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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."
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.
Except that the original concern was raised that MS Office was the *only* way to access most of the documents. There is nothing stopping MS from implementing perfect support for the OpenDocument format. There are many things stopping competitors from implementing perfect MS Office compatibility. Come to think of it, even MS can't (or won't) truly implement perfect MS Office compatibility between the various versions.
...to buy a state senator.
My God! It's full of Voids!
I am giving OpenOffice the benefit of the doubt by assuming the software is Section 508 compliant. I can see perfectly well so I cannot ascertain its compliance. I like to believe that Sun and whomever else backs OO.o understands accessibility.
I think these Senators have recently been in backroom talks with some unnamed software company from Redmond, WA. The alliance backing open document formats in MA should follow the money trail and see if any donations have been made to the senators in question.
If OpenOffice is, in the end, inaccessible and non-508, shame on the open source community.
My 2 cents: The less of these thousands of documents are stored in a proprietary format the better for everybody, including visually impaired. What am I missing?
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
It's called text only. Anything can read it!
~Donald / Just RTFM
It is interesting to note that concern for "blind and visually impaired persons" was also used to justify the lack of paper trace for voting machines.
It seems that the/some/most important/one ? civil society organisation for Blind and Visualy Impaired Persons has been taken over by some very dangerous persons.
If I would be a blind american I would be feeling very concerned on how my "voice" is being used.
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Lobbycracy stinks....
The trade off is potentially all of our futures as against what is in practice a short-term hold-back for a few.
Short-term, because MS will support Open Document if there's the demand: they're on record saying precisely this. Also, other firms chasing the market opportunity will improve their support for the disabled.
"Blink first" is not good market strategy, any more than it is good diplomacy, and a strategy of always giving way to what there is supplied at present, and creating no new demand when there is a real long-term need of (in this case) document accessability, is simply cowardice.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Then the impaired workers should be complaining to Microsoft about their lack of support for the format.
Ok, let met get this straight: A few disableds complain because Word has better support for their specific disability?
Sorry guys, you are on the wrong train. Demand that the tools used by the state have proper support for your disabilty, that's ok with me. Stop the move entirely because the M$ lock-in, the exact reason it's all been done, raises its ugly head? Hurts just thinking about it. Maybe we shouldn't have introduced trains and planes - the first generation of those used to have stairs and wasn't exactly accessible to cripples (used literally - people with one or both legs missing).
I wouldn't be surprised to find M$ money involved here. Sending forth those with the big sympathy bonus is in the 101 if every astroturfer and lobby professional.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And what does the blind person on low income do with their Office 97 braille-accessible components when they download a 2003 document from the government website? Upgrade? Don't know if you've noticed, but the less well off segments of society generally aren't on the latest hardware and software.
To bring it back to the topic, with the money saved on MS Office licenses, MA could easily hire a temp whose job it was to do nothing but open OpenDocument docs in OO and resave them in a Word format for the blind workers.
Of course, we're also forgetting that by the time this article falls off the
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Frankly, the whole thing stinks of someone playing a PC card, but for other purposes.
I don't see what's stopping M$ from implementing this apart from the fact that it would be an acknowlegement that there is other software in the marketplace. And to do so would be to admit that their carefully constructed monopoly has a hole. A lot of people [low level users] are of the opinion that outside MS Word there is no other worthwhile piece of software. The more institutions that move to StarOffice/OOo the better. Microsoft win by contagious monopoly... people come home from work and think the MS Word is all they can use. A knock on effect is that, literally, no one i know who owns MS Office Pro legally aquired it. This is crime by ubiquity, thus making criminals out of millions around the world. I think the seemless compatability between all the products mentioned should be made more of.
Command line and XML code is useful if the blind user can understand and effectively use it. Your peers in your LUG may be able to effectively use it, but like the general population, blind people will also have difficulty working code whether in Windows or Linux.
There's support for AT tools in OpenOffice.org.
Read:
http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/index.html
http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/at.html
and might be a lack of companies supporting the Java Access Bridge
If MA does switchover, then those who have to share docs with the MA gov will have to use software that reads and writes OpenDocument. If MS Office does not support OpenDocument, then people will try other products, and MS may start to lose their stranglehold on the office software market.
Hopefully, MA is only the first of many businesses and governments that will switch to open formats. The fewer of these MS Office supports, the less useful it will be.
Perhaps eight years is ancient in the Internet age, but I have data that goes back longer than that I still occasionally dredge up. Thankfully, it's not locked into a proprietary format that I can't read. Do notice that Web browsers render an open language and are backward compatible and oftentimes, I have personal Web pages that are older than eight years. Although the mark-up has been updated, the content is remarkably unchanged. If the same lock-in had been applied to the Web as to office software, do you think the WWW would be one tenth as useful as it is now?
This is exactly the attitude IT needs to move away from. An understanding needs to occur that since computers are now permanent office tools, the data that is created and stored by them must be accessable years, if not decades into the future without worry of its accessability. People are generally sick and tired of the forced upgrade treadmill.
ODF has apparently been designed with long range accessability in mind. I believe that the new metric for data accessability should be one average human lifespan--any electronic data created at one's birth should be accessable during that person's entire predicted lifespan. This obviously precludes vendor lockin of file formats for the purposes of revenue enhancement.
There is no technical reason that MS could not incorporate seamless document importing capabilities from older versions of Office. It chose not to. Why?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
consumer demand for OpenDocument...
...for Word for Windows ? I just couldn't care less. OpenDocument is great with or without Microsoft. Always remember, Microsoft is big only until we [users, customers, money spenders] make them big. I will never ever petition for anything for Microsoft to make - if their dozens of market analyzing droids don't realize what they have to do to keep up, let the whole pack rot altogether.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
We need to get on the phone with these lawmakers.
Listen: The example of Blind or Visually Impaired access is PRECISELY why an open document format should be used. OK I admit it, I didnt RTFA, but it sounds like blind + visually impaired people are complaining because their microsoft software that enables them to read documents doesn't support the open document format. Well guess what, that'll take about a month for the free software community to fix, and by fix I mean, support whatever reading mechanism these blind people have.
Imagine if the situation was reversed, and we were asking microsoft to add support for the visually impaired. Or asking microsoft to give out a free reader so poor people could get access to the state's documents. Or asking microsoft to make a Linux, OSX, and Solaris port of that reader for people who exercise their right to choose. Or some brand new ailment appears where people need to read their fonts in dayglo rainbow colors or they have seizures. The FOSS community will be able to handle that situation _much faster_ than Microsoft.
This is the _reason_ mass is switching to ODF, so as needs change, the community can change the software. This is a safer bet than asking microsoft, crossing fingers, and hoping they decide it will be more profitable to do what we ask then to ignore us.
Maybe they caught us with our pants down on this one?
PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO DEMONSTRATE WHY F/OSS IS THE RIGHT CHOICE.
Why stick up for big business?
To bring it back to the topic, with the money saved on MS Office licenses, MA could easily hire a temp whose job it was to do nothing but open OpenDocument docs in OO and resave them in a Word format for the blind workers.
Or better IMHO, with the money saved on MS Office licenses, MA could easily hire a programmer who could work on improving accessibility on OOo. It would serve the whole community.
I think that if one has a Jeffersonian view of individual liberty, then F/OS Software is a natural choice. Politically, I bend toward a strict Constructionist and have championed Free Software for nearly a decade.
I don't think the use of F/OS Software is a liberal or conservative issue. Rather, it has to do with being educated on the tools available and the ramifications of their long-term use.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
I didn't realize that the MSFT reps shoveling thousands in campaign contributions to MA legislators were visually impaired state workers. But I guess it looks bad to say the senate was holding hearings because one of their big donors doesn't like what the state is doing. So they hold up those poor visually impaired state workers as the reason they're suddenly so concerned. Never mind the format has nothing to do with whether they can read a document on the computer screen, what relevance do facts have when there's money on the line?
Probably the same state workers that the senators bump out of the way while heading out to lunch with one of their good buddy lobbyists.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Maybe 8 years backward compatibility is enough for you. I would want proof of my payments into a pension fund to be available at least fifty years. I would like proof of the ownership of my house and the land it stands on to be available for longer than that. But that's just me.
You might want too add some qualifiers like today, and if they run Windows on an X86. But the lack of an open format for document storage means that this support might not be there tomorrow. What if Microsoft goes out of Business? Think it could never happen? Well Eastern Airlines and AMC are no longer around. Those where both large companies that just don't exist anymore. Even if Microsoft doesn't go out of business they could drop the Office product line or just not support old file formats at some point in time. The requirement that all goverment documents be stored in a format that is NOT the property of company seems to so Logical that to have it be any other way is just dumb. Not only that but you are then making the choice of office software a no bid item! Microsoft will have a goverment enforced lock on goverment software contracts for a very long time. This would then become a goverment backed monopoly. Disabled people are not defined just by their disabilities. Everything that effects a none disabled person also effects disabled ones. Well I did have a blind friend tell me that one advantage she had was that she didn't have to see teenagers running around with their pants hanging half way off their butts and showing off their boxers. She is a very interesting person she was working on a book called "Why it is good to be blind".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
the only precedent we have for long range storage has been books. ( I will leave out stone tablets, etc, I mean semi modern historical precedent) Stored properly and made with good quality paper, they last quite a long time, and the only requirement for data retrieval is the ability to read. Electronic media has a more dismal track record so far, precisely from evolving hardware and software abandonment. Instead of centuries like with books, it is mere small number years, and poof, hard to get access unless one maintains a computer and software museum.
There really *does* need to be a guaranteed open access document format, especially for public governmental documents.
The willingness of most business to voluntarily get locked in to a forced upgrade cycle, and government the same, based on ONE monopoly's dictates and profit concerns, is mind boggling. It's contemptuous really, beyond idiotic. Imagine the discussion if books were similar, write something, ten years or so later, after you paid for an eyeball upgrade because "everyone else does it", you could no longer view the decade old book. It's ludicrous but that is what the closed document format people want with electronic records.
Execpt that this isn't about Linux vs. Windows remarkable as that may seem. It's about Open Standards vs Vendor Lock in. Windows users can use OpenDocument as well.
And then there's always OpenOffice Base which is reckoned to be a pretty good Access workalike - an aknowledged weaness of OOo 1.x, now addressed in 2.0.
When you need to add business logic to a database, Access does a pretty good job.
That's debatable; at best it's a matter of preference. Personally, I'd use a proper database (Oracle, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or Informix by choice) and add the front end using Perl/Tk. Or if you insist on using windows, use ODBC and the developement environment of your choice.
But right at the moment the argument is about who you can buy your office software from if you want to talk to MA government offices. Is it going to be Microsoft, or is it going to be everyone in the world plus Microsoft too (if they decide to stop sulking)?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
But the left's love of the poor is surpassed by their obligation to their trade union constituency to oppose any large business that doesn't pay union scale. They focus their ire on the alleged shoddy treatment of Wal-Mart employees. And I suppose by their standards, it is so. But somehow they find people who want to work under those conditions. I assume it's because they can't find anything better. I always tell people who hate Wal-Mart so much that they can get together and each kick a few bucks into the pot to form a corporation that will offer low prices to poor customers and still pay high wages to the workers, if they believe so strongly in the idea.
What does that have to do with the topic at hand? It's this: People who don't like MS Office have gotten together to make and improve software that implements the OASIS OpenDocument standards. What MA has done is not to prevent MS from selling to them, (analogous to the communities that won't allow Wal-Mart to build a store) but to allow competition.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I might just be crazy or something, but I would really hope that the new metric for data accessibility would be "forever". Or at least "as far as the eye can see". Ok, maybe not everyone wants to keep all of their data forever, but why does that mean that our aim shouldn't be to make data accessible for the foreseeable future, for as long as a person should want to keep his data? If any data format precludes this possibility, I think it should probably be obsoleted immediately, as it is insufficient for the needs of civilization-- or my needs, at any rate.
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. No, we should demand that all file formats are open enough that they can be read for all of the foreseeable future, and that if that format should become obsolete, conversion would be possible.
As opposed to whom, pray tell? And while we're at it, how does the public get charged, precisely? Funding targetted for OSS development tends to come from corporations, or by private fundraising rather than the taxation you suggest. Perhaps you were not aware of this.
Of course if MA adopt a Microsoft controlled format, then the general public will end up paying, whether they wish to or no, particularly if MS move to the subscription model they've been threatening. In fact the public will pay twice - once for their own software, and again for the that used by the MA state goverment.
Then we have
Let's be charitable here and assume you meant to add "... for disabed users ..." at this point. Maybe you meant us to infer it from the context? Personally, I read it more as a an assetion that Office95 was better than OOo 2.0, but that would be a stupid thing to say, unsupported as it is and contrary to the experience of many of us who have indeed used both.
