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A decade ago, the largest concern with corporate monocultures in software was quarterly-cycle thinking that would degrade the quality of software on which governments rely.
Now, we also see the active weaponization of trade and threats to supply chains, and it is no longer just about dark corporate patterns but about dependence on private entities tied to the U.S. in its slide away from democracy.
I firmly believe that promoting software that exposes governments to diplomatic coercion should be treated as treason and scrutinized by intelligence.
The mandate should be for open, replicable, and fully published formats. If you want to be super-strict, add the requirement that there have to be at least two fully interoperable implementations under the control of two separate organizations.
Locking everyone into a particular format is always a bad idea.
Just in time for everyone and their brother to vibe code a docx editor. This doesn't make much sense except as a token gesture that will make everyone's life worse.
[Edit: I work on a Word competitor for lawyers. If anyone here thinks this type of move does anything but further entrench someone like Microsoft who has the resources to implement every format under the sun, I’ve got some news for you. So if it’s not anti-monopolistic, then what? Do you actually think the User prefers it? Honestly?
The world standardizes on VHS two decades ago. How is mandating betamax going to benefit anyone other than the established players and box ticking bureaucrats?]
In your roadmap you listed pdf support, so hopefully your system already has abstractions in place to handle multiple input formats without rewriting everything, no? You'll just have to pull-in an odf crate (or vibe code one).
I understand that it's extra work for you, but if you take a step back and look around you maybe you'd see the greater good.
PDF and ODF are completely different beasts. PDF is read-only rendering, ODF means roundtrip fidelity with edits, tracked changes, styles. The abstraction doesn't carry over cleanly.
Has anyone actually tracked which countries mandated ODF ten years ago and whether Microsoft's market share shifted at all? Because that empirical record would settle most of this debate.
IIRC, ODF is a family of formats -- ODS for spreadsheets, ODT for text, ODP for presentations. "ODF" alone isn't really a single format, though I get what the headline means.
Now, we also see the active weaponization of trade and threats to supply chains, and it is no longer just about dark corporate patterns but about dependence on private entities tied to the U.S. in its slide away from democracy.
I firmly believe that promoting software that exposes governments to diplomatic coercion should be treated as treason and scrutinized by intelligence.