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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."
...Hopefully they did it all while wearing festive penguin suits, or for the politically correct Bostonians, Spheniscidae American suits.
Yup...
PDF
;)
and
Open Office XML
Strangely, both say you need Adobe reader to read them
liqbase
The government's bottow line is the same as the tax payer's bottom line. Either through taxes or deficit, every dollar that is spent by big brother comes out of our pocket. Not quite sure of the point of your post, except to jip by out of FP! :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
[1] Yes, I know it can with third party products, some of which are Free.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Why? Everybody can view a PDF-file, only those who pay for MS-office can read their files (if you have the correct version)!
At least the file format has been publicly released:t /sdk/index.html
And you can use it reliably on more than just devices that can handle office formats.3 .shtml
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/acroba
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Xpdf-415
I don't get it.
I hardly see how Open Office and PDF formats "guarantee" citizens will be able to view electronic documents in the future any more so than MS Office formats. For all anybody knows, in 5 years, all of these formats could be dead as new formats emerge. And guess, what--When that happens, there will be conversion tools for the next mainstream formats, too.
I understand that Microsoft wants to keep the files that Office creates in a closed format. But, in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening, why not offer an open format as an option in the "Save As" dialog box? That way, users such as the Massachusetts government could be satisfied and still use Office, and everyone else could continue using the closed format. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I really think 99% of the users would still just click the save button as usual, because I doubt the average Office user is aware or even cares that they are not saving in an open format.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
This was also covered on groklaw, yesterday.
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.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
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Actually, the Boston Tea Party was held to incite the British into open action against the rebel minority in the colonies. In effect, the rebels wanted to increase the divide between Britain and the colonies so that the colonials who preferred amity and compromise would come to their side.
The pretext of the BTP was to protest the imposition of import taxes, it had nothing to do with opening up the market to American tea traders.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What version have you been using? Adobe 7 is very quick (even the professional version) in opening up PDFs. Heck, I don't even notice sometimes that my PDF is already open, it's so fast. Even with 6, you could move the plugins to a different folder so that Adobe wouldn't load them all up at the same time.
Did I miss your point? I don't know how else you could mean what you said.
Adobe Acrobat is not the only program that can open PDF. At least on Linux there is vast choice of PDF readers, all of them are much faster than Acrobat, I guess it applies to Windows too.
I wish the media would understand that there is a difference between Free Software and Volunteer-Developed Software. There is overlap between the two groups, but they are by no means identical.
[1] Of course, this didn't really happen, because we all know Sun are evil and out to destroy all open source software.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is amusing.
.sxw extension to .zip & throw it into whatever unzipper you wish to.
However, less-astute readers should remember that the OO.o formats are well-documented & any other program can easily write an implementation to spec.
They are also XML files, which can be understandable in plaintext. This means many people don't even have to bother looking at the spec to extract useful information.
So why the gobblygook? Look at that "PK" at the beginning of the string. That indicates that it is zipped. Rename the
I applaud the move as I file documents in the commonwealth from time to time. A benefit of Open Office files is that they are generally smaller files that MS files. And, more importantly, being able to file .pdfs helps eliminate one of the great threats inherent in .doc files. That is the hidden parts of the document. The stuff that was once part of the document, but was removed in editing.
I have opened many a .doc file in a simple text or hex editor and found some very interesting revisions or other information. One file mysteriously had a persons application for benefits in it. This included SS#. It is hard to be certain that you've eliminated these dregs when using Word.
Hopefully this will lead to a more secure America.
Another benefit of the .pdf is What You Sent Is What They Get. WYSIWTG. You can never be sure that all your pretty formatting will survive when your .doc file is opened on the other side.
Loading the PDF viewer is SLOW. I am constantly reminded that I need to 'update' something. In fact, the viewer on two of my computers is stuck in an update loop- where it thinks I need to update something that has already been updated.
Once a large PDF is loaded, it is still SLOW to scroll pages. And when I hit a page with some pictures, I need to wait a few seconds for them to load.
If your pdf viewer is slow, I would guess that you are still using Acrobat reader version 5.x or 6.x. Acrobat reader 7.x is much faster, at least for me either on Solaris or Mac OS X.
