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

So, which will MS Office support?

[TheRaven64]

Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add? They could relatively easily add PDF output as an export-only option, similar to the OpenOffice implementation, and treat it like printing. This would potentially have the effect of reducing the number of people using .doc as an interchange format, reducing lock in. The other alternative, supporting OpenOffice formats seems much less likely - if MS Office could read and write these formats it would be a lot easier for people to migrate away from it.

[1] Yes, I know it can with third party products, some of which are Free.

Re:PDF?

[MBtronics]

Why? Everybody can view a PDF-file, only those who pay for MS-office can read their files (if you have the correct version)!

I know how they feel

[bgfay]

For years I used WordPerfect and liked it a whole lot. However, I didn't like the price of it, the upgrades (I know, I didn't HAVE to upgrade), and the fact that the Linux version sucked while the Mac version was discontinued. So I switched to OpenOffice.

Only when 2.0 comes out will I have easy access to all those WP documents.

I use OpenOffice for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I think I have a good chance of being able to open my documents for a long time.

That said, I think that this is all a PR thing to get MS to lower their price. I don't believe that a government bureaucracy will make this step for real. Next thing you'll tell me that they've decided to run Linux.

There needs to be a new name for this sort of thing where groups say "I'm switching!" in order to get the real price from MS. Let's call it the Boy Who Cried Linux or BWCL for short.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[/ASCII]

I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats. For me it is very important to know that I'll be able to open and edit my own documents twenty years from now, and to convert them to whatever format is all the rage then.

Neither

[doublem]

MS will offer the state some discounts on Microsoft Office. If they're desperate they'll push RTF as a document format instead.

As we've seen far too many times in the past, government bodies tend to use moves like this as a way to force a better deal out of the existing vendor.

This isn't about using Open Source to build a better solution. It's about leveraging Open Source to get a better deal on the existing solution

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[gowen]

Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.

That's right. Because we all know that government's never do anything beneficial to the community: like roads, education for those who couldn't otherwise afford it, public transportation, water supplies, defense, the police...

A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.

Re:PDF?

[richlv]

yep, so that's where opendocument steps in (even though in articles it is refferred to as "open office format", i believe it will be od) - so you get pdfs for read-only stuff (reports, laws and other things citizens would not neet to edit normally ;) ) and odt/ods etc for things that could be edited (some forms that must be filled and other things like that)

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[shis-ka-bob]

I agree completely. Here is one example. A dissertation is often printed about three times (one for the department, one for the univerisity library and once for the student to keep). If the document is shared, it is shared electronically. What are the odds that you can read an Word 3.0 document compared with the odds that you can read a PDF, LaTeX or even RDF? It blows me away that people will work hard to produce a document that should become part of the corpus of human works, and then save in in a format that will be dead in a few years.

Open formats are the clear answer.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Boing]

I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats.

How can this be surprising? To 98% of the people in the world, the computer is, and shall remain, a black box. They don't care how it works inside. They don't care about LZW compression, or XML, or TCP/IP, or C++, or the difference between OR and XOR. They don't think of their files as being in a "format" unless poor user interfaces dictate that they must. To them, the file is a photograph they took, or a screenplay they've written, or a song they downloaded, and the internals of its definition are irrelevant.

And to take a small jab at the open source community, this is where we have problems reaching the desktop market. We design interfaces for ourselves, and we care about the internals. We want to know that PNG supports alpha transparency, or that our Windows XP installation is on /dev/hda1 while our Linux swap partition is on /dev/hdb2. We care whether the songs we listen to use VBR to save a few extra kilobytes on a 300 GB hard drive.

But when you provide these things as options to a user who doesn't know or care what they mean, you're asking them to commit to a choice when they don't want to. They'll feel helpless, and stupid, and if/when they complain, we too often reply "well it's not our fault you can't use it. RTFM."

Okay, I kinda veered off topic there... regarding open formats: in the end, there's relatively little difference between an open and a closed format on a twenty-year timeline, from the perspective of the 98% group. Either way, they're not going to be the ones designing the conversion tool. If it's an open format, they have to hope that enough geeky guys with free time find it an interesting or relevant enough problem to solve. If it's a closed format, they have to hope that the company's still in business and updating its tools, or that it released something before it went belly-up, or that it opened its file formats, or that its developers are good samaritans. And here's the kicker: the 98% group does not know which of these alternatives is more likely to be the case. They probably don't realize the problem exists. It's not because they're stupid or willfully ignorant, because once again they only see the computer as a tool. You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.

it seeems to me ...

[Savage-Rabbit]

... that the state of Massachusetts bottom line is not just cost. They are arguing that open file formats = democracy and closed file formats don't which makes sense to me. A citizen should not be forced to invest money in proprietary software because that is the only way he/she can read official documentation. The current situation of publishing official electronic documentation in *.doc, *.xls or some other closed file format is akin to making law books publically available for free or at worst a small nominal fee but printing them in such a way that you must buy special glasses that can only be purchased from company X in order to read them. People take it for granted that laws and other such documents are publically available to anybody at minimal cost when the medium is paper and ink, why should any citizen have to shell out several hundred dollars for a MS Office suite in order to read the exact same material on his computer?