ROME: 28th May 2005 -- What follows is both news and
opinion. There - I've declared my hand!
'The news' is that within the past month, a new document format has
been approved as a worldwide standard. It is called, simply
enough, OpenDocument format and is backed by a movement called Open Source. What it means effectively is
that the one who uses the Open Document format is not locked in to a
particular vendor or proprietary software. The rest that follows is
opionion. Take it or leave it.
The issue possibly has implications for Salesians,
because it is part of a wider issue of dependency that we all
experience - dependency on proprietary software. It occurs to me
that the wealth of industrialised nations (I am looking only at the
software/computer scene) is not entirely innocent nor apolitical. The question came to me in
two practical circumstances - buying cheap proprietary software for
almost nothing in a part of Asia ($2 instead of $900), and suggesting
to students from Ethiopia that they might want to get some help with
essays, obviously using MSword as the medium.
In the first instance, there is some sort of obvious
ethical problem: call it piracy, or try to suggest that the 'benefits'
of industrialised expertise is somehow being subsidised, made hidden or
zeroed out, and the disks possibly don't work anyway when you get
home! A further problem is a spelling one - the disk I saw was
called 'Adope collection'!! In the second instance there is
nothing obviously wrong with helping students from Ethiopia or anywhere
else via MSword, but it might be a path taken which is not ultimately
in the best interests of that nation, once one considers the costs
involved in sustaining proprietary software use.
So what could we do, practically speaking?
Over several months I have taken small steps, none of which I
regret. One is to use Mozilla's Firefox browser instead of IE
Explorer. Worth saying immediately that you probably should not
attempt ever to remove IE since so much of the Windows system relies on
it. But nobody says you have to use it. Firefox is no worse (a
tiny bit slower), probably better (it reads RSS to start with),
definitely cheaper (nothing), and not as 'heavy'. A second move
is to ditch OE (Outlook Express) in
favour of the open source Thunderbird. Very definitely better in
every respect.
OpenOffice has arrived at the next-but-last beta
format before OpenOffice 2.0. I'm moving in that direction but
haven't fully 'plunged' as yet. It too costs, nothing, the
OpenDocument format is now widely approved and backed by the EU, it
does all that the 'other' office program does and a little more - it
saves to PDF format without using the proprietary Adobe software.
And Linux. you ask? Haven't taken that step
yet! Need to think about it. But there is another step I
only have praise for. It's called Wiki, and it's too long to
write about here. Look it up. Wiki is all about
collaborative text production - if you want to see it in action tell me
and I'll demonstrate how to go about it and use it in a practical
project. JBF
VOCABULARY
to declare one's hand: to state
openly
Open Source: a movement that makes
licenses and computer code freely available, and usually free in a
financial sense.
vendor: a firm or group that sells things
proprietary: owned by someone (therefore
not freely available and usually not free in financial terms)
apolitical: without political
consequences, or nothing to do with politics.
to ditch: to throw out
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