Slashdot Mirror
Massachusetts Finalizes OpenDocument Standard Plan
wellington map writes "The state of Massachusetts has finalized a proposed move to an open, nonproprietary format for office documents, a plan that involves phasing out versions of Microsoft's Office productivity suite deployed in the state's executive branch agencies. Massachusetts expects its agencies to develop phased migration plans away from productivity suites that do not support OpenDocument, with a target implementation date of January 1, 2007. Looks like it's finally cemented after some heated discussions."
... governments are getting geekier.
Seriously, I like it. I like the fact that govs are looking at the bottom line and trying to streamline operations. Phasing out Microsoft? That would have been unheard of ----- last year.
I am happy to hear the Chew'setts have the brass tacks to pull something like this off and I can't wait to see Microsoft shoot themselves in the foot on this one.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
While it will take more than days, I think that Microsoft will eventually come around and support OpenDocument. There's no technical reason that they cannot and Microsoft can't afford to let big customers get away. Once large companies and governments realize that they can get along just fine without Microsoft products, it will be even harder to get them back on the crack, so to speak. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are already betas running in Microsoft somewhere that support OpenDocument and they run on the Microsoft Linux Distro too!
Anyway, in the end, the customer is always right. So Microsoft will come around if OpenDocument gets any kind of real traction.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
My father died in the vietnam war. By accepting unpatriotic "open" standards, you are pissing on his grave.
One of the guys behind KOffice has just posted an open letter refuting a few aspects Alan Yates/Microsoft's criticism of open doc.
Microsoft grumbles, but implements OpenDocument in Office, and Massachusetts buys it. While official policy is to use OpenDocument, everyone continues using .doc because (1) non-government people are largely not using OD-capable Office versions and (2) Office's OD import/export is implemented horribly, so badly that even for people using OpenOffice importing and exporting .doc is a better choice.
I RTFA and it doesn't say one simple question "Why is Massachusetts doing this?" Now I can think of numerous reasons, but did OASIS? Or is OASIS simply justifying it's existence (however brief it might have been/will be) by creating an expensive (sorry, but migration IS expensive) procedure that will have to take place over a year? Beauraucrats love making policies, is this simply another example of that, without regard to the advantages and disadvantages?
The slashdot articles are also fairly free of any real reason. One cites some vague legal concerns (that frankly seemed devoid of any real information) while the other makes mention of a non-Microsoft format (called Voleware). If whatever they were using Voleware for wasn't meeting their needs, fine. But why this big policy change state-government wide? Why change all of the formats (when most of them CAN be opened under all modern operating systems)? Were the costs and disadvantages discussed along with the advantages? I can't see any indication of that. Does anyone that know more about this want to shed some light?
from choose somehting truely open. I am suer this OpenDocument format will not leave Microsoft's doors without a license that says you won't use it with GNU-licensed software (or maybe even MIT and BSD.) They don't want people having Office interoperability with non-Microsoft products anymore than they want people replacing Office (namely Word and Excel) entirely. Of course, if they do allow things like OOo and abiword to open and edit their OpenDocument-formatted documents, at least Massachusetts won't be as angry and they will probably still get plenty of customers buying Office. However, now it will be more difficult to force upgrades. Institutions are already fed up with Office costs and many (like the local school system) are using OpenOffice.org instead. I predict that Office will become much less profitable if everyone starts using OpenDocument format.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
By the way, what will happen when the Federal government sends documents to Massachusetts in word format? Would the state send them back?
Suppose M$ suddenly decides to support OpenDocument, gets the state's business and then issues a "security patch", that introduces proprietary extensions as has been in the past?
Microsoft has one goal, and they are amazingly focused on it: make profit. For a cool extra few billions, wouldn't you "admit" that your software development processes were bad 18 months ago but are now much better?
So, the part of this message is "our development processes have improved, we have rewritten Windows, it's amazingly bug-free now, and it's completely new". Of course, those claims are ridiculous: nobody turns around an organization the size of Microsoft in 18 months, or rewrites Windows in that time.
There is a kernel of truth to this story: they probably are trying to improve their development processes. But the rest is marketing spin, designed to convince you to shell out bucks for an operating system release that gives you almost nothing new.
Great way to fight the FUD!!!
Whenever I bring it up to any of my clients, government or private side, they give me that deer in the headlights look. Even if you can dig out an old backup tape and demonstrate the files aren't conveniently recoverable it still doesn't seem to sink in.