Also, the pdf file format is an open one. If you don't like Adobe's pdf reader or creator, there are others available, both commercial or FOSS.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
http://www.planetpdf.com/
I've only used Adobe's reader.
I have used a free pdf maker, and it worked fine.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
On my mac, I am totally dependent on pdfs to help me deal with the research literature wot I have got. I use Adobe Acrobat to do detailed annotations of documents, take notes and link to my bibliographic database. Sometimes this gets slow as molasses due to poor software engineering by either parties hand.
On the other hand, when I want to have a quick squizz at a pdf to see if there's anything relevant there, I use the super fast and efficient Preview application. If Preview had better annotatin facilities [hint hint], I wou'dn't use Acrobat at all.
Earlier today, I needed a powerpoint thingamy transferred from a windows machine to machine to a mac (without office). It would have been a lot less painful if W$$do$s had native PDF support.
Microsoft made their monopoly and their money by taking the personal computer, removing value from it, and then selling that removed value back to the consumer at high cost. I wish more people understood this.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
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.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
KDE now has a very nice and efficient implementation (kpdf), which will be available for all major platforms eventually.
I am trolling
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
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Michigan could do with a move like this. We're running a deficit and our economy's not getting any better. The Republican-controlled legislature is pushing tax cut after tax cut, without much in the way of spending cuts. Something like this could save some real dollars.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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)
Rich
What's even funnier is people parroting right wing propoganda. Observe the top ten states for taxing their residents as documented by CNN/Money:
And where does Massachusetts rank? Way down the list. Tied with the liberal sewer pits of Georgia and South Carolina:
30 Illinois 9.80%
31 Georgia 9.80%
32 Massachusetts 9.80%
33 South Carolina 9.70%
34 Virginia 9.70%
Source: http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/taxesbystat e2005/
But why let facts intrude on your right wing talking points?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
We're slowly moving away from MS apps in RI too. For example, most servers are now LAMP vs. being MS IIS, Exchange, etc. There are still a couple of Novell GroupWise servers but those are slowly being phased out.
For example, my agency has 60 users. For MS Office assuming a government discount that makes the end price $200 we'd be shelling out $12,000.
And lets not forget the obscene pricing of MS software for servers. A 50 user MS-SQL for instance would run you approximately $8K to $10K and that excludes the OS.
LAMP - server cost $5K. Cost of software $0, Cost of configuration time: $1K or so. So for the $20,000 above you could buy three new servers and have them congigured to do what you want them to.
And a desktop can be had for
So yes, it is a bottom line exercise and a clear signal to Microsoft that:
a) We won't pay bloated prices for sofware that we only use a small subset of features on, but isn't crippled from occasionally using the gee-whiz features.
and
b)Constant upgrade cycles in which we shell out full retail for something that is an upgrade.
They had better wake up and smell the coffee. As government goes, so goes business that interacts with government. Microsoft could be staring at a huge defection of customers in the near term.
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Open formats are the clear answer.
Think global, act loco
BS. What Adobe really offers is the documentation on how the format works. Microsoft doesn't do that for their formats.
In the posts here I see a lot of back-and-forth with some holding fast to the notion staying with MS Office is the prudent thing to do for various reasons including:
(bullets borrowed from Donny Smith(567043))
From personal experience I think the most important factor is getting out of MS' talons and whimsical changes to their own formats. I've posted about this before.
I've actually been in business meetings which couldn't not get started on time because attendees had to sort out getting copies of the agenda or memos which they'd actually received beforehand but were in formats incompatible with their version of MS Office! This, ostensibly at one company using tools to help conduct business. Were this a one-time anecdote would be one thing, but I encountered this scenario many times. (There are grooves in my eye-sockets from so many eyerolls waiting for business to proceed.)
OpenOffice may not offer the perfect solution, but any move away from unpredictable and untouchable formats brings hope to eventually working with technology that improves our productivity. (I shudder to mention the car analogy, but it's so fun: can you imagine a car industry with such an approach (or maybe it's the highway infrastructure)? Every year or so you find out some cars can't be driven on the highways because of some change it their design, blah, blah, blah.)
Sure. I'll take that bet, IF I can bet on Microsoft being there to get this reversed. I'd even bet on Microsoft being successful, by giving the State a huge discount on their Office products, along with intense bribes (excuse me, lobbying) to the local politicians.
