User:HaakonME

From openSUSE

Hi!

My real name is Haakon Meland Eriksen, I live in Tromsø, Norway. I've been using GNU/Linux since October 1998. I bought boxed sets from SUSE three times. Since 2003 GNU/Linux in the form of SUSE has been my daily desktop operating system.

You might find me if you go googling, but if you are interested in what I did here at openSUSE, you can take a look at my contributions.

Unfortunately, the joint press release 2. November 2006 from Novell and Microsoft has led me to reconsider my choice of distribution after 8 years. That is a long time. The conditions of the agreement do not satify me at all. Microsoft should have endorsed the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) and dropped their proprietary Office Open XML. Rather than spending time on ODF, Novell has used their resources to enhance free software's ability to read/write Microsoft Office Open XML. Whilst interoperable solutions are a great thing, in my view this is the wrong way - away from vendor neutral solutions. This will enhance the status quo among end users, rather than enhance the unlocking of their own data.

To those who don't know - ODF files are regular archive files - ZIP files, but in stead of .zip the extensions are .odt for text documents, .ods for spreadsheets, .odp for presentations and so on. You can inspect and extract the contents using WinZip on Windows or just type zip:/path/to/filename.odt in Konqueror. The content is stored inside as plain text, using vendor neutral XML tags - an ISO standard - to identify how an application show interpret some text as a paragraph and other text as a footnote. Now please think big - like contracts, public records, property statements, laws, judgements, statistics, wills, medical records, private documents - and long term - 10, 20, 50, 100 or 200 years - when your last decendent is no more - and you understand those tags must be vendor neutral - how else can we as end users be sure they will last that long? Microsoft being around in 2037? With a backward compatible solution to Office 2007? No way. Not only is Office Open XML not vendor neutral, it is not possible to inspect and extract the contents in the trivial manner of ODF. This means I cannot choose the archiving system I want, the web publishing system I want, the workflow system I want and so on.

As I see it, this is a mistake on behalf of end users who wants to be free from vendors who use technology to bind customers to them rather than respect end users need to control their own data indefinetly. More could be said, but I'll stop now - thank you for your attention.

To the SUSE developers - thank you for ride - it's been a great eight years!

Yours sincerely, Haakon Meland Eriksen, signing off for the last time