Slashdot Mirror
Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents
Tontoman writes "ZDNet is running a story that sheds new light on the decision by Massachusetts to switch to
open formats for the commonwealth's official documents. This issue has previously been discussed on Slashdot, first The Massachusetts Office Party and then
Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision . From the
article: 'Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told CRN on Friday that
Massachusetts had concerns about the openness of Microsoft XML schemas
as well as with potential patent issues that could arise in the
future.' The article also quotes a Microsoft executive
on further reason that Microsoft's upcoming Office 12 will not support
OpenDocument."
ms office must support openoffice documents... it's just more reason not to use it
Wait - I can't think of a reason not to support a "save as Open-Office format".
Surely, having create a document, you can save it out as an Open-Office document? Why are they talking about backwards compatibility - this is like save as text.
Just like save as text it does not support embedded video and Multimedia, and just like text, it's available to be read by anybody who has access to the standards.
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
MS Motto: Extend and embrace.
People also tend to use one office set. So Mas. switching to OO, could end up people downloading OO to be able to use the documents (Ok, there are PDF versions). MS will most likely counter that by releasing an update or a plugin to be able to read OO documents in some twisted destructive, or correct later on way, and not being able to save OO documents.
I just think that MS will support OO formats soon enough, because they would really not like to lose customers over such a simple thing as a document format, hey, they even might be able to sell the OO upgrade for MS office to these people!
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From the article:
"Microsoft will not support OpenDocument in its next version of Office 12 as it believed the format to be inferior"
If the format is 'inferior', then extend it! The X in XML (which is used by OpenDocument) stands for 'eXtensible'. XML is designed to allow document formats to be extended in a way which still allows portability and does not break compatibility.
Microsoft have make extensive use of XML for years, so they know this. This comment is simply pure FUD.
Let's say in the future that people find some value in electronic-format reading materials. EBooks is one idea that fits that category but hasn't quite taken off. Just assume for the moment that something suddenly became widely useful like that.
It would be beneficial to the device if it could play video/audio inline. A very rough parallel would be cutscenes in games. You'd read a passage, then there would be a video to take you deeper into the world of the narrative.
Something like this in textbooks would be extremely valuable. You could have the normal dry text followed by a well-done audio/visual presentation of the presented concepts.
Obviously these are totally off the top of my head, but there have to be more and better ideas out there for such a technology.
Now think of yourself as Microsoft, publisher of the biggest word processor of them all. Are you going to let yourself be hamstrung by "standards" which force your users to *not* use the full capabilities of the format? If you were really interested in progressing, you'd just keep throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the product and seeing what sticks and what can be shelved.
The best thing you can do is put those features in and let your users decide whether to use them or not. The worst thing to do is to think you are smarter than your users and artificially limit them in the name of standardization.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
What??? MS Word can already load and save a large variety of formats, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with any past version of Word. For example it loads and saves WordPerfect files. Presumably they did that so government and law could use their word processor. So what was the reason for not supporting OpenDocument format again? It certainly has nothing to writing another import / export filter since the APIs for that must be OLD HAT.
Why not just be honest and say the real reason. You don't want to support it since your own formats represent lock-in. But sooner or later they will have to though I reckon they'll do their utmost to sabotage it becoming the defacto standard.
Slightly OT: The quote reminds of the absurdities MS put out when saying why they wouldn't port MS Office to OS/2. At the time one of them said they wouldn't port it since it didn't support OLE2. Yes, and who wrote OLE2? Such ludicrous excuses emanate from MS when the real reason they don't want to do something would leave them open to accusations of monopoly.
Naturally the OLE object's content is encoded, but the document format copes with it just fine.
... stick an "Exportfrom/import to OpenDoc" button somewhere in your Office product. They already do this with a bunch of other formats, including early versions of Word (which certainly don't contain VoIP, or whatever it was that MS was babbling about), so they have absolutely no excuse for not doing it with a proper standard.
Of course, they're still not gonna do it because that would provide people with an easy migration path away from cash-cow Office...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Well, that's unfortunate.
I don't just think embedding of video/audio in documents isn't necessary, I think it's very stupid. A document should be able to be printed out!!! Clearly, these things cannot be printed out and held on paper; ergo they do not belong in documents. The same goes for anything else that cannot be printed out and held on paper.
If you want those things, put them in some other computer format, but don't warp the meaning of 'document' to mean 'anything you can hold and represent on a computer, mushed into one file', because that's just silly.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
And the microsoft formats are very specific to their applications, and yet openoffice supports them..