In fact, it's far from clear that MS Office is the superior product at all, since your point is supported with little more than hyperbole. Still, if MS offer superior support for the disabled, then hooray for Microsoft. I'm sure they will continue to enjoy strong support from that sector of the marketplace - just as soon as they get off their high horse and support the OpenDocument format that is. Otherwise, I'm sure some other vendor will be only too willing to meet their needs. That's what capitalism is all about, after all.
As far as I can remember in 1995 MS Word has about the same support for disabilities as did Vi and Nroff. Windows did a little better, with high contrast colour schemes and large fonts for the visually impaired, but that's not an Office feature and nothing in the proposal stops anyone using Windows.
Still, I'll admit it wasn't a matter that much concerned me at the time. Perhaps you'd care to refresh my memory?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who oversees the state's public documents, also opposes the new storage standards, although his office has not explained why."
One point to note is that these are Massachussets state senators and secretary of state (not national as the summary implies).
Another point is that while the overseer of public documents would be an extremely important voice in deciding the format of public documents, his failure to explain his opposition is totally unacceptable. He's not some corporate CIO who can delcare whatever policy he whims. He's got to explain to the public, his employers, why proprietary formats are necessary, and open formats unacceptable. Until he does, he just makes the argument for openness that much more obvious.
--
make install -not war
It's worth mentioning that part of MA's plan has always been for everyone who already has MS Office to use it with a converter to generate suitable documents. So it's not only incorrect to say that the plan would require people to quit using MS Office, but the plan never even assumed that people would quit using it.
Another wrinkle here is that everybody hates Romney, especially the legislature. People are guessing that he'll mess up as much stuff as possible before he runs for president instead of running for re-election. Connecting the proponents of the plan "the Romney administration" is somewhat of an insult, even if it's technically standard to refer to the entire executive branch as the administration of its leader. But it's not surprising that, if the executive branch does anything, and says it doesn't need the legislature's approval, and Romney comes out in favor of it, and there's any contraversy at all about it, the legislature will want hearings and the candidates for governor will oppose it without even looking into the matter.
It's obvious that he doesn't like MS, and wants to give open format a boost. Right or wrong that is his motivation. And he is lying about it.
Uhm... no. As was stated in the meetings leading up to the decision, Microsoft may participate by supporting an open standard. There were (at the time) two ways of doing this: submitting their document format to a standards body, and enencumbering it from any patents. Simple and straightforward.
The second way (now the only way, since MA has decided to go with Open Document) is to support the open document format. Considering MS supports *other* formats (WP, Lotus 123, etc), it's not much of a stretch for them.
At issue isn't a like or dislike for Microsoft; it is Microsoft doing what they always do-- they are trying to force their control on the citizens of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
So let me ask you this: do you prefer corporate control of our government, or citizen control of our government? The crossroads is before you. Choose wisely.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I worked in a computer lab at a university years ago, back in the Win3.1 days. We had Macs that worked pretty damned well for the time.
What's your point in the context of this article? One of the things the article doesn't mention is that this issue was brought up during the standardisation discussions. As it turns out, there are plenty of options for visually impaired persons, options that support the Open Document standard. (WordPerfect, for one.)
This is a strawman. The issue is being pushed by a state senator just days after a Microsoft representative met with this state senator. It is a strawman built and deployed by Microsoft.
At stake is the rights of all citizens to control their government. On the other side is some incorrect assertions that citizens with impaired vision are going to be adversely affected. So, to sum up: openness and transperancy, or lies and corporate agenda.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Don't matter. There is no law about document compatability. But there is about disability. My mother uses Microsoft Word. Not because its good, but because while the Screen Reader people claim to support wordPerfect, etc. their support is laughable and full of bugs. My mother is legally blind.
So while fundamentally the issue of Accessibility is probably best solved at the OS level, MS has not but solved it at the Application level. Or at least they have made it smooth at the app level. And only MS apps receive true testing by these 2nd party application screen readers and dictation programs and screen zoomers, etc.
Its a tricky issue but one that has the laws on the surface fully in support of MS since MS does support this and the others really do not. Open Office should implement Accessibility, not just 'accessibility support' and not depend on a 2nd part to do it, if they want to fully compete. Especially with Government.
Ahh, the old "Vendor Lock-In!!! Run for Your Lives!" argument. The policy Massachusetts is proposing is a lock-in, it's just a standard-based one.
If the state ONLY saves documents in that format from this point forward, then they will be unable to take advantage of any newly developed tech, be it standard or proprietary. ie, if Massachusetts 'locked in" on wax