KOffice Developers Reply to Yates

danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."

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Full Text of Alan's Letter

[AeroIllini]

Beware, the evil web PDF! Here is the full text of Alan Yates' letter, in good ol' HTML. And yes, it is a very long letter.

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September 8, 2005

BY ELECTRONIC MAIL AND OVERNIGHT DELIVERY

Secretary Eric Kriss
Executive Office for Administration & Finance
State House, Room 373
Boston MA 02133

Mr. Peter Quinn
Chief Information Officer/Director
Information Technology Division
200 Arlington Street
Chelsea, MA 02150

Re: Proposed Revisions to Information Domain-Enterprise Technical Reference Model

Dear Secretary Kriss and Director Quinn:

Microsoft respectfully invites you to consider its responses to the proposed revisions to the Enterprise Technical Reference Model-Information Domain published on August 29, 2005 (ETRM) which, as currently framed, mandates exclusive use of a designated office document format within all executive agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by January, 2007.

Microsoft strongly supports the efforts of the Information Technology Division (ITD) of the Executive Office for Administration & Finance (ANF) to bring the benefits of XML to executive agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We recognize that governments are challenged to be fully accountable for archived public records well into the future, and for ensuring that government agencies can efficiently handle data and documents across all technical and organizational boundaries. We share the opinion that XML is the ideal format for data interoperability and storage, management, and archiving of public records and endorse the direction to support open and agreed-upon specifications for data interoperability within government via XML standards. We share the proposal's goals for data interoperability across government agencies and for assuring proper storage and maintenance of all public records. Consistent with this viewpoint, Microsoft has been deeply committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work with many governments around the world toward these goals.

We have substantial concerns, however, with the definition of "open formats" in the current proposal. This definition mandates adoption of a single, immature format for office documents throughout the Commonwealth's executive agencies and effectively requires deployment of a single office application technology within those executive agencies. As such, this unprecedented approach not only prevents impacted state agencies of the Commonwealth from using many critical and well- established technologies, but also runs afoul of well-established procurement norms without due consideration for the enormous costs and technical challenges that stem from the proposal. We simply do not believe that the proposed mandate for this exclusive document format is the best solution for achieving the Commonwealth's laudable goals.

Microsoft's key concerns are as follows:

1. ANF did not provide sufficient time for review and comment on the proposed policy, nor a robust process for addressing comments. Due process requires much more, particularly given the unprecedented nature of the proposal and the potentially adverse consequences it could provoke,
2. the proposed policy would create significant costs and problems for state agencies, for the private sector, and for its citizens,
3. the document format designated in the proposed policy is new to the marketplace, still subject to potential revision, and not widely deployed or tested in a wide variety of product or usage scenarios,
4. there are substantial technical challenges associated with implementation of the proposed policy. For example, there are issues associated with converting documents saved in the well-established, existing document formats which apparently have not been considered, including the possibility that the new policy will lock out citizens and organizations which use software applications supporting these existing formats fro

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[CyricZ]

The fact remains that word processors are remarkably fast efficient and easy to use and entirely suitable for the majority of users.

Except for the fact that they aren't. They suffer from problems with the format the documents are saved in, as this whole debacle here shows. And word processors are pretty fucking useless when you can't even expect to be able to give a saved file to another user and have them open it without problem. At least LaTeX gets around this problem by using a plain text format.

uh.. what?

[XO]

OpenOffice and StarOffice are the exact same things. I'm not sure what the hell KOffice is? Is there such a thing?