Also, microsoft claims that compatibility with older office applications are important, and yet their xml format is not compatible with versions prior to 2003 and their binary format has many incompatibilities between versions both forwards and backwards.
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Well the opendocument format is decided upon by a committee, if your feature is worthwhile and well thought out then it`s highly likely to be included in the next version.
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Massachusetts has a valid reason to worry. The worry about future readability of the data they are producing today. What if M$ went away in the next 30 years? What if, while going down hill, they decided to bleed their customers for the use of their XML "standard?" I don't doubt this could happen....
I also don't buy Microsoft's stance on the OpenDoc format. They can, and should, implement this format as an export/import at the least. Backwards compatability is a sorry excuse for not implementing open standards. They just don't want to give up the gold they find when they have locked their customers into a certain format.
This may turn out to be a problem for students and those of us that work at home. I had a similar problem when I was going to college for CS a few years back. My professor required our C++ to be created in a Windows-only compiler, commented and structured using that editors tools. I was only running Linux, just as I am now, and had to get an exception to policy in order to not have to live in the computer lab.
Now, working on my EE degree while in the Army, I am doing distance learning with a school that requires MS Office formats on papers. So far, it has been working out well but what if they 'upgrade' to a new office version that somehow corrupts or otherwise does not display a file created in OO well? There goes my GPA!
Same goes for my job in that Army. As an NCO I often times complete work at home and bring it to my work terminal (all MS, after the recent Solaris genocide) on a USB stick. Will all my work be for nothing? Will I be spending hours at the office instead of at home where I can at least be with my wife and kids? I guess the same can go for those that tele-commute and use Linux.
Man, I REALLY don't want to have to install Windows or use an emulator just to use Office.
Start a sourceforge project? I'm pretty sure a few people would thank you.
Yep, MS is even a member of OASIS (Sic!). There really isn't any excuse for not implementing the "missing" functions into the standard...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I agree on your view of text documents. However, there is also a standard for presentation documents (ie PowerPoint). These have a dual target - bigscreen projectors and paper. For the first target, video really helps. I'm not sure what is included in the standard and not, but I really see the point in being able to include a piece of video in my keynote...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Moderators, parent clearly deserves some 'insightful' points here, since known cash cows for MS are Windows, and Office. But:
If users ditch Office for a free alternative, clearly MS's bottomline gets hurt. Not so with Firefox? I disagree: IE is a way to lock users into the Windows platform. If you need IE, you need Windows (in general). If you need Firefox, you need Windows OR (enter you favorite Firefox-capable OS here). So ditching IE in favor of Firefox, is one way to reduce your dependence on the Windows platform. And a good reason for MS to give away IE for free, I think.
So increased use of OO may eat directly into MS's bottomline, but increased use of Firefox makes it easier for MS's bottomline to get eaten into.
My view is that MS not supporting open standards is simply to make it harder to switch platforms, to increase the cost & effort of a switch. Another example: why doesn't MS itself provide support for Linux ext2 or BSD filesystems? It's technically feasible (others have done it), many dual-booting folks would like it, and there aren't any licensing problems that I can see (as long as MS would write their own, or build on BSD-licensed code). So why? Simple: without it, dual-booting folks have to look themselves for ext2/BSD filesystem drivers for Windows. More hassle, higher cost of moving to Linux/*BSD.
MS says it cares about interoperability, but it's actions often say otherwise. Not supporting OO document format in Office is just another example of that. Anyway, I think managers that decide between MS Office or OO, Firefox or IE, Windows, Linux or Mac OSX on company desktops, matter more here than home users.The more I read about this it seems that MA is more concerned about MS's propiretary schemas and patents that could affect the legal distribution and use of the states documents. The potential effects would be massive. State, county, local governments, schools and agencies, as well as private sector business's would have signifiacant concerns about the digital distribution and use of state documents, allowing the only workaround to be printing the material.
I also guess they will be dropping RTF, "Plain Text", "Web Page", and MS Works as valid formats, as these are clearly inferior to the basic MS Office format.
MS already allows users to "Save As" to reduced formats, even if Open Doc was reduced (which it certainly isn't in terms of multi-media) then Microsoft have already set the precedent of Load/Save from "inferior" formats.
Its not just FUD... its Stupid FUD
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It behooves those who desire unrestricted interchange of information to help make proper support of OpenDocument become of interest to MS.
