SF Gate on Open Source Government

Bruce Perens writes: "At the San Francisco Chronicle's SF Gate, Hal Plotkin points to Sincere Choice as the right compromise for an IT renaissance in Government including both Open Source and proprietary software. The article is extremely flattering to yours truly, but a good push in the right direction from a well-respected commentator."

Comments

ROI

[gokubi]

I agree that legislating interoperability would go a long way to fixing the problem. How does anyone propose to get legislation to this effect?

The Internet/Computing industry gave $16,138,743 in the 2002 election cycle. If there is one thing that these people understand, it's Return On Investment.

Re:so as I understand it...

[curunir]

The way this works is, you mandate formats, not applications.

Not quite...the format is not mandated, just the openness of the format. So, for example, if Microsoft were to produce full documentation (available free of charge) for the .doc file format, the state would be free to purchase copies of Microsoft Word for whatever price Microsoft agrees to. They would also be just as free to use OpenOffice which uses a completely different, yet still fully documented file format.

Re:Excellent strategy

[Bruce Perens]

You must be aware that trying to lead this community is like herding cats. Do you really think that there would have been that much coordinated activity among so many people with differing goals and viewpoints, and in a Machevelian way? No, sorry. I actually could not get Red Hat to sign on to Sincere Choice, Tiemann had alread decided on his direction.

And you credit me with more political sophistication than I have, so far.

Bruce

Re:I don't understand

[LordNimon]

what value does the patent serve other than to prevent others from trying to patent it?

You'd be surprised how many companies file patents for just this purpose. The larger your "patent portfolio", the easier it is to get cross-licensing contracts with other companies that have patents you want.

Re:PDF"s

[Bruce Perens]

If it is possible for the Free Software community to implement PDF forms without any legal problems, and if the format is fully documented, I would not object to PDF. There is some question regarding whether the documentation is sufficient. There is also the PDF encryption issue.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Possibles issues...?

[Chemical Serenity]

Hmmm... I've seen some of those legal nightmares of which you speak, and while plain jane RTF might not handle it well, plain jane HTML would easily be able to... or if HTML was found lacking, a commonly accepted SMGL DTD would be in order.

Mind you, the vast vast vast majority of documents generated in any office (government, law, or otherwise) are simple memos, notes, and casual correspondance. Standardizing on a DTD for official documents isn't too insane, and standardizing on .rtf for 'unofficial' things would be fine.

That's all blue sky though. Most offices don't have enough techno savvy to understand what rtf or SGML is, let alone implement it in a uniform fashion.