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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.)
>On the other hand, XML and other TLAs don't
>always mean free or open formats.
This is true, but XML documents themselves are also considerably more open than their binary counterparts. Anyone can parse a well-formed XML document, and validate it if a DTD is provided. While companies may still create XML that behaves in a specific way bound to their application, the data in the XML document is available to any application. While developers could create obfuscated DTDs or encrypt their data in a proprietary manner, they would lose most of the benefits of using XML. XML doesn't bar the creation of proprietary formats, but its openness is one of its greatest advantages.
This is not the first time we at /. have seen states and countries go this route but they almost always end up back with Microsoft but with a discount on their licence.
I don't know about you guys but I won't believe it until I see office workers using it, before then it is just a negotiation ploy to save some money with Microsoft (Why else announce it early?)..
Adobe certain has done its job in making PDF so common place that it's become an "open" format, hasn't it?
I think that for specific purposes proprietary formats are ok, but for interchanging and for storage purposes, the open formats are important.
Google is your friend. The complete PDF specification is available for download from Adobe's website.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
HTM is the filename suffix that broken operating systems like Windows used to assign to HTML files. The document format is called HTML.
I think it's good because it will permit people/company to interact and be able to exchange document without to be forced to use some particular software.
But I think if you take XML, we need to have some effort to produce some standards DTD or XML-schema to be sure to have a real interoperability
Also it will be neccesary to have some kind of validator for each format to force that everybody is using the real standard and not some fancy extension that could ruin the all idea
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
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.
If they are serious about enforcing open document formats, that's good: open source can compete and win if formats are open. The big concern is that companies like Microsoft will try to portray their proprietary formats as "open". For example, the DOC format has been documented by Microsoft, but it isn't truly open because it keeps changing and because it is under Microsoft's control. In particular, XML is not an open format--it isn't a format at all; XML is a standard in which people can define formats, both open and proprietary.
A format isn't open until it has actually been standardized by an independent body that can guarantee that it is free from patent or other claims, and until it has been demonstrated that it can be implemented independtly by actually doing so.
Similarly, RTF is RTFM.
Geez.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Most commenters seem to be missing the fact that this news is unequivocally bad. There were efforts to adopt open source instead of closed source software, but this senator (probably sponsored by Microsoft) managed to talk them into focusing on open formats instead. This coincides nicely with Microsoft's new XML formats for their office products, and lets Massachusetts continue using Microsoft products while paying lip-service to the fans of "open" solutions.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Boston City Council sends by email public hearings notices for council committees like the Human Rights Committee. But our Boston City Council is unwilling to send the email as plain ASCII text instead of the .doc formatted public notices that are not so compatible.
Maybe they want to preserve enbolded text as if that enbolded text was some sort of legal document. Maybe they want to preserve the image of a seal of the city. At the expense of wider more compatible distribution of important information our city council is even unwilling to put the full text of public hearings notices on the web site at http://cityofboston.gov/citycouncil
An online calendar at the website does list the meetings minimally with no details. The full explanation for the purpose for holding the public hearing needs to be posted every time with an archive for reviewing past hearings.
So much for a mandate of so called e-government !
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...
A .TXT file is nothing more and nothing less than a plain text file. Ironically, it's only because of MS, champion of closed standards, that using the .TXT extension for these files has now become a de facto convention, but in the DOS age, other extensions such as .DOC or extensions that were basically part of the name (like README.1ST) or the total absence of an extension were also very common.
Since when do plain text files count as an "open format"? Is it just because someone hasn't tried to patent it yet? (probably) Just seems a bit weird to me.
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.
Obligatory disclaimer: I wrote this humble file formats FAQ and it represents my personal and professional opinion (not necessarily my employer's).
That said, can someone in MA please ask the movers and shakers there to read that document? It's probably in the class of "common sense" to most of us here, but clearly we've done a less than stellar job so far of imparting this clarity to those in political circles.
For the impatient: the conclusion I reached is that RTF and PDF are very questionable if you want to use them as truly interchangeable formats in a heterogeneous environment. This is an empirical finding, based on real life experience.