This move by MA is a step in the right direction, away from proprietary formats.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
OpenDocument compatibility is coming to Office anyway, and whether Microsoft likes it or not. Office has an embedded programming language, a bastardised dialect of BASIC, which includes a document object model. So, it ought to be entirely possible to write a series of Office macros which turned an Office document into an OpenDocument document -- and maybe back as well.
..... or at least, not hard enough. Probably the ones who are still in awe of computers don't even realise what ought to be possible. I've been connecting stuff together all my life -- before computers, it was record players, tape recorders and radio sets, recording signals from the wireless and amplifying them through the record player's speaker. My first VCR, with its separate audio and video sockets opened up exciting new possibilities in connectivity {4 hour long recordings of radio broadcasts from pop festivals! Complete with teletext-style graphics from the Model B, which were initially only there to keep the muting off but evolved into a kind of artform in their own right}. Every computer I have ever owned has had something unusual plugged into it.
Now the only thing keeping Office popular is the lack of interoperability with anything else. Lack of interoperability is usually considered to be a bad thing -- name me one electricity company that sells 48 volts DC. We have already seen protectionism fail when countries did things like adopting different TV standards from their neighbours effectively to prevent imports of cheap tellies {setmakers just went multi-standard, and SCART connectors with RGB input eventually became the norm}.
These realities do not appear to have hit the computer market yet
But I don't think I represent most of the population. I think most people don't expect things to be connected together and just work like that; they're still so taken in by the fact that they just press the keys and the letters come up on the screen, and later pop out of the printer, that they don't think past that. That ought to change in the future; but it will depend more on the fact of clue filtering slowly through to the population than anything any major player does {unless that something is to cause sudden and large-scale data loss}.
If the conversion suite was released as quasi-Open Source software {as open as anything running on a closed platform can be}, then the only thing Microsoft could do about that is try and prove they own a patent on converting documents between Office and OpenDocument standards; but then they would expose themselves to the patent being struck down on the grounds that the invention had not been worked {which is still valid in some jurisdictions IMMSMC}. Not to mention that it would constitute an admission that Microsoft already had the technology to perform the conversion {otherwise the patent would be a mere work of science fiction, therefore null and void by default}. This would have the effect of casting doubt on other things Microsoft are fond of saying.
Once a mechanism was in place for converting documents between OpenDocument and Office formats, a business would then need only one PC running Office -- and then only for as long as they have any Office files to convert to OpenDocument. Under well-established doctrines, they would even be within their rights to sell that machine to another business when it was finished with.
At the moment, I have good reasons not to be having a go at this. When those reasons change, if there is not already a functioning translator, I will definitely set up a Windows machine of my own and give it a crack.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I agree that there's a lot of things about computer documents that are stupid, but still, in my world, printing to paper is the stupidest thing ever. Digital documents are easy to edit, you can use a repository for shared access and version control, you can compress them losslessly, protect them with a password, check the hash checksum, make lots of copies and spread them around without much of an effort at all. Whereas printing out on paper means that the document has to be flattened down to a single view from a given angle, it has to be chopped into pages, cropped and rendered to a given zoom on a given paper size, you need a scanner or a copier or a fax machine or a monastery full of monks (and more paper and ink) to make a copy, you need a shredder or a fire to remove the paper document... And the links won't work any more.
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
Let it be said that I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy. (Thanks to me, both my girlfriend [Ubuntu] and my mother [Debian Stable] effectively run linux.)
However, I don't believe that Microsoft should be forced out of business for refusing to add in a feature that we all know will cost them money. This is still business, whether we like it or not. No one has to use Windows/Office. What they should be punished for is lying about their reasoning. Anyone with common sense at all can see that "backwards compatability" is a bunch of crap. (Really, look at the previous posts...and this is Slashdot, where no one has common sense.)
Anyways. I'm going to go randomly talk about vendor lock-in while passing out professionally pressed Ubuntu CD's. (I'm not kidding.)
The only thing in common with what Apple had visioned in the "90s" and the current technology is the concept of using an open format (business decision to use a common format). The technology behind what they had and what is currently proposed now are worlds apart and although it may have achieved the same goal of an open format.
I was quite sad when I heard it was killed - and I was just a kid at the time.
Actually, it is one thing I'd like to see on Linux... although I like OO.o, it is still a monstruously large application; a modular office app that would only load the tools it needed would be much faster and, for those 80% of the users that use 20% of the functions, infinitely more simple.
