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Meeting
Notice
The Southeastern Michigan IEEE presents:
"ODF:
How a Digital Document Format is Threatening a
Multibillion-Dollar Monopoly”
Presented by: Dave
Scholl, Ford Motor Company
Date: Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Time:
5:30 PM
Location:
Fairlane
Campus - U of M Dearborn (Map Code FCN)
University of Michigan
School of Management
Fairlane Center
19000 Hubbard Drive
Dearborn , MI 48126
Please
pre-register for this free event online at: https://www.ieeeemcs.org/semi/regemcmeet.asp?EventID=081407
Registration is
due Noon on
the day prior to the event.
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Schedule of Events 5:30 – 6:00 Pizza and Refreshments
Sponsor: Vector Cantec
6:00 – 7:00 Technical Presentation
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The Chapter Presentation is a FREE event. IEEE Non-Members Welcome!
To be added or removed from the IEEE EMC e-mailing
list, send an email to scott@emcsociety.org with ADD or REMOVE in subject line.
The IEEE Southeastern Michigan EMC Homepage is http://www.emcsociety.org
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Abstract
"ODF: How a Digital
Document Format is Threatening a Multibillion-Dollar
Monopoly (and what you can do to help)"
Under the leadership of
Bill Gates, Microsoft has become one of the most profitable companies in the
history of the world. There are many keystones to Microsoft's continuing
lock-in as a convicted (yet untrammeled) monopolist in the personal-computer
software market. One of the most important of these keystones, and one which is
a matter of personal experience for many of us, is their control over access to
the information we store in digital documents. Microsoft Word, by default,
stores documents in a proprietary format which can only be read reliably by
other copies of the same version of Word. Therefore, almost everyone who works
in any kind of office needs to purchase an up-to-date copy of Microsoft Word in
order to be able to access these documents.
Recently, two powerful
communities have joined to promote an alternative digital document format known
as Open Document Format (ODF), which is a published open standard, free for any
programmer to implement. The first and largest of these communities is all
those who don't wish to pay Microsoft's monopoly-inflated prices. The Chinese
government, on behalf of the Chinese business community, is a notable member of
this group. The second such community is government archivists, who have a
statutory responsibility to maintain collections of documents for public access
over decades. This group is smaller than the first, but their voices are heard
by lawmakers. They also find the default Microsoft document format
unacceptable. Imperfect conversions to new formats can change the documents in
unpredictable ways, and maintaining computers running older versions of Word is
neither practical nor legal. In many countries, arranging a
government archive in such a way that citizens are required to make a purchase
from Microsoft before viewing public records is highly objectionable, not to
mention illegal. More objectionable yet is the concept of the citizens
of a sovereign government being unable to view their own government's
electronic documents without licensing software patents held by Microsoft, a
foreign corporation.
The seminar will present
some technical background on ODF, as well as OOXML, Microsoft's response to
ODF. The current status of these formats with regards to international
standard-setting bodies such as ISO will be described. The political
environment surrounding government decisions to adopt ODF will be reviewed,
with particular attention to recent developments in the
This meeting is joint with the EMC Society , the Vehicular Technology
Society , the Computer Society , and the Engineering
Management Society .
The IEEE Southeastern Michigan EMC Homepage is http://www.emcsociety.org