Chinese movement (From Barcelona)

Mr. Hu Cai Yong was talking about the background for the Chinese interest in open source software and OpenOffice.org. The company RedFlag 2000 has made their own distribution of OpenOffice.org called ReadOffice. This distribution is in no way competitive to OpenOffice.org
but is more as a distribution with a Chinese spirit inside. As Mr. Hu explained:

"Other providers of office suites is trying to implement western software and a western way of thinking."

and he continued:

"Translating an application like an office suite into Chinese is far more than just translating the words in the menu".

In Chine, as an example, all letters in the alphabet is the same size. And Chinese documents should not be suppressed by western standards, just because a it's common use in North America and Europe. With open source software as OpenOffice.org, the Chinese developers can make their own version that supports the specific needs that comes from Chinese traditions and culture.

I think it was important for all participants to hear that from a Chinese point of view, open source is solving a problem that proprietary western software can never do. We from North America and Europe will never be able to solve problems that actually has its beginning in culture.

ISO Objections - Dismiss it

The Danish subcommittee under DS called S-142/U-34 has a hearing that closes today, July 2nd. Now that the hearing is over, the subcommittee will decide how Denmark will vote in ISO.

The Community behind OpenOffice.org in Denmark has objected to the ISO approval of OOXML or ISO/IEC DIS 29500 or ECMA-376 or "Office Open XML File Formats" being an ISO standard. Here you can find the objections: http://doc.oooforum.dk/Filer/ISO_kommentar_OpenOffice_org.pdf

While I was working on this document, I had the opportunity to get some detailed knowledge of the content in the 6.000 pages specification. And some of it is quite overwhelming. For example have a look at this document from the ODF Alliance: http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/The%20Technical%20Case%20Against%20OOXML.pdf on page 4: Cultural and Linguistic Adaptability -- Does it consider different cultures and languages?

Read it and read it again.

The answer to that question is no ! The specification is cultural and religious discriminating. If you are a person from the rich part of the christian world, everything will be fine. But if you don't consider the American way of living as an interest of yours, you can find you another document format.

This is disrespectful and this should alone cause the ISO organization to dismiss the specification. Shame on you !