Now, if only I found someone with enough free time and coding knowledge... or had the time to learn coding myself...
Ignore this signature. By order.
I just used grep as an example, since my lawyer clients sometimes call me to find stuff for them and then I do the search on the server, which is a million times faster than doing the search from a client machine.
However, even MS Windows has a quite capable Find utility built in. The only problem is that it doesn't work on MS Office documents, since the contents of the files is binary, not text. It works quite well on anything else though, eg. WordPerfect files and lawyers readily understand that.
If you ever had a temp file an affidavit under the wrong filename in an unknown directory, in an average law office with 100,000 documents, then you'll appreciate the problem.
This is why MS is touting File Search as a major feature of their new OS version Longhorn - Wow! Gee Whiz! After 20 years, they can now search their own files with their own search utility! Woohoo!
Stupid idiots...
We're talking about public record here. Considering Microsoft's dismal track record with DRM and wanting to control data that they have no business controlling, do you really want public records in their document formats? One of the things that Microsoft has been touting is the ability for their documents to have access lists and be traceable. This is really bad news for whistle blowers in the public sector. How else do you leak documents that SHOULD be leaked? In case anyone has forgotten, it's your government. They are YOUR servants, not your masters.
This should be a federal initiative. If our feds weren't so in bed with corporate America, this would be a no brainer. Proprietary document formats with DRM are a bad thing for public record. Don't even mention the fact that with each revision Microsoft has a tendency to break documents in older formats in new and horrendous ways. The idea of having embedded resources beyond text is also monumentally stupid. Embedding URLs for various resources that may shift or wind up being dead later is stupid. Embedding video and sound clips while "neat" stops working unless the media clip is actually made a part of the document. Most users aren't smart enough to do that, so the embedded clip stops working when the document and the media clip are separated. And in the event that the user DOES actually know how to embed the clip properly, then you wind up with a 250 Meg word document that's really nice to try and send via e-mail.
If government moved to an open document format and only kept the most important information (most government business is better conducted via text) in text with limited use of graphics and a complete ban on media clips, we'd be better off in the long run. As a sidenote, if a document seems to "need" media clips, then your not doing your job, or maybe you've been tasked with something that should have gone to PR and a proper media production outfit. My money is on the former in 99.9% of the cases.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Now the only thing keeping Office popular is the lack of interoperability with anything else.
And MS knows this. Gates famous internet memo from '95 highlighted the fact that in a few hours of surfing he didn't find any Microsoft document formats out there, except a few PPT files. That really upset him, because he knows that closed file formats are the drug that MS is pushing.
MS is fighting a rear-guard action on this, and in the end they will lose, because if OOo doesn't win, some other open format will. Closed document formats are increasingly unacceptable to large organizations for very good reasons. As soon as a viable alternative exists there will be a major shift away from MS formats to open formats.
But MS makes its money selling a tool (Office) whose value is fundamentally tied to proprietary file formats. As soon as people start using open formats, they'll have a choice of tools. MS can either make its tool compatible with the open format, or not. Either way, it loses the monopoly pricing ability that it gets now from the fact that MS Office files are the de facto standard of document exchange amongst many businesses.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The article says:
Massachusetts agencies have until 1 January, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.
From a Tobacco Settlement document
at the GAO, most state's fiscal years begin July 1, except Alabama and Michigan, where the fiscal year begins on October 1, and in New York, where the fiscal year begins on April 1.
I am having trouble figuring out from Google when the budget deadline is, but this would appear to imply that every Massachusetts agency will have to put in a budget request before this coming July for a related budget (i.e. hire some company to install it and train them), unless they can handle it in house (since OOo is free).
But government is not necessarily driven by a cost of $0. It seems to me that this means there is a great opportunity for open source software companies to get jobs from Massachusetts, and also for software developers.
There should be a big push to ensure that there are plenty of mature projects with easy to use GPL libraries supporting the OpenDocument format, and resources should be put into developing lots of different kinds of software that supports it. This will help ensure a diverse ecology including providers and users of these tools, open content, and increased momentum to buy into it. This could match what is called "Embrace and Extend". In Embrace and Extend [and Extinguish], as the Wiki notes, support of a given standard is announced, after the PR partial compatibility is provided, then proprietary functions get tacked on and finally widespread use of their mangled format in various products and tools makes it impossible to compete, and they own the (mangled) standard which they can then kill if they wish.
OpenOffice/OpenDocument can be marketed as superior to MS Office. It's just a matter of PR, isn't it Microsoft? And we don't even need any FUD, after all if we have SMIL in OpenDocument then we can integrate web-ready media, etc.
Perhaps a new brand could be created called "Office Plus".
Anyway, where M$ embraces and extends with proprietary and patented code, the free software community has the GPL.
And by putting more energy in to leveraging OpenOffice and OpenDocument format, including making it easy to do so, we can implement the Extend and Extinguish phase. If there are enough alternatives, including OpenOffice, reduced feature set but simpler to use software based on its code, tools such as database generated documents and fill-in forms, etc., we can build a suction to draw people away from M$ Office. There will be many alternatives even if M$ belatedly adds Import/Export for OpenDocument, by which time adding it will be even worse for Microsoft.
Personally I do contribute to debugging OOo as a user but have never gotten into its code or documentation though I should. Just imagining what it must be like has been too dauntin. But I certainly would like to be able to output reports in OOo format, and instead of CSV perhaps use OOo's Calc format for example.
As another example, I was working on workflow software that munges excel data, and thought about adding a spreadsheet input function (to wxPerl). This exists in WxWidgets, but it woul be nice if bits of OOo code found its way into there so that people could easily use OOo facilities, perhaps driven with some scripting from inside a document.
I just noticed as I was writing this that there are a bunch of perl modules on CPAN for OpenOffice for example, think I'll start there.
The incentive to buy Office should be that Office is a better product. ...
It should not be that only Office can work with Office, which is what everybody else uses
(Of course, Microsoft is in the business of making money, not playing fair. And there's little benefit to them to working with OpenOffice, so ...)
This is hardly unique to `today'. This has always been the case.Reading about Microsoft's "concern" about open formats not providing adequate support for legacy documents in old formats has me chuckling.
I started using StarOffice years ago, and started recommending it to others, solely because it was the only effective way to move MS Office documents between versions of MS Office.
Of course I'm strange-- I've stayed with MS Office 97 all these years for reasons that Microsoft apparently consider to be stupid:
I do like the interface on OpenOffice v2.0 (I've started using the beta, which seems to be at least as stable as the MS Office 97 workhorse). I think it is about time I upgraded to it.
Open-source coders and OO.o can add one or two things to help MA apply egg to MS's face. Those things are light-weight, small plug-in viewers for various Web browsers on Windows that can be set up to be installed through the browser's standard plug-in/add-on installation interface. Make it easy, when people hit a Web page referring to OO.o documents on MA's sites, to get their browser set up to view, print and save the documents (editing isn't, I believe, too neccesary here). Have the viewer, when it's installed, add the appropriate hooks so that once OO.o documents are saved the browser and plug-in get used when you double-click on the document later. In short, make the viewing experience as seamless as possible so it's only MSOffice that seems to have problems with OO.o documents. We all know what the average Windows user is like, so make it Microsoft's problem to explain why MSOffice won't work when they get calls like "Word won't open this document! When I visit the MA web site I can see it just fine, but Word won't open it! Why's Word broken?". :)
MA can add to that by putting links to the OO.o downloads page on all the pages that link to OO.o documents. Make it easy for users to ask "But everybody else makes it so easy, why is Office the only thing that gives me problems?".
I think you miss the point. This is not about open source applications or not. The only thing they require is that they are in full control of their own information.
By specifying an open free for all standard they give equal opportunity to all software houses. Nothing prevented Microsoft from supplying such solution, but Microsoft didn't. So, surprice, they don't get to sell their product.
From the governments point of wiew a open format is a good thing as their vender will have no protection sheild of vender lock in. This means that venders will have to offer other things to compete, e.g. low price, or better service. This makes good capitalistic sense in the long run from the buyers i.e. the tax payers perspective.
Your car example doesn't fit in. A more accurate car analogy would be that the govenment refuses to buy cars from GM that only can run on roads that are built by GM instead of cars tha can run on all roads. If that was the case I would strongly suspect tax payers to object very much and urge the government to buy the all road car.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Alan Yates, Microsoft's general manager of Information Worker business strategy, criticised the Massachusetts proposal, saying it was "confusing".
If a statement, "we don't want to use something that locks us in and presents possible legal problems," is confusing, I'd say Microsoft has reached a state of clueless nirvana.