in070185
From: Christian Einfeldt [einfeldt@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 5:55 PM
To: Rajchel, Lisa; Garner, Jennifer; Desautels, Sara; angel.lopezsolanas@wipo.int
Cc: ODF Discussion List
Subject: Christian Einfeldt Contribution in Response to JTC
1 N 8455 - 30 Day Review for Fast Track Ballot ECMA-376 | ISO/IEC DIS 29500
Office Open XML File Formats
Dear Colleagues,
My name is Christian Einfeldt. I am an attorney practicing civil law
in San Francisco, California, USA. It has been brought to my attention
that there is a possibility of that Microsoft's OOXML program would
gain the status of an international standard, despite the fact that the
Open Document Format has already been granted this status. I would
request that you oppose Microsoft's efforts in this regard, simply because
it would result in confusing and duplicative international standards.
I have several pragmatic concerns in this regard:
1) I have moved my entire law practice to the Linux operating system
and to the OpenOffice.org office suite. I did so, in part, because
I saw that governments all over the world were moving to a more open standard.
It would be counter-productive for me to have to accomodate a second standard
in my practice.
2) The Microsoft standard is not truly an open standard, but is focused
on one product, and one product only, that being Microsoft's Office product
line. I have moved to open source software for my law practice because
I wanted to be able to get support from competing vendors. I would
not have this opportunity with Microsoft products as the standard.
3) Tracking of licenses is a substantial business cost. With
open source software, I do not have to incur this substantial compliance
cost, nor do I need to worry about an employee "accidentally" copying a
licensed illegally. Attorneys in California are subject to discipline
and sanction by the California State Bar, our regulatory agency, for engaging
in software piracy, and having to treat my employees as potential thieves
is not conducive to a good work environment.
4) The move from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word caused substantial
and costly change in the legal industry. With an enduring, truly open
document standard, I can rest assured that I will not have similar conversion
costs in the future.
5) Lawyers are required to keep documents for years. I am concerned
about compatibility issues with a non-open standard such as Microsoft's
Office product line. My employees have experienced problems in the
past opening older documents, only to find that formatting has changed from
one version of Office to another. In fact, I have been told that there
have been problems opening some older Excel documents with newer versions
of Excel, which is one of the reasons that we switched to OpenOffice.org
Calc -- it was able to documents that Excel was not.
Thank you for your consideration of my request
Christian Einfeldt, Esq., California State Bar license 165953
Law Offices of Christian J. Einfeldt
580 California Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104, USA
+415-351-1300