The Massachusetts Office Party

Quattro Vezina writes "The Inquirer reports that the state of Massachusetts has performed a modern-day Boston Tea Party, by dumping Microsoft Office in the proverbial ocean. According to the article, 'every state document must be in PDF or using Open Office formats' starting in 2007." Forbes has the story as well. More from the article: "The switch to open formats such as these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to Massachusetts - something that was not possible using closed formats. The proposal, which is open for comment until the end of next week before it takes effect, would represent a big boost for open source software such as Open Office, which is created by volunteer programmers and made available free of charge."

Comments

PDF?

[MyLongNickName]

Movin to PDF is a step forward? Crap, I'd rather have a word document....

PDFs?

[connah0047]

Switching to PDFs, eh? Just think how slow the government will be NOW. I absolutely despise PDFs. I think the concept itself it good, but Adobe's implementation (which is by far the most widespread) is slow as molassess, up hill, IN THE WINTER.

I don't buy it

[argoff]

BS, this is senator Kennedy's state we're talking about here. Nothing is for the good of the tax payers. I would read this to mean that Microsoft didn't offer enough bribe money to high ranking state officials.

Not quite

[nurb432]

They are tossing out file formats, not microsoft.

Ever noticed word can read/write ( for the most part ) open formats such as html, or RTF?

Slow news day eh?

And since when is microsoft the government? The 'teaparty' was a protest by the people against the government.

Re:Not quite

[nurb432]

You proved my point. They can easily add support to what ever format they want.

( and i can already export in PDF from microsoft products.. today. )

Not that i have a problem with ousting microsoft, but this 'format requirement' isnt even close to that.

PS: for your RTFA attitude, bite me. If the story summary isnt accurate, dont blame me, blame the editors.

Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine

[DavidD_CA]

Which version? How do you embed formulas? How do you embed graphics? What archive format will you use to pack the whole mess up for distribution?

What's your point?

I hardly think you can say that any "open" standard doesn't have its issues with forking and version differences. RSS is a perfect example of an open standard that quickly got muddled with versions.

Opendocument is a standardized XML representation, so I guess Mass. agrees with you completely.

Agreed, which is why they should just stick with MS Office (which they've apparently already purchased) and save as XML instead. Problem solved. No need to have the Boston Office Party.

Sounds good! Now you just need to make free PDF editors available to all your citizenry so that they can return completed forms to you.

And preventing the public from sending the government a .DOC format, which 90% of the business are already accustomed to, is a better idea?

Please, it's OSS zealot-like comments like yours that give the OSS community a bad name. You're pushing OSS for all the wrong reasons. It's not because it's cheaper or open, it's because it's not Microsoft.

If a government entity can accomplish its tasks without spending more money, doing training, research, burdening the citizens, etc... but it happens to use MS products, then OMG how awful.