Explaining Open Standards email attachements

[Theo Schmidt]

Sam Liddicott schrieb:
> I think the message is a great summary of the problem; but from experience I
> say that users who don't already have a political understanding of the issues
> or a thorough technical background will:
> 
> 1. Not be able to understand what to do in order to comply with the message 
> 2. Not be capable of carrying out the steps if they do understand.
...

I agree. Additionally, many people who *do* have a political understanding and 
*are* capable, reject this out of pure laziness or convenience, or are obstinate 
because they do not want to be told what to do. Or, they feel they are already 
doing their bit to save the world and what harm is there in using <XY>? (e.g. "I 
already sort my trash and eat bio food, why should *I* waste my time with file 
formats?").

Therefore we also need a pragmatic approach.

...
> On the other hand I often say that I don't want to have to buy five hundred
> pounds of office suite and operating system in order to read their docx (or
> worse: ms publisher) properly; I ask for a PDF (which they are familiar with)
> and there is a free printer driver pdf writer for windows which I can point
> then to. Thus I reduce my problem and their future problems. Asking for ogg
> would make problems.

I sometimes *send* people OGGs and when they complain use this to bring up the 
subject. But I can't complain if somebody sends me an MP3, as it is the "de 
facto" standard and everybody can open it, even most Linux users. The fine 
points about whether Fluendo's "free" MP3 codec ist free as in beer or in 
speach, or whether VLC is 100% legal is lost for everybody except the likes of us.

With DOCX I'm uncertain what do do now that OpenOffice can open these files. 
When somebody sends me one I somtimes pretend I still can't open it and ask for 
a PDF, RTF or even (Horror!) DOC. I generally explain that DOCX is a bad idea 
because the majority of people can't open it, i.e. everybody who hasn't got an 
up-to-date program or plugin. I expect this actually includes more Windows-users 
than Linux-users.

Cheers, Theo Schmidt