The same with database storage. I'm amazed how many companies don't even have a freakin data dictionary. If you have to ask why you need one of those, then you need one. Maybe you just really like transposing fields and data types on the fly between every application you build. People must find that pleasurable because there's sure enough of them doing it.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This move was long overdue and hopefully the other states will follow soon. There are better uses of our tax dollars than filling the pockets of Microsoft folks. Afterall, OpenOffice and XML are pretty much standard nowadays.
I have some old papers I wrote, back in the MS-Word/DOS days. Yeah, I know I'm old :-) (and didn't know better yet, in the late 1980s); but there are people and documents that matter which are even older. I'd genuinely like to make them available along with various other writing of mine. Unfortunately, absolutely nothing appears able to read these old formats, especially not anything made by Microsoft.
On the other hand, when I wrote papers in WordPerfect 4.2 or so, not much later, those formats are still happily read by recent WordPerfect versions. Not to say WP is a perfectly open format either, but at least it's not quite so breaky as MS formats are.
Fortunately for me, the old Word/DOS format is like all those wordprocessor formats of the 1980s: mostly ASCII text, with a smattering of control codes in it. Ultimately, with a little bit more work than should be needeed, I can extract the text and reformat the document. Had this been Word97 or something, I'd just have a steaming blob of undocumented binary data. Which exactly what all MS formats will be 20 years from now. I'm not so happy that WordPerfect moved to a more binary-ish format around WP6/7; they were also quite discernable using 'less' in the WP5.1/2 timeframe. They've retained better compatibility (even filters for the older versions to read the newer thing). But "readable in 'less'" is an important quality.
Luckily OpenOffice format is now, and will always remain "readable in less". XML is like that. Not that it's quite effortlessly readable; but I don't see XML parsers as going away, so extracting data will still be quite reasonable in 50 years, even if the format itself is no longer implemented in current products. Not effortless, but not outrageously difficult.
Buy Text Processing in Python
First of all, I agree with the logic regarding the need to archive information and not impose a high cost to the public to view public information. It's the same reason why governments mandate accessibility standards and such. Sure, some company is going to complain about having to put in accessibility features, but that's why we have governments, to help balance the extreme self-interest of companies that are so efficient but narrowly focused.
That said, this is a huge, huge deal from the perpsective of breaking down Windows. It signifies that there is not only an alternative product, but an alternative vision for IT. What's going to come is the network effect. Massachusetts will start sending out OpenDocument documents simply for the same reason that people send out Word documents. They will have no conception that other people won't be able to read the document and will just assume everyone else will have it. "Dumb users" will not really understand the difference between different document formats, and even if it happens by mistake enough times, it will create a network effect on everyone around Massachusetts. Then will come a tipping point, and Microsoft will start to feel a lot of pain. This is their achilless heel. They are all about incompatibilities with anythin except the Microsoft implementation. As soon as that is taken away, it will have a massive, massive effect on the computer industry.
A few reasons:
...OpenDocument is pretty new. It will take some time for industry to wake up to this, and for support for it to ramp up towards "critical mass", but it will happen - industry *is* tired of being extorted exorbitant rates every few years to be able to continue reading their own files.
.doc. This compels them to continue along the MS Office path even if there are open formats/software available. (Also short-term thinking is endemic in all human endeavours: The higher up-front migration cost is usually foregone in favour of lower short-term but higher long-term expenditure.)
... there is a kind of 'magic' point where enough people have adopted it and know about it that it becomes considered OK to send people documents in OpenDocument format. Massachusetts is an 'early adopter' (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm).
(1) For some odd reason, nobody had every really put forth a major, viable, industry-backed and powerful open specification for Office formats
(2) Compatibility with existing documents. Most large corps have many existing documents stuck in
(3) Document interchange: All businesses have to exchange documents with other businesses, organisations and/or individuals. This also compels everyone to continue along the MS Office path even if there are open formats/software available. Hence the crucial thing for OpenDocument is to gain *critical mass*
So all this will take time, but it's exciting that it's finally happening --- the industry has been stagnating for so long, this is long overdue.
That the format isn't supported in all office suites isn't anyone else's fault but Microsoft's. If MS was quick about this, they could easily incorporate the OD standard into an upcoming release of their Office suite. In fact, I believe they have one coming up, as luck would have it. Hell, include a patch to backport that feature to whatever Office (12-1) was called.
In this way, they could show governments that they *can* move to open standards, while still maintaining their (for MS) lucrative relationship. Instead, as per usual, we get stonewalling out of Redmond.
Funny? Yes. True? YES.
... and the idea is shot down.
