Fwd: [FSF] Why I'm rejecting your email attachment: for freedom and the good of the web!

[ijstokes-/2FeUQLD3jedFdvTe/nMLpVzexx5G7lz at public.gmane.org (Ian Stokes-Rees)]

>> Why I'm rejecting your email attachment: for freedom and the good of the
>> web!
>>
>> http://www.fsf.org/news/why-im-rejecting-your-email-attachment
>>
>> BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, March 31, 2010 -- The Free
>> Software Foundation (FSF) today launched a campaign calling on all
>> computer users to start politely rejecting email attachments sent in
>> secret and proprietary formats: for freedom and the good of the web!
>>     
> Yeah, I'll get right on that.  THAT will help my job search!  No more
> sending or getting Word documents.
If the document doesn't need to be edited, then PDF is surely a
preferable way to send these sorts of things -- you are sure it looks
the way it is supposed to, on any system, and you avoid someone opening
the document, turning on comments, or starting an "undo" chain to see
what you *originally* wrote.

PDF, RTF, or plain text is not an unreasonable policy to advocate for,
however I too am less fanatical these days and more pragmatic about
document formats.  Things could have gone in a different direction if
Open Office had succeeded in being a viable alternative to Word for
business document creation, however that still hasn't happened, IMHO.

Ian