You know, the Standard Operating Procedure these days.
Followed by a huge Press Release saying that the State is dropping OSS in favor of Microsoft. Which in turn will alert even more states that they can get MS software for a huge discount just by issuing a Press Release.
Now, if the State was REALLY smart, they'd include a clause that any Word documents which couldn't be read via the current Word technology 5-10 years in the future would require Microsoft to pay a fine of, say, $100 per document. To cover the States' cost in converting it so that it could be read again.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
When I was laid off, I spent nearly a year working as a security guard. ProEngineer was giving away a 3D CAD program, ProDesktop, so I thought I'd use all that late night desk time to draw up my airplane.
...and all those Slashdotters claimed there wasn't a God.
Fast forward a few months, ProEngineer decides the giveaway didn't make them much money, so they kill the program. They were nice though, and gave all the current users a 5-year liscense key to use their current copy.
Fast forward a year. My laptop crashes, and I have to wipe and re-install. My ProDesktop key is gone. I now have several megs of very detailed and very useless drawings.
This is the reason that governments should be using open formats. Thank you, Massachusetts.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.
Well, I remember when I decided do get rid of the pile of 5 1/4 in. floppies I had accumulated (like 120 or more), I engaged in the daunting task of revising each one of them to see wtf did they had... I found a lot of documents I have done in several formats, from Qpro spreadsheet (dont remember the extension) to PW (Professional Write anyone remember that program? it saved me thousands of times when the !"£@ MS Word for 3.11 didn't want to work) and Banner, Printmaster between several other files.
.DOC 95 MS Office format or others... in 100 years... if instead we have an open format, you are SURE that someone will know about it.
/information/.
Of course, I could not open a lot of those files (some others where 1337 h4ck1ng and cr4ck1ng courses, anarchist cookbook etc etc... from my "computer hippie days")... of course, I am sure that will suddenly happen with the
And, if you use a human readable format like LATEX (which I am using lately to write scientific papers) then it will be easier at least to get the
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Umm... didn't they invent the orgy? :o)
And where does Massachusetts rank? Way down the list. Tied with the liberal sewer pits of Georgia and South Carolina:
In your post you listed Illinois as 9.8, Georgia 9.8, Mass. 9.8 and SC at 9.7
So technically, by your own numbers Mass. is tied with Illinois and Georgia, yet you failed to insult Illinois. They are a state too, and deserve to be spit on by all other states too.
In the future, please always remember to insult Illinois.
i don't care
You might want to factor in that Massachussetts residents pay more in national taxes per service rendered by the government. Sofor every dollar of taxes paid we get 0.75 dollar worth of services. This is pretty common to "Blue states" as we do not have the support of the current administration.
t ml)
Adding one third of national taxes to this score does infact make Massachussetts one of the worst tax places. But this is not due to their state policies, but due to Washington politics.
Here is a good page on all of MA taxes and how it compares nationally. Overall I agree that MA does a pretty good job.
(http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/35.h
As a BSD user, I had to wipe my aunts computer due to virus's. After hours of scanning the computer wouldnt boot up.
Now each of her Works Documents have to be opened in the free "Word Viewer" copied and pasted into OpenOffice because she does not have the original software.
In response to PDF's being "closed", they may be owned by adobe, but at LEAST there is more than one way to view them, and they can be viewed and printed from any computer on a number of different applications. Also Adobe does offer Acrobat reader in some form or another for most systems.
Put it this way: a pdf or a wps of unknown version made in works?
Have you ever worked in / around the Federal Government? My experience in the USAF was that at the end of every fiscal year, every project went on a ill-advised spending spree to ensure that they spent every penny of their budget (flat screen LCDs, the newest computers, expensive peripherals) all of which was totally unneccessary. Every federal project does this at the end of the fiscal year so that they don't come in under budget, otherwise they'd have their budget cut because the don't need the money. Since money == clout in the government, there is never, ever any "extra money". It's all spent. Every time.
The Federal Government will not spend your money wisely, because it is not their money. End of story.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
... you know that any official/legal notice will be sent by US mail, certified mail, or delivered by hand.
Not true at all, at least not in Masachusetts.