This has been the attitude of many in our government for about the past 5 years. If you oppose us (the united states government), then you are against freedom. The irony being, many whom oppose the united states government want more freedom. They want us to believe that they are under this unalienable right to be coupled with freedom. "The united states government was home to such hero's as Lincoln and Washington. You're against the government that saved you from British tyranny!? You sir, should then leave our country for we do not want you. You can go to one of the many countries of which we have great influence over."
How does this have anything to do with the comment (and TFA)? Historically, every time something like this has been suggested to a government body, a large corporation (or financially backed government leader) steps in and says "HEY! You can't do this. This is just unamerican. National security threat. DMCA. 9/11. Gooble gobble gooble gobble." *muttering* "Well he is right. Did all those people in 9/11 die for us to do something unamerican? I think not!"
This is the first time a large American government body has made a decision like this and stuck to it. No amount of patriotic buzzwords has stopped them. They've seemingly gone about the process with some amount of prospective. This is great for America. We can only hope that they stick to this decision, and that others follow in their footsteps.
Could this be a changing tide for America? Probably not. However, it does seem to usher in some amount of balance in this rhetoric filled post 9/11 government we have to live with.
How are massachusetts administration going to embed their innovative Voice-Over-IP content in their text documents now?
Well, you have that slightly wrong. It should read:Even this form leaves "us" undefined, and while most Americans believe that "us"="American people" the US government keeps redefining the notion more towards "us"="those with power."
Uses of the current version of Office already have the option of saving in XML data formats. However it's currently not the default but it is very simple to configure office applications to save in these formats by default. The next version Office 12 will save in xml by default
Don't be surprised if this ends up being a boon for Microsoft with governments upgrading to Office 2003 and/or Office 12.
Is M$ flooding /. with all the FUD in here? I'm always amazed how many people don't understand M$ only wants money, while open-source is about freedom. These are two very different things. I'd rather be free and give my money to charity.
Software freedom...I love it!
The reason minorities and women are given preference in our current society is to undo hundreds of years of social and economic repression (please finish reading even if your knee just jerked). Racism against non-whites and sexism against women is still very much alive in America. The disenfranchisement of black Americans goes back to slavery, about as bleak a start as you can get. We just had the civil rights amendment in our own lifetimes. Do you think everyone in America who opposed desegregation and the women's movement simply gave up? There is a strong anti-non-white sentiment in America that manifests itself as complacency and an underlying acceptance of "white" being "normal" and "safe".
Affirmative action programs are not racist, they are anti-racist, as in, undoing the historical damage of racism. To give just one example, after WWII, white GI's were able to get affordable loans for homes and education, minorities were not. This allowed whites to accumulate home equity as well as knowledge which has disproportionally dispensed the nations wealth into their hands. Children of minority families today still feel the economic repercussions of racism and they would even if today's society was completely devoid of racism, which it is not. I norder for things to get better they are going to have to get a little harder for white poeple. This is because white people already have to much material wealth and control and so only stand to loose. Thankfully, we also stand to gain in our humanity so it should all balance out in the end.
I used to think about racism in similar ways to you I suspect. But then I actually did some research and discovered how little I actually understood racism and its effects.
White people do not notice the doors that are not closed to them.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
This is just one step in the eventual commoditization of major software products. Eventually, because of open formats, the interconnected nature of the internet, and tightening IT budgets, there will be nothing Microsoft (or any other private company for that matter) can offer in a word processor to justify the price difference from Open Source alternatives. The same will be true for other types of software, such as spreadsheets, browsers, even operating systems. As a result, these types of "ninty-percenter" software will become commodities; each brand will be basically the same as every other brand, including OpenSource. And no one can compete with free.
Once this happens (and it already is, slowly), the software companies will have to make their money by creating "ten-percenter" software: highly specialized software contracted and built specifically for another company, or a niche market. To use an analogy, the "ninety-percenter" software market right now is like tract housing. Companies build products that they think people will like, and then sell them when the product is finished. The future of software design is much more like contract housing; people contact a company, tell them what they want in their product, and the company builds it for a contract fee, specifically for that customer. Both types of software development co-exist now, but soon the tract style will not be maintainable as a business model since groups of people are giving away tract houses for free.
Microsoft is struggling right now with the future of their products. Microsoft Office will soon be obsolete if MS continues their current business model, since there will be nothing to justify its high price. Right now, Microsoft maintains their pricepoint with vendor lock-in; but as soon as every major company and government is using open standards, MS Office will be just one choice out of several. I can see Microsoft Office being quite profitable in a commodity market, but Microsoft will have to add more than just office-suite productivity to their software. They have to offer more value than the next guy: in the form of tech support, or service contracts, or collaboration/version tracking software, or any of a number of things that would add value to the commodity. The commodity alone will not be enough.
This is a very good move by Massachusetts; in the long run, it will protect valuable data from vendor lock-in, and eventually foster competition in the office suite marketplace. Competition is always a Good Thing(tm).
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
If you don't understand what a open and useable document format I urge you to
i .pl?OpenFormatMeetingSept2005
listen to the MA open format meeting. This is about nothing more than storage of
a document is a fashion that allows everyone equal access. MS can choose to implement the standard or they can choose not to. It is about preserving the sovernty of data owned and created by the MA govt.
http://www.softwaregarden.com/cgi-bin/oss-sig/wik
I highly doubt MS is going to support this document format as it will not only
undermine their proprietary lock in advantage but accellerate it's demise.
The audio transcript is outstanding and shows that MA fully understands the
implications of their decision.
Got Code?
Having worked for UMASS and had contact with many state agencies in that capacity, I saw absolutely zero motion when MA supposedly recommended using Linux. There are just too many asshats that control the buying and tech departments for that to happen. They'll buy whatever their sales reps shovel at them. They have absolutely no clue, and probably will not even ever hear about this. (Not to get down on state employees... the rank and file are only 50% asshats.)
Hate to be a downer, but I am sure if you asked my former CIO in a year if he "got the memo" on this, he'd be bewildered and have no idea what you were talking about.
Someone had to do it.
"What will the Federal Government do when the State of Massachusetts only submits ISO-standard ODP (OASIS) documents back to the feds?
:-)
My guess? Use OpenOffice.org as a conversion filter. Then, various fed employees (IT people) will start wondering _why_ they should be paying for MS Office when they *already* use a similar office suite as a _conversion_ filter."
You took the words right out of my mouth.
But OpenOffice is a great piece of software. OOo 2.0 does everything I need it to do, and I like it better than MS Office.
I think it's great that MA is doing this. I hope many other government follow. Access to government documents should be open to everyone and should not be locked to any particular vendor.
Big companies need to communicate with their customers to stay in business. There's a good chance their customers will send them Word docs. Companies need to keep customers happy. There's a tipping point there, of course, but I don't see it changing for the next year or two.
The state needs to communicate with the public and companies that are paid to do things for the state. It's in the public's interest not to require expensive proprietary software to read state documentation, and the state can specify what document formats it uses to companies that provide services to the state.
The fact that Microsoft's word processor is widely available is irrelevant. The fact that some people have reversed engineered (to some degree) the older Word formats is also irrelevant. This is not about a particular program. What MUST be available is the document format. It must be freely available to the public so that records that are encoded in that format will always belong to the public. This means that it must be unencumbered by patents or restrictive licenses.
Pretty damn good reason if you ask me.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
"So point is, this decision wasn't made based upon tech savvy. It was made based upon cost."
Hopefully moderators will mod your post down as WAY over rated. If you had listened to the mp3 they say straight out that cost is NOT a factor. If Microsoft supports the open standard it is likely that their products will still be used. The issue here is that public records belong to the public. I don't use Windows or Word but I am still entitled to any public record and should not be forced into buying a particular product to view those public records.
Another point is that those public records should be available to the public forever. With an open format, the encoding method is public so years from now if I really wanted to I or anyone else could write software to convert/view those public documents.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Why not just grok and use TeX (LaTeX fine too). Do something like LyX.
Many succesful standards are often pretty simple, for example:
- SMTP (for Simple MTP)
- LDAP (for Lightweight DAP)
- XML (as a simplified SGML)
Most of these standards produce pretty easy to understand documents or line protocols (HTTP springs to mind).Of course most of these standards provide extension mechanisms (I know SMTP, HTTP and XML do), which can be very useful but should be used sparingly. I think that that is the problem with XML. Every application defines their own "extensions" (as DTD's, schema's, namespaces). Although OpenDocument should work as one such standardised "extension", the examples show that each application further extends on that.
First you would have to reverse engineer it as there is no API so you could not guarantee full compatibility.
Do you have a link confirming that there is no public API for input filters in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?
microsoft will never let it happen.
What you're not seeing is a standard for the other parts of the office suites - spreadsheets and slide documents tend to get passed around quite a bit.
Why can't "slide documents" be passed around as SVG or PDF or some other format that can handle paged vector drawings? Is it that things need to "slide" around on screen?
Ah yes .... Massachusetts. They need the "open" document format so that they can register those gay marriage licenses... since no other state in the union will accept them in any other format.
In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.
This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.
This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here
The future is in beta