Re: [libreoffice-users] Digital signing MS format documents

On 09/13/2011 03:57 PM, e-letter wrote:
> On 13/09/2011, draganb<d_bocevski@yahoo.com>  wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > we started using LibreOffice as an alternative to MS Office in our
> > organization, on some of the computers. It all started well, but we've hit a
> > wall with digital signing. As I understand, the document must be in
> > OpenDocument format for the signing to work. The problem is that we will not
> > be able to use the LibreOffice native format in the near future and we are
> > stuck with the MS formats for which the signing doesn't work.
> Firstly, I shall assume your organisation has legal installations of
> m$. Correct me if wrong, but there may be a legal implication as a
> result of using digital signatures, so why would you want to use LO
> generate a digital signature for a proprietary format not owned by LO?
> This may be a legal problem for LO assuming a digital signature is
> supposed to authenticate the user, content and the software used to
> create that content and so it is entirely appropriate for LO to
> provide digital signatures only for the native odf.
>
> Are you really "stuck" or just unwilling to explain to your clients
> that you are using LO and the benefits derived from using LO?
>
> Of course, the main benefit is supposed to be the advantages of odf...
>
> > Is there any way around this? Or maybe I should post this as a feature
> > request?
> Well, m$ users will vote for this because of the short-term
> convenience, but it would be a very bad consequence for LO. See
> previous posts for the reasons.
>
> You need to perform a cost benefit analysis for your use of LO;
> otherwise, revert to m$.
Maybe the company wants to have some way to make sure that their 
document show that they come from their office, and not someone doing 
some creative editing and claiming that it came from them.  Digital 
Signing is not just for MS to determine if you have a legal copy of 
their products.  There are digital sigs for emails and web sites.  I 
have received some documents that must have a digital sig or it is not 
legal.

How many businesses really would risk problems with pirated copies of 
Office or XP/Vista/Win7?  Most would not.

To be honest, if LibreOffice is to be a replacement in the business 
offices, it must be able to handle the file formats, digital sigs, and 
any other thing that a normal user [not power user] would use MS Office 
for.  That is the market LO was designed for.  If LO does not do these 
things, then business users will not be able to switch over to LO and 
still be able to do their normal office work and/or support their 
clients that do use them.  If people see that LO does everything they do 
now with MSO [including the file formats] AND it is free to get and 
upgrade, then there is not reason to keep using MSO.  If they have 
clients that use .docx and .xltx files and LO did not support them, then 
these businesses would not be able to switch to LO and keep their 
clients happy.  And NO, do not ask [or require] the clients to switch to 
LO, like one thread stated we should do.  You could easily loose those 
clients for asking.



--
For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted