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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.
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.
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See my post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163269&cid=136 37741
i .pl?OpenFormatMeetingSept2005
There is a recording of the Mass Technology Leadership Council discussing their reasons here: http://www.softwaregarden.com/cgi-bin/oss-sig/wik
Basically they're very afraid of proprietary document formats (and rightly so). Especially when they consider archival purposes. 20 years from now do you want to find a copy of Word '98 to be able to read old state documents? Right now I can go to the basement of Harvard and read law books from the 1800's!
They're also concerned about requiring the public to purchase expensive software from a single vendor in order to view "public" documents. They state time and time again what their requirements for a doc format are, and that if Microsoft were to offer one they would consider it. MS, unsurprisingly, does not offer one...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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?
Well, I can think of an easy answer: to begin to get out of the financial box MS has put most US governments. I can only speak about my own experience working in IT for Multnomah County in Portland, OR, but I know that they were spending millions each year on MS licensing fees, both for OS and Office applications. Sure, it can be expensive to switch IT standards, but it seems to me the more governments rely on open standards and open source software the less they have to spend keeping expensive proprietary software around. As a side note, Oregon at one point was considering a bill that would force local government IT to consider open source when making technology decisions. A move that had MS down there in a jiffy with a team of FUD spreading lawyers who quickly squashed it. As a partial result, Multnomah county is now 100% MS, no NetWare, no Linux, no alternatives allowed. They even fired or demoted those who refused to switch....
Do not by deliberate policy require taxpayers to purchase upgrades to operating systems deprecated as insufficiently modern by entities with a commercial interest in selling said upgrades. Policy must be to assure that documents created at taxpayer expense will never become unreadable because an entity with a commercial interest in the sale of novel document software issues an end of life statement. Use of a secret storage format whose details are known only to a vendor and whose details may not lawfully be reverse engineered is grossly irresponsible.
On top of that, I'm also sure they'd identify weaknesses in the specification and ensure that their
Other fun things they could do? Scary warnings before saving in
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
Massachussets stated reason for switching to the OpenDocument format is that it allows them to guarantee access to important state documents. However, my guess is that this is just a fancy sugar coating over the real reason for switching, and that reason is the cost of migrating to Office 12. There is a very interesting exchange in the MP3 of the recent meeting that the state officers had with various software companies in which, after nearly an hour of saying that the state didn't want to talk about procurement, one of the Mass. officers let the Microsoft team have it right between the eyes. Basically he laid out the costs that Massachussetts would incur in a switch to MS Office 12, and it was clear that the costs were much higher than a switch to OO.org.
Massachussets is going to have to switch document formats no matter what they do. The new version of MS Office 12 is going to have a completely new set of document formats that won't be backwards compatible. Yes, Microsoft has promised plugins for some of the older versions of MS Office that will read and write these new formats, and yes Microsoft has tools that allow for batch conversion of documents, but OpenOffice.org has this as well. The state of Massachussetts has an estimated 50,000 desktops, primarily running Windows 2000. In order to use MS Office 12 Massachussetts would have to upgrade the operating system on all of these boxes, and in many cases it would need to purchase new hardware to boot. Not only that, but Office 12 also has an entirely redesigned user interface which would require additional user training.
Do you see where this is going? Massachussetts estimates (using past knowlegde of similar Microsoft updates) that a move to Office 12 would cost $50 million dollars. A move to OpenOffice.org is estimated to cost an order of magnitude less ($5 million dollars). Heck, if Microsoft is going to force their customers to a new set of file formats, with a new UI, and a new operating system then its almost certain that OO.org on their existing operating system and using existing hardware will be less expensive. OO.org also forces you to use a new file format and it will require training, but Massachussetts won't have to throw an OS upgrade into the mix.
The reason that Massachussetts can get away with the switch is that they are big enough that they can simply mandate a file format and expect people that deal with them to make the switch. You don't argue with the bureaucrats. If they want their documents in OpenDocument formats then you simply find a way to send them OpenDocument formats. The fact that the software necessary to deal with the state government is going to be a free download is just a bonus. If Massachussetts required MS Office 12, or WordPerfect, or even LaTeX that's what people would send them.
One thing is certain, a lot of businesses and individuals in Massachussetts are going to find it necessary to download and install OpenOffice.org, and many of them are going to like what they find. It's almost certainly going to become much more difficult to sell new versions of MS Office in Massachussetts. After all, unless you are some sort of MS Office power user you are not even likely to be able to tell the difference between the two programs, and OO.org is going to be required for dealing with the government.
I, and anyone else who have creating word documents for the past decade or so, know how fustrating it is to go back and try to edit old work. Now, if one is using word as a toy, i.e. school papers or memos that no one really reads, then it doesn't matter how the work is saved, because the computer is just a fnacy typewriter, and no one will care about the document the day after tommorow. But when using Word to edit documents that will need to be revised for years to come, or that others will have to interact with, it is really a waste of time to have to fight to read in those docs when MS chooses to change the formats.
And it really is between MS closed format and something not so insane. The current state of the world is that most things are in MS format, and MS format is really a problem. I like MS Word 97, so, until a few years ago, that is what I used. I could use the latest version, as it would cost me very little to upgrade, but the money would buy me nothing but file compatibility with other users. The biggest prolem with word '97 is that the current MS word has difficulty reading the files. So I can upgrade to the current format, or I can find another solution. It shouldn't be hard for MS to provide the solution, as it is a MS product, in the form of backwards compatibility, but the choose not to. MS instead chooses to screw it's customers. Like 10 years ago when i had to reinstall and mess with filter to get the then current version of word to read files that were a year old.
Which is really what I think this is about. It is not so much that we want an open format. Many are happy using PDF files because PDF files have seldom let us down. What we don't want is a format that is so insanely closed that not even the company that controls it can keep up with from version to version. Everyone hates insecurity, and what MS has shown us since MS Word the first is that we cannot count on the security of reading our old files. This is why I use OO.org, and why it is not worth it to save anything important in any MS format.
At this point people usually reply that I am lying. But I was perfectly happy with MS Word until i woke up one morning and realized that nothing was going to change and i was putting all my writing in a black hole. MS Office is good, it is not overpriced, but in terms of file security, it is a very bad value.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They have been doing all of these things for years now. And still OpenOffice.org is gaining in numbers and mind-share because some people occasionally are able to see through the MS BS.
If there is a *policy* in place that tells folks that they must save in the ODF, then those folks will naturally ask their IT staff to make it easier to do, whether it's with a MS product add-on or OpenOffice or KOffice, or whatever.
Well done, Massachusetts.
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).
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.
Is this true? Are most users running Open Office? Is it 5%?, 10%?, 50%??? It is A standard, but is it THE standard?
Did you just violate Microsoft's Intellectual Property? I didn't sign any microsoft agreement and now I know how to make a simple document with their patented XML schema....
Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
How are massachusetts administration going to embed their innovative Voice-Over-IP content in their text documents now?
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.
Massachusetts could simply refuse to buy any version of MS Office that was crippled with respect to the OpenDocument format.
XML != open.
o n.html
Wikipedia defines XML: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, RDF, RSS, MathML, XHTML, SVG, and cXML) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form.
One uses XML to 'define' a document format. The problem is that one could easily define a format (schema), permit royalty free-licensing, but 'patent' the schema/format.
Remember GIF?
MS XML formats have this problem. One, there are a couple licensing requirements. Two, the royalty-free license does *not* grant the licensee rights to use any MS patents that the document format may utilize. Even if one interprets some as the text as granting a right to the patents for certain implementations of MS XML, there's no reason to believe you have a perpetual right to those patents.
MS has some control over who can implement these formats, and for instruments of public policy, that is simply not acceptable.
MS is free to implement OASIS formats, because everyone is free to implement them. Governments are having to upgrade anyways--> DOC is being phased out. It's either switch to OASIS (ISO-approved), with multi-vendor support, and shipping software that supports it; or switch to MS Office Open XML, which hasn't been released yet, which *no* software on the market currently supports, which is not vendor neutral in implementation, and is not any kind of 'official' standard.
People use DOC over all the other formats because it has marketshare. MS Office Open XML has 0 marketshare right now. It has to compete on its merits alone, and a such, is failing.
Read here for more information:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-w
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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.
When properly indented, it seems quite reasonable. What really scaries me is the <w:validateAgainstSchema/> <w:saveInvalidXML w:val="off"/> bits...
Err... I think you are quite mistaken
1. OpenOffice.org (read, Sun's Proxy) is one of the forces behind OASIS, but by no means the main force. There are quite a few heavyweights, both vendors and customers. Here's a list:
Vendors:
Adobe (Framemaker, Distiller)
Arbortext (Arbortext Enterprise Publishing System)
Corel (Word Perfect)
IBM (Lotus 1-2-3, Workplace)
KDE (Koffice)
SpeedLegal (SmartPrecedent enterprise document assembly system); both product and company later changed names to Exari.
Sun Microsystems / OpenOffice.org (StarOffice/OpenOffice.org)
Customers:
Boeing (complex, large documents)
National Archive of Australia (retrieve documents long after development)
New York State Office of the Attorney General (both)
Society of Biblical Literature (large, multilingual documents)
IBM really is planning to make a big play for the enterprise office market. This is not an OpenOffice.org product---this is IBM's Workplace product. If anything, IBM is a MUCH, MUCH bigger dog than Sun.
Furthermore, I believe OASIS gave the EU two opportunites for input. You are seriously misrepresenting things if you believe OASIS=OpenOffice.org
More information here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
2. The OpenDocument restrictions are simple. 1. You can't patent any aspects of the specification. 2. Anything you contribute to the standard must be offered Royalty-free, with no other stipulations. 3. Any copyrights you hold on *anything* you want included in the specification must be licensed to OASIS under a perpetual, transferrable, sub-licensible, royalty-free license.
Did you even _read_ the license agreement you linked to me? Do you realize that the only thing prohibited by that license is trying to prevent companies other than your own from using the format?
This is quite a contrast to the MS Office Open XML license. When I think of MS XML's license, I think of GIF. As far as I'm concerned, until MS gives up their patents on the MS XML schemas, they are a patent poison pill.
3. Furthermore, the MS XML schema excludes GPL licensed products. That's a big problem--- OASIS formats, and a truly 'free' format, would do not such thing.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Why not just grok and use TeX (LaTeX fine too). Do something like LyX.
Some could write such a plugin.
The amount of work would be quite a lot, especially if they wished to make said plug-in proprietary.
Also, I imagine that MS would try to break this plug-in quite a bit.
It's much more likely that someone would make a separate go-in between filter program.
If you are going to use a separate program, however, you might as well run OpenOffice.org to do you conversion. You could have an OpenOffice.org java/macro program that did exactly that. Drop the file on your openoffice.org converter, have openoffice.org launch MS office with that file.
Easy to build, quick to implement, and free, except for the developer's time (maybe an hour or two) to put it together.
At that point, however, you'll probably have people using MS office for basic tasks just start using OpenOffice.org. "I'm already opening in it in OpenOffice, and I'm only changing a few words-- I'll just save it in here. I'll save MS Office for the big jobs."
Also, with the coming of Office 12, I imagine that many users will actually prefer OpenOffice.org. Compare the OpenOffice interface to the Office 12 interface, then compare it to Office 2003/XP/2000/97/95.
Which one is closer? Which one appeals to you as the 'natural' upgrade path.
Worse, you'll have to run add-in software for converting DOC files to WordML (OfficeML) files. MS says they'll be releasing converters for that purpose. But that begs the question: Use MS filters for DOC files, and OpenOffice.org for ODT files, and MS Office 12 for the actual work?
Or just switch to OpenOffice.org for everything?
Small departments/individuals will use OpenOffice.org.
Medium department/organizations can use either OpenOffice.org or StarOffice (with pro support)
Enterprises can use IBM's Workplace enterprise document management solution.
The OpenDocument 'platform' is much better positioned to take over the government market that Office 12. It's really not even funny, and with Sun & IBM working together, theres a ridiculous amount of lobbying power.
MS versus OpenOffice.org foundation? MS wins in terms of procurment trickery.
MS versus OpenOffice.org, Sun AND IBM? Magic 8-ball says, "Outlook not so good".
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell