I agree and I would like to add that BD Govt (and any other non-profit org or governing body) should move away from any proprietary document format for their documentation needs. The “.doc” is owned by Microsoft, if they go belly up ( this could happen in many forms, some company may buy them out in future and declare Office 95-2007 obsolete, support less ) how will we open the government documents then say 25 years from now?
The State of Massachusetts recognized this issue has jumped on to the OpenSource in 2003. Details here :
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/53656.html?wlc=1240235994
It is like saying everybody should use ABC brand of Panjabi in the Office where the true guideline should describe the properties of the selected Panjabi and not favor any company product.
In right minds which government would love to be held hostage of some profit-hungry company’s mercy? Government docs should be free and open format period.
I believe in new version of Microsoft there is a way to save docs in Open Format, details here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
Now about the OpenOffice, the product is stable, matured for last few years and look here, there are works in motion to support Bangla :
http://bn.openoffice.org
However in light of Oracle buying-out Sun (who originally developed Sun-Office and donated productionVersion-1 code to OpenOffice)..& the recession in full swing the future of OpenOffice could be at stake. This needs to be examined before anybody should advocate a software for government adoption.
Lets make sure we understand what is open source/open data-format and recommend that in full details to BD government. Getting married to another software or software platform is not going to be a true solution.
Thank you.
ZL
Tags: Bangla, Bangladesh, MS Office, OpenOffice