There are a number of agencies that send out things like tax and license notices via email, if you've registered to receive them that way. If you don't pay, you will eventually get that registered-mail notice. But if you do pay, that email becomes your only notice. It's a real convenience for us computer-literate types, and saves the government a lot of money. It's been years since I've received a hand-delivered government notice. Some things still arrive via first-class mail, but very often the email/web approach has handled it already.
They can get away with it legally, because such "pre-notice" messages aren't the legal notices; they're just a convenience for the taxpayer.
But we've had problems with government web sites that are only tested, and only render sensibly, with IE. Some downloadable docs are only in MS-Word format. Again, this is legal, because you aren't forced to use them; you can always use the hard copy. You can take a day off work, drive downtown to the agency, and pick up the docs you need. Or you can buy a Windows machine and download the Word doc, saving yourself a day off work and lining Bill Gates' pockets by another (to him) small amount.
There are those who think that it's not quite right for the government to be in bed with a major manufacturer like this. It's not a new story, of course; that's why the Boston Tea Party is brought up. Look up the history of that event. It's not an exact parallel, but it's close enough for media reports.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
At least, I didn't have it until I installed a licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat Standard.
The Adobe PDF printer you're seeing was added by a third party application, probably some flavor of Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional. I don't know what other Adobe products also add a PDF printer driver. Photoshop might, and I'm pretty sure Illustrator does as well.
No, it's not part of Windows XP, and the only way to (legally) get it is to buy the necessary software from Adobe.
Some demo versions of Adobe software may have a bug that results in the PDF Printer remaining behind after an uninstall, or after the demo expires. That could be another way you got the option.
But no, the rank and file Windows XP users do not have a PDF Printer available by default in either the Home or Professional editions.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Roads are and should be maintained by the government, along with basic city planning. The reason for this is that roads are created by the community and for the community and are not a profitable enterprise, unless you start charging more tolls to use these roads. When every road starts to have entry fees, then the argument can easily be made that a private company needs to take over.
Education for those who couldn't otherwise afford it need NOT be provided by the government. All that they should provide is the money so that the education does become affordable. In other words, the system of financial aid that allows students to go to a high quality private college needs to be brought down to lower grade levels. Vouchers are a good start. As for those who don't qualify for financial aid, they already DO pay for their public schools in the forms of taxes. Just because you don't give the money directly to the school district supervisors doesn't mean that this isn't exactly where that money goes. The difference would be that then you WOULD know where it goes, and you'd still be paying the same amount.
Public transportation need not be provided by the government. Most major cities go into contract with private transportation companies who run city bus routes. Why is the government involved at all? They're doing nothing but skimming off the bottom line of the company as a "fee" for being given the opportunity to run their business. The airline industry isn't run by the Federal government, and has functioned well for decades (and arguably better than under a government beurocracy). Taxis are operated by private companies, why aren't you complaining that they should be taken over by the government? There is a proven track record, both on a local, national, and global scale, of private companies successfully running transportation businesses.
Water supplies are a utility. Natural gas is usually provided by private companies, as is electricity. Why is water so special that only the big, powerful government is to be trusted?
Defense and the police are needed to protect the population, and every Libertarian would tell you that this should be the ONLY service that a government should be providing. Therefore, mentioning this point is in no way an argument against Libertarianism.
I'm not a Libertarian, and I'm not an anarchist, and I don't agree with many of their principles, but common sense dictates that there's no reason why the government closes off entire lucrative markets when private companies, concerned with efficiency and customer satisfaction rather than the status quo, would deal with things more efficiently. Especially when the government is already IN COMPETITION with private industries, as is the case with public transportation, the postal system, education, and a whole host of other industries.
Governments DO supply communities with many beneficial things, including every item on your list. However, there is absolutely NO reason for why they should be doing this when there already are alternatives.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
... 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?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
When I first encountered a PDF file on the web I wondered why it was not a plain text file which anyone could read regardless of OS. It was three times larger than any other file format and I had to go hunting for a program to install and view the file. I've hated Adobe PDF format ever since.
Sure you may need a program to read pdf files but pdf files look the same in Acrobat Reader on all platforms and the fact is is to read any document on a computer you have to have softwear to open it in. What I don't like is that all too often Acrobat Reader crashs or freezes on my computer.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Same way that Java is "open". The specs have been published so that anyone and their family pet can create and/or render PDF. e.g. GhostScript.
It's a very dark ride.