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."
> I understand that in the union, the Federal government can overrule
> a state's authority.
You do not understand correctly.
> By the way, what will happen when the Federal government sends
> documents to Massachusetts in word format? Would the state send
> them back?
The state will read them with OpenOffice, of course. What do you think?
> 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?
Either the "extensions" will be turned off or Microsoft will lose the state's business again, and perhaps find itself in court for breach of contract.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This sounds very similar to what Microsoft is doing with HTML/CSS/JS. Before they release a new browser, they state how CSS2 is "flawed," and therefore we wont support it (And I'm betting that they will add propritary functions that do a similar thing). The same thing happened with the half-assed support of pretty much any standards in HTML/JS...yes, they might have one or two parts that follow standards, but the rest is either proprietary, or a horrible "improved" take on the standards.
I'm sure MS will attempt to do the same thing to ODT files. They will make some fairly basic functions in Office stored in a "enhanced" form, which, ofcourse, only works in MS Office. Judging from past experiance, the "standard" files genorated by Office would be a horrible mash of invalid markup, useless elements, and namespaces that server no purpose; except to break compatibility with any other program. In their usual style, they will probally hide a series of options hidden under 12 dialog windows which are the only way to genorate an actual standard document. Not only this, those options would probally pop up a "scary sounding" warning when disabled, to stop the non-techies among us from changing them.
Just to back this up, look at the XML Word genorates for a document that only contains "Hello world!" (No, I'm not joking, check for yourself).