Explaining Open Standards email attachements

Hugo Roy hugo at fsfe.org
Tue Apr 6 09:38:57 UTC 2010


Hello,

Le lundi 05 avril 2010 à 19:02 +0200, Carsten Agger a écrit :
> However, Sam is still right in pointing out that because of the
> widespread use of proprietary de facto standards, switching to Open
> Standards for most people will mean switching from something which works
> to something which doesn't.

This is wrong in my opinion. Here is how I see it, I'm going to use your
sentence and change it to make my point:

"because of the widespread use of proprietary de facto standards,
switching to *something else, be it proprietary or open standards or
whatever* for most people will mean switching from something which works
*only with his software* to something which doesn't *work with his only
software*."

So to assume that it is because proprietary standards that switching to
open standards doesn't work is, I think, wrong. It is because
proprietary standards doesn't work that when you switch to open
standards you can't use proprietary standards anymore.

>  "Don't send people Word files, use ODT
> instead" would, for many people, be equivalent to saying: Don't send
> people files they can read, send them files they can't read instead. 
> 
> I wouldn't do it in a job application.

My point is: send people files they can read. So use Open Standards.
Then I don't care if you choose ODT, OGG, TXT, WAV, EMAIL, HTML or
whatever. But don't send doc files, and when you receive them, explain
to your correspondant that it is important to send files people can
read, and Open standards is the only way for that.

> And, most people don't have and don't want to have a clue about *why*
> they can't read them either. I'm all for open standards and never send
> people attachments in Word format (usually using PDF, RTF, HTML or plain
> text), but I think there must be a better way to do it than to start
> sending people files they can't open.

I don't care about the *why* it is about politeness. In communication,
it's important that people understands you. Not making this effort is
considered rude. "Why": I don't care, and most people don't care, they
just do it.

-- 
  Hugo Roy                           im: hugo at jabber.fsfe.org 
  French Coordinator            http://www.fsfe.org/about/roy 

Free Software Foundation Europe works to create general understanding
and support for software freedom in politics, law and society-at-large.
For more information, see http://www.fsfe.org
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