By David Meyer, 14 May 2008 08:41
NEWS
Becta, the organisation that advises the UK government on educational IT, has escalated its complaint over the interoperability of Microsoft's products to the European Commission.
The announcement has already drawn praise from some of the same players in the open source community who, little more than a year ago, criticised Becta for being too closely aligned with Microsoft.
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Last October, Becta went to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) with two Microsoft-related complaints, one regarding school subscription-licensing arrangements and the other regarding the lack of full interoperability between recent products, such as Windows Vista and Office 2007, and earlier versions of Microsoft's software. For example, users of Office 2003 could have trouble reading documents created in Office 2007.
However, at the start of this year the Commission began its own investigation into Microsoft's interoperability issues, an investigation that has since expanded to take in questions over how Microsoft may have used its dominance in the sector to push for the standardisation of its nascent Office Open XML (OOXML) document format. Becta has now taken its interoperability complaint up to the Commission, to be folded into that wider investigation. The licensing-related complaint is still being considered by the OFT.
The organisation said in a statement: "Becta believes that impediments to interoperability limit choice. In the context of the education system, this can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects which have a negative impact on wider policy initiatives, including improving educational outcomes, facilitating home-school links and addressing the digital divide."
Becta's executive director of strategic technologies, Dr Stephen Lucey, has met with the Commission to discuss the matter and said he welcomes the Commission's wider investigation.
Lucey said: "It is not just the interests of competitors and the wider marketplace that are damaged when barriers to effective interoperability are created. Such barriers can also damage the interests of education and training organisations, learners, teachers and parents."
Lucey added, however, that Becta would prefer not to have to go to the competition authorities on the matter. He said: "Ideally, we prefer to address interoperability issues by working in close partnership with the wider industry. We are successfully addressing a range of other interoperability challenges through this type of approach."
Becta also announced this week an open-procurement process for its upcoming, revised software-licensing programme, which covers software such as office-productivity suites. One of the open-source community's main criticisms of Becta in the past has been the closed nature of such tenders.
Comments
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1. Richard Davies
Are these people serious?
Firstly, there is a download for MS Office 2003 etc. called 'fileformatconverters.exe' and this is free from microsoft and allows you to open and save documents created in office 2007 (docx etc.).
Secondly, what other competitors out there have so much interoperability between competing products? I work in the construction industry and no software packages are interoperable other than perhaps a few import routines for CSV based data import / export etc.
Thirdly...open source community should write better software and offer better support etc. that way the private sector may sometime in the future consider it as a realistic alternative to microsoft. I mean come on...have you seen the latest version of OpenOffice...its looks like microsofts apps from the days of 3.1!
Forthly...packages such as OpenOffice will read MS Office documents fine and also save as them if you want people to think that you have MS Office as well and are not a tight wad!
With all this I don't see an interoperability problem at all?
I would admit that I think that the full suite of MS Office Pro is slightly expensive however, this can only be set by demand and people are still buying it.