1 and co. and will save the documents from one version to another.

Say you have a old Word document (done on Windows 3.1) that Office XP cannot read, but that’s readable by Office 97. They will open the document with Office 97 and save in 97 proprietary format. Then they will open it with Office XP and save in XP format. Then they will finally open it with the latest Office (I don’t even know its name…) and will save it in the OOXML format.

Easy, repetitive and boring. Have a nice day, pigeon!

As you may know, the ODF Alliance, global group of business companies that promote the free open document format (ODF), some months ago requested the ISO to make the ODF an ISO standard.

Yesterday, ISO accepted and ODF is now an ISO standard.

In the meanwhile, OpenOffice.org just launched the campaing Get Legal, aimed to convince current MSOffice users to switch to a legal and free copy of OOo, instead of burning another CD to get MSOffice 2007

I’ve just read on OSNews that, while the city of Munich is switching to free software, Extremadura (Spain) supported the development and lately adopted their own GNU/Linux distribution, known as gnuLinEx.

Then, a few minutes later, I even read the french tax office has switched[0] to OpenOffice

I definitely can go bed with a smile on my face!

[0] article in italian