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Massachusetts Adopting 'Open Format' Software
XopherMV writes "A Massachusetts state senator who had complained about the state government's effort to promote open-source software at the expense of proprietary software has hailed the state's effort to reach a compromise over future software purchases by the state. The latest iteration of the state's policy emphasizes 'Open Formats' such as TXT, RTF, HTM, PDF, and XML." And if file formats for state use must be in truly open and free formats, then it matters much less what OS or application is used to create or open them. (On the other hand, XML and other TLAs don't always mean free or open formats.)
By thinking of XML as an "open" format they are walking right into Microsofts little trap... Try decoding Office-XML sometime. Or my little XML format here: <blob>()Yyfoas/FGTif</blob>.
(Of course, they don't trust that people really can't decipher it, so they protected it heavily with patents too.
It's like saying ASCII is an open format. That's right, but ... there's something written in ASCII too, is that format open? Like RTF, which is written in ASCII but *not* open.
the data in the XML document is available to any application
Not with any meaningful intepretaion. The problem is there no information about the meaning of the terms that appear nor about the meaning of the absence of terms.
Even with a DTD/schema all you get is syntactic information - it doesn't tell you what anything actually means without getting access to documentation.
Good specification documentation that is freely available and freely implementable makes something open.
The last time I was sendout out resumes (a lot of places want a doc file), I opened it in multiple versions of word. The file always opened, but the formating got changed. Sometimes it all fit on one page as intended, other times it would spill over onto two pages, etc. So for times when formatting is critical, word is not truly backwards compatible. You are better off exporting to pdf...
Not in the case of Massachusetts. Look at the state's history with Microsoft -- they were the only ones not to cave in with regards to the antitrust case, and there are numerous stories regarding their ongoing efforts to better embrace open source.
I see the announcement both as a way to encourage the regular rank & file and the various commonwealth communities to embrace the efforts more than it is an effort to gain some ground negotiating with Microsoft.
I've worked with WordML. The only binary I saw was embedded images, encoded in plain old base64. Everything else was plain text.
Granted, there were features in the DTD that weren't in the spec, but I was using a pre-release documentation set, so hopefully they've gone back and fully updated things. Besides, everything was in the DTD, so if you had to, you could look at how it's supposed to work.
Try reading through the documentation and some WordML files of your own, instead of just talking out of your ass.
Actually, plain text files aren't standardized across platforms. Windows tends to use CRLF to show the end of a line, while Unixes use LF, And the old Macintosh used CR. Not sure if OSX uses LF or CR, because it's unix, but it's also Mac OS. Anyway, Microsoft is the only one that actually has it right, since if you think back to the old typewriter, you have to have a Carriage Return, and a Line Feed to get to the start of the next line when typing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"...that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms."
.DOC is NOT that format as of yet. If they want to play this game, it will have to be, or they need to come up with an as capable substitute.
Don't you get it? Haven't you figured this out?
If for whatever reason Microsoft wants to play in the arena, they need to support a "fully documenentd and available for public use" format.
This means any dreams of wacky patent controlled document formats from Microsoft (which is more harmful to the industry and open source than an undocumented format) are out the window. They can patent them all they want but they have to let it go either way.
Let them buy all of the MS stuff they want, but this is the first step.
Imagine the next step when they start to mandate network protocols "that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms."
That will make SAMBA a heck of a lot easier to maintain...
Open Source is more competetive and possible with Open Standards. You need Open Standards to empower Open Source.
I recently had to fill out a form that required Adope Acrobat Reader 6.something to open properly, a version which is not available for Linux.
.asx, or maybe .apx -- at any rate, it's got some parts that render correctly, and some that are oh-so-secret and don't appear unless using a new enough AA Reader, by design.)
...
(I think the extension is
After no reader in Linux would work, I decided to try it with my iBook. Apple's preview also won't show the hidden parts -- it actually demands AA Reader. Sigh. So I downloaded a new AA Reader 6.02 think, (an obnoxious, screen-stealing application, btw, which makes you appreciate the beauty both of kPDF, Ghostview and other free viewers, and Apple's Preview), thinking, "Hey, I can view it with this, including the hidden parts, and print to a *real* (all displayed) PDF, then email to my Linux box, where I have a working printer
Even this convoluted path was too much to hope for, because the special encoded PDF didn't allow printing to a PDF, only to paper. Catch-22; you can view this PDF, but don't you try to save it as a PDF!
So, sadly, even PDF can be used to obscure as well as to delight and inform.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Think about it -- if something like this had been done earlier, we could have saved an awful lot of time and money that was instead spent on anti-trust lawsuits that the government ultimately "lost" (yes, I know they technically won, but have _you_ noticed any benefits from that win? I sure haven't).
Here's the problem -- Federal, State, and Local Government agencies of all sorts put out press releases, solicitations, regulatory notices and the like by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. Companies and citizens who wish to read and/or respond to this data stream have no choice but to purchase Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in order to interact with the Government. Government has ensured the Micorsoft monopoly simply by continuing to support a product with closed and proprietary file formats. If other state Governments, and especially if the Federal Government endorses _independantly verifiable_ open document formats, the monopoly is broken without the expense of continued litigation or oversight.
I think that the same can be said in other areas as well. For instance -- Mozilla, and now FireFox, are making inroads into IE's domain. The progress is slow because many sites do not support the HTML standards put forth by the W3C. What if all government agencies declared that all web pages created or maintained by their agencies would support only open standards -- not some of the wrinkles introduced by IE? Again, problem solved over the long run.
IMHO, we depend too much on legal wrangling to try to enforce corporate behavior, rather than encouraging, architechting, and supporting an infrastructure that would lead to the same end without all the pushing, shoving, and head-butting along the way.
Yes, I know that I am naively idealistic. Deal with it.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster