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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."
Headline: MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice ...are questioning the move to OpenDocument.
Submission:
You do realize OpenOffice != OpenDocument, Zonkyboy, don't you? And what the hell is a Massachetts?
Complex Word documents often have layout/macro issues - pretty much the same level of compatability as the OSS filters, really - though the conversion is very good and the fast majority of users will see no problems, just as with OO imports.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone that this is MS pulling out its political guns - think we'd be having these sort of hearings if they were moving servers from UNIX or Linux to Windows? The accessibility issue is real, and I'm not disabled and haven't done an intensive study, but OO.o does have accessibility support, even if it's not as good as what Office has. Previous versions of Office (97 and the like) have worse accessibility, so if they were good enough for workers then OO.o should be too, especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o. The quotes don't sound to me like any has actually reviewed the alternatives and is familiar with the level of support in OO.o. It's not 100% correct, either. Makers of screen reader software and braille readers have specifically supported Office at the expense of other applications - an example of the harm the Office monopoly causes - and screen magnifiers work with whatever software you use. I think we're seeing a lot of people with vested political interests, or even just people that MS and MS backers have political access to, trying to toss thier 2 cents in to break a project that means a signifigant loss of revenue for MS.
All of this wouldn't matter in the slightest is MS implemented support for OpenDocument, of course, and I imagine there are plenty of people in Massechusets who would simply jump all over the chance to give MS 3 times the money they'd otherwise spend.
Sun added many accessability features to StarOffice, including support for blind users a while back:
e ssibility/index.xml
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/7/acc
Hopefully someone decides to talk to Sun and ask them if StarOffice has these types of features before their meeting.
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There was an oligopoly on food distribution for decades, with much higher prices than south, in the EU. One of the two big chains even had their own exception from monopoly laws! This was officially complained about by the politicians (but not too loudly), but nothing ever happened.
Despite that food costs is a larger part of low income people's expenses, something claimed to be close to the heart of the usual government party.
A few years after joining the EU, a low-price German food distribution chain started to open shops. They had a really hard time to get permits, since the towns decided that they wouldn't allow any more business centers outside the central cities (despite that those have been built for decades!). The central politicial parties didn't exactly intervene on the local political agenda, either.
All the bad press that the German shop got is besides the point -- we are talking about state/country level politicians here. (Swedish press isn't exactly NY Times in integrity.)
Sure, it might just be total incompetence. But since this hit low income people disproportionally, left wing politicians, always talking about the poor man's lot and "solidarity", should at least have talked seriously about doing something in the 70s.
I don't know if/what kind of lobbying was behind all this. I just note that 10% of the total cost for food in a year is a lot of money. And that left wingers love talking about the evil corporations, but never mention the big distribution companies that really stole the poor people's money.
IMHO, the win with the EU membership, is serious laws against monopolies.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Anyone want to bet that MS will still be supporting Word 2003 file format for even 10% of that amount of time?
Thought not.
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You would be wrong. Access in particular has absolutely shitty backwards compatability - we're currently in the middle of a huge effort at work to upgrade from Access 97. If you even *open* an Access 97 db from Access 2000, it can't be accessed from 97 anymore (which is why we never did a full migration before). Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all, and Access 2003 refuses (or at least corp. IT can't figure out how) to co-exist with 97 on the same machine the way 2000 can.
Just a tip that may help out a little here. Although Access 2000+ won't let you directly manipulate Access 97 databases without converting them, the Jet DB engine is perfectly capable of R/W access to 97-format databases. One way to have them co-exist is to create a blank database in 2000, then link all the tables from the 97 format database in. By opening the special compatibility database, Access 2000 users can have full read-write capability without having to convert the database.
You can also go the other way (open 2000 format MDBs in 97) if you have a new enough MDAC version installed. A simple linked table won't work, but you can route it through an ODBC data source.
It's an ugly hack, and you still have to manually copy over reports / macros, but it works.
Point One: wrt to archival access, the "standard of the industry" and good corporate practices do not apply to some institutions, such as governments.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was ratified in 1780; it is of course still in active use. There is a large body of documents written before 1780 that might be called up on any discussion of MA law or procedure, as well as a yearly addition to this that has grown exponentially. This is not just the legislative and judicial records; it includes agency policy memos and even invoices and purchase orders since these might indicate how MA actually did its daily work at any time.
This is a "living archive" situation-- any of these old documents of the last 300 years could become relevant again today in a variety of different settings ranging from courtroom fights over MA's stewardship of public lands to the responsibilities that anyone selling goods or services to MA residents must meet.
I agree with the current govenrment of MA that it is important to make these materials as accessable as possible for as long as MA continues to exist. And it makes sense to look for the most efficient way to do this-- which in the eyes of those who have assessed the numerous studies, means moving to OpenDocument.
Point Two: Some other institutions have similar needs. Hospitals are one example that I know fairly well.
Malpractice litigation is one of a hospital's biggest expenses. In its collective wisdom, US courts have determined that a hospital should not be held to today's standard of care for an incident that happened years ago; the hospital should be held to the standard of care that existed at the the time of the incident. It is the hospital's responsibility to prove what its standard of care at that time was, and whether it exercised due diligence in developing and enforcing that standard. That means that all old policy and procedure statements, the research that informed these decisions, attendance records for training sessions in the new procedures, and some indication of compliance with the changed standard, all need to be part of a living archive. Obviously storing all this material digitally has advantages over paper storage. Just as clearly, it makes sense to go to a format that promises easy access into the future.
I worked for a hospital when MS Office 2000 was released. Our IT department thought this was a big deal when the first machines came in, and handed them out like candy to the Most Very Important Persons. IT got slapped hard alongside the head when the hospital Administrator found that the memo he had written on his new computer looked like crap on the computers of the clinical staff who were still using Office 97. IT got slapped hard again, when a Quality Control nurse found that MS Office 2000 mangled old policy statements that had been written in Word 97 and made them unusable. In the end, IT had to go through the expense of ripping out MS Office 2000 on every newly purchased machine, and replacing it with MS Office 97, and living in an uncomfortably ambiguous legal situation since Microsoft wouldn't give a straight answer to whether such a change was actually covered under the blanket contract. Instead of being acclaimed as the white knight heroes that the IT staff thought would be their due, the whole department acquired an odor reminiscent of the unclean shoes of a swineherd.
If there is a moral to this longish Sunday morning writing exercise, it is that youngsters who are entering the IT professions need to keep an eye on issues of long term storage and broad access.