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:Bzzt. Wrong Answer.

[arkanes]

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.

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.

Re:We already have Section 508

[morgan_greywolf]

Accessibility for OpenOffice.org on Windows is provided via the Java Access Bridge. So any screen readers, etc., on Windows would need to use that API. On Linux, OOo is compliant with the GNOME Accessibility API and therefore is supported by the Gnopernicusscreen reader app.

See this page for details.

Don't be ashamed...

[BerntB]

It is the same all over the world, just more hidden in other countries. Let me give an example from Sweden, which is among the top "corruption free" countries in the world. I argue it is as bad here as in many other countries -- the difference is that the politicians are more group oriented, since the parties are harder knit together. The collective leadership makes it harder to do more that get a low price on the summer house or fix good jobs for friends and relatives.

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.

Re:8 years of backward compatability....

[greginnj]

Why should there be a necessary expiring of information, anyway? Can you imagine if every bit of information from more than 80 years ago suddenly disappeared? Imagine what we'd lose.

Hear, hear! I'm reminded of TFA of a day or two ago about resistance to Black Death conferring resistance to HIV. Public records (birth and death) over 400 years old were used to establish family trees of BD survivors who stayed in the community and had descendants still in the community. Without those accessible public records, this medical research would have been impossible. This is exactly what MA is trying to avoid.

Anyone want to bet that MS will still be supporting Word 2003 file format for even 10% of that amount of time?

Thought not.