Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 16:14:09 +0000
Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 03:52:18PM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> > >
> > > > Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
> > > > yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
> > > > M$-Office substitute.
> > >
> > > In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google
> > > Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not
> > > have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact
> > > with school.
> > >
> > > [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives
> > > implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file,
> > > which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea.
> > 
> > right, but don't forget that to in order to "read only"  a document, you
> > don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link
> > you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to
> > take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its
> > only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While
> > using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to
> > Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a
> > NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier "marketing job" to do.
> 
> Are you interested in a read-only or  read-write format?
> 

I believe public Google Documents can be downloaded in OpenDocument format
without registration (did not try that), and they certainly can be placed under
licences that can be modified under certain conditions (e.g: Creative Commons
licences). Anyway, even Lawrence Lessig in http://remix.lessig.org/ does not
advocate the abolishment of read-only culture. There's a lot of content on the
Web out there that's not in wikis/etc., and that's OK because it's still
usable.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if
> a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with
> another.
> 



-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Optimising Code for Speed - http://shlom.in/optimise

Chuck Norris doesn’t commit changes, the changes commit for him.
    — Araujo

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .