MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice

kcurtis writes "According to a boston.com article, senators in Massachetts are questioning the move to OpenDocument." From the article: "At issue is how the state government stores the millions of digital documents and other public records it creates. The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages -- except Microsoft Office. The state Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee is holding a hearing Monday on the proposed document storage standards after blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns."

Comments

Re:How about a REALLY open/accessible format

[Flower]

Red, white and blue background. Talking about a state in the US where all the documents are going to be archived in American English. Yeah the GP painted with a pretty wide brush but for the context it really wasn't that bad of a comment. Of course, I do see benefits....

[Scene: Blur away from Flower typing his post to /. and start to play stereotypical Arab music with someone reciting prayers (actually a shopping list - Americans won't know the difference anyway) over a loud speaker. Fade in to scene of Arabian town covered in sand (lots of sand, gotta have sand. Camels too) move camera through throngs of people in the market place and through a dark alley where masked men holding AK-47s are guarding an ordinary door (covered in sand.) Cut scene to room behind the door where two men - one with laptop - drink tea together. Man with laptop moves hooka to the side]

[Arab with laptop] So do you have the disc?

[Other Arab] Yes Amir. *hands over CD-Rom* We were given this by our spy in MA. With these files from their state government we can start to plot our next terrorist attack against the American dog infidels!

[Amir, inserting disc into laptop and trying to access the files. He begins to frown as his eyes flare] American PIG DOGS! These files are in 7-BIT ASCII TEXT. They are useless for my WORLDLY Unicode software. *spits on ground, considers hitting cd-rom with his sandal* These are clever infidels from the Great Satan Habib. We'll have to move our plan to some other state where they are more modern. Maybe Wisconsin?

Yeah, I can some merit to the idea.