Thanks to Russell Ossendryver for pointing this out.

Recently it was announced that National Archives are converting their stock of electronic documents into Microsoft Open XML format. This format is not supported outside of Microsoft’s own products and ties the public to purchasing Microsoft Office should they wish to view the products, which is a cost of around £80-£120 depending on version. It also ties a user to purchasing Microsoft Windows which is a cost of roughly £150 for the Basic edition or purchasing a new PC with Windows which is a cost of at around £200 for a new machine. Instead Open Document Format which is an accepted ISO standard unlike Open XML should be used. Open Document Format is supported on many major platforms and is freely available at no charge. It includes all the necessary features for documents otherwise it would not be the ISO standard. There should not be a £250 charge to use Microsoft for accessing the National Archives electronically especially in light of the companies ongoing litigation with the EU regarding its anti-competitive actions.

Since the recent vote by the ISO, the bit about OOXML not being a standard is now obsolete unless there is a formal complaint made within 2 months. Also, M$ Office can cost a great deal more than £120 if you want any of the (more useful) enterprise features. Of course, Open Source offers them for free.

Nevertheless, although I doubt it will make much difference to the choice of document format used by the UK’s publicly owned National Archive, as it seems to have been infiltrated by Microsoft’s puppets at senior levels, it may well help to raise the profile of ODF and OpenOffice.org to the UK government.

And of course, it’s just fun to be able to make your point somewhere.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ODFinNA/

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This old story gets even more ridiculous. The fact that the head of the national library is a co-chair and obvious supporter of M$’s OOXML specification, led our National Archive to spend yet more money with Microsoft for a solution that will actually NOT fix the problem. More documents will be stored in a, as yet non-standardised and closed, document format. That will, eventually require us to spend even more money yet again just to get access to old electronic documents.

It seems our antipodean partners have come up with a solution: It’s called Xena. And it’s Open Source and uses the GPL.

Xena is free and open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia to aid in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena is an acronym meaning ‘Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives’.

Xena software aids digital preservation by performing two important tasks:

• Detecting the file formats of digital objects
• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Now this sounds like a very decent solution. Read that last bullet once more:

• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Adam Farquhar and the National Archive of Great Britain please take note…

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I really can’t believe it (well O.K. I can - it’s just M$ being M$), but here in the UK the National Archive Office (the place that is SUPPOSED to look after all our important documents) is being duped by Microsoft.

They are working with the evil empire Microsoft to enable access to their old Word and other proprietary document formats by - get this - running M$’s vitual machines so they can have Windows 95 and old versions of MS Office running on top of more Microsoft software, to get access to these files!

Then, to add insult to plain stupidity, they are singing the praises of M$’s OOXML specification. Yes, that 6000 page document, calling itself a technical specification that contains, amongst other things:

• Bugs that mean dates before 1900 are handled incorrectly
• 60 pages of CLIPART!!!!!
• Technical implementation notes like “DoLikeWord95″
• Proprietary encryption routines that don’t conform to ISO approved standards and have not been verified safe
• Implementation details kept hidden or removed from public scrutiny so only M$ will be able to fully implement it
• A strong reliance on a single vendor’s operating system.

Why oh Why oh Why are they being so stupid?

Yesterday, Sun released a free ODF plug-in for Microsoft’s Office product line which allows bi-directional conversion to and from proprietary, closed and locked file formats, and the ISO approved Open Document Format.

Surely, that seems a far more sensible route than having more M$ software, virtualised, running yet more M$ software ( and old software at that) just to get access to your files?

The National Archive news item is here: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk…

Sun’s ODF Plugin can be downloaded from here: https://sdlc3b.sun.com/ECom/EComAction….

If you are at all interested in this issue, please write, email, telephone the National Archive office and your MP. This action is NOT in the public’s interest. They will find themselves going down a road that will lead to one company only having control over your national archive… Think about it.

Oh yes. And the other very interesting fact on the news item is this: “Adam Farquhar, Head of eArchitecture at the British Library and co-chair of the Office OpenXML standards committee said:…” Head of our British Library AND chair of Microsoft’s document specification steam roller? Hmmmm… doesn’t sound too impartial to me, does it to you?

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