-- This
There's a lot of (good) commentary on the detail of what is and isn't an open format. And it would be good to get the detail right, because there are many ways to abuse the phrase "open format" and there are companies that will take advantage of them.
.doc, .xls and .ppt formats would really open up the desktop marketplace.
Nonetheless, requiring the use of open formats is a strong, defendable position in practise. like it or not, mandating the use of open source isn't possible, or at least highly unlikely. The reason for this is that open source might be good but it's not *necessary*. Not in the short term, and never in the minds of people with votes and money for lobbyists. A lot of good things have been done with proprietary systems (I'm an Apple fan) with a lot of openness. Open source is therefore a difficult argument to win in terms of *requiring* its use. Again, as a Mac fan, I wouldn't agree to it myself as a *requirement*.
Open formats (*real* open formates) produce a level playing field. Open source could win its argument in a fair fight in public, not a dogmatic argument conducted in courts between various zealots on both sides that many people fight it hard to really bother with.
I'm not interested in forcing organisations to drop Microsoft. Dictatorial approaches to solving problems never appeal to me. I'd be far happier with a situation where by legal documents and government documents (as some important examples)must be in an open format so that full featured editors could be available on a number of platforms e.g. Windows, Mac OS X, Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX.
That list is deliberately composed primarily of commercial companies because a) that's the way the world still works - make use of it to your own advantage, and b) to get all those platforms (including a good open source distro) sharing some new equivalents of
I don't think that government should mandate open source vs. closed source code purchases. This is unfair. The government should not mandate against valid, legal business models.
I think the government should mandate that output from any software be an open standard format (XML or whatever) and then they choose, based on a competative bid process like they are supposed to do, the software that will do what they want (which may include adding features at some point). If some OSS group wins, so be it. If some proprietary group wins, so be it.
Allowing only OSS is both wrong and bad, IMO, for a number of reasons.
1. It is straight against capitalist economy to require one business/development model. In capitalism, you specify the product and whoever can do it best/cheapest/easiest wins. Only an OSS zealot would think that OSS would always win.
2. The government should not dictate the "right" business model for people to follow. As long as they are legal under the laws (both criminal and financial) of the country, they are valid. The government should not dictate that some valid models are not valid for the government.
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
I am absolutely shocked that somebody would actually think this is true:
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.
Obviously you have never even seen a typewriter. On old typewriters the big silver bar on the left did both cr+lf. Electric ones had a key (where "Enter" is on your computer) that did both cr and lf. If you wanted to overprint, you did the return action, then turned the big knob on the left to basically do an "inverse-lf". If typewriters were the inspriation, we would have newline and reverse-lf characters.
It's true that early teletypes using baudot standardized on the two characters in their communication. This is because the mechanical return action was so slow that if it started doing the lf after the return started no time was lost. The lf character forced a delay to be added so the system would work, printing after a cr would never work, the next character would appear somewhere in the middle because the carriage was still returning. You had to add delay nulls to get overprinting. Believe me, at 50 baud, if they could have gotten it to return & lf in one character time they would have saved that character!
I think on early machines there was a key to generate a cr+lf pair. Also every computer system I ever saw or heard of would convert a single key into both codes internally, you never needed to type it.
Microsoft could fix their system in one day if they wanted to (just change "write as text" to be identical to "write as binary" but leave reading alone). However it is in their interest to make sure their files break when used on other systems, though almost all Unix programs have been fixed to treat CR as whitespace because of this. They also have made sure the default application you get when you double-clicik a file (textedit?) will not work for plain LF, so that Unix files look like crap. Notice that every other program they have can handle plain-LF just fine, this is pretty positive proof that they did this on purpose to make interoperability look difficult.
Also, OS/X uses LF, just like everything in the world except Microsoft.
No, TLA is Three Letter Acronym.
Since when were 'TXT' and 'HTM' the names of document formats?
Please, this isn't MS-DOS, and even if it were there's no need to resort to such barbarisms. You mean plain text, and HTML.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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