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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."
[1] Yes, I know it can with third party products, some of which are Free.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This was also covered on groklaw, yesterday.
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.
Open Office formats are zipped XML. All you need to get at the data in them is an unzip program and a text reader. It's a good way to "guarantee" that anyone can view them in the future.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
If the format is properly documented and the documentation is available, it is only a matter of getting someone to write an appropriate viewer or conversion tool.
If the formats documentation is not available, you are pretty much at mercy of whoever invented it, and their willingness and ability to provide viewers and conversion tools.
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
If Office opened and saved OO.o documents, there would be a flood of people migrating away from it.
Think about it, if you knew you could download OO.o for free and anyone with Office could open/edit/save the files you'd made in it, would you spend hundreds of dollars for Office? Hell, what could possibly motivate you to buy it at that point?
I would say that if MS opens the door to OO.o formats, they may as well just shoot themselves in the head and be done with it, because they're toast.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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
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.
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.
... 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