"Exterminate all the Brutes"

The Administration of the State of Zurich in Switzerland still uses the proprietary xls, doc etc. formats of the MS Office Suite. That’s why each an every worker of the state of Zurich has to write its timetable into a table of such a proprietary file. Today while transfoming my timetable.xls file into a ODF (Open Document Format) file I coincidentally found out that the timetable with its calculations and algorithms still works perfect in Openoffice. And it also does in Neo Office (on a Mac OS X). Further I noticed, that the file shrunk by 70%, although the content of the file was exactly the same. This means that a conversion of a xls file into the odf format cleans the file and keeps it neat. If the administration of the state of Zurich would switch to the ISO certified ODF Format we could economise 70% of our storage Servers, that could be used for example for another Free Software project in Malawi. 🙂

Melissa Draper from the Ubuntu Project recently posted an interesting article about Edubuntu on the Linux.com portal. In the article the thin-client project, that I realised in 2006 at the Polytechnic, is mentioned.