[clug] AGIMO bad bad bad

[Alex Satrapa]

On 21/01/2011, at 09:55 , Robert Edwards wrote:

> On 20/01/11 17:47, Paul Wayper wrote:
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>> b) Microsoft has publicly said that they have no intention of following or
>> adhering to the standard.
> 
> Microsoft is not mentioned anywhere in the CoE document. Again, not
> actually relevent.

I think it is the most relevant of all the issues raised, and what I was alluding to with my suggestion of a "strict adherence" campaign.

The Government is rapidly migrating to Microsoft across the board - even departments that have been holdouts using Lotus Notes and associated products for a long time.  The CoE document specifies ECMA because they believe their current environment can support that standard.  The moment they upgrade to the next version of Microsoft Office (10 and later), that ECMA compliance will be lost, because newer versions of Microsoft Office comply to the (not yet ratified, but very expensively lobbied) ISO standard instead.

A tangential issue is that compliance with Microsoft Office 10's version of any standard requires using Microsoft Office 10.  This means that individuals or corporations intending to interact with the Government will need to invest at least $209 for the Home and Student version.  This is effectively a tax on interaction with the Government.

Then there are the ethical issues of requiring compliance to a standard which was railroaded through the ISO processes using plenty of money as lubrication to buy votes from countries who won't be using the standard in the foreseeable future.

Alex

PS: and then there's silly AGIMO folks thinking that a total of 100 people reading a blog means the message is getting out there…