14 DAY TRIAL // The United Kingdom government recently announced that it wants to embrace open source software even more by switching from Microsoft Office formats to the Open Document Format (ODF), which basically boosts the popularity of open source productivity suites.
The software giant, on the other hand, claims that such a decision would actually increase costs and lead to user dissatisfaction, with many government suppliers expected to be affected.
“You may not be aware, but the UK government is currently in the process of making important selections about which open standards to mandate the use of in future. These decisions WILL likely impact you; either as a citizen of the UK, a UK business or as a company doing or wanting to do business with government,” the company said.
“We believe very strongly that the current proposal is likely to increase costs, cause dissatisfaction amongst citizens and businesses, add complexity to the process of dealing with government and negatively impact some suppliers to government.”
Microsoft, on the other hand, says that it’s not calling for the UK government to abandon the idea of switching to open-source software, but to keep both systems active and thus give users the power of choice.
“To be very clear, we are not calling for the government to drop its proposal to use ODF. Nor are we calling for it to use only Open XML. What we are saying is that the government include BOTH Open XML and ODF. To do so offers it most flexibility, the widest compatibility and the lowest Total Cost of Ownership for everyone – government, businesses and citizens alike,” the company noted.
Cabinet Minister Francis Maude said a couple of weeks ago that he wanted to provide staff with more choices, so software wouldn’t be limited to just a single brand, but he wanted to make sharing and collaborating on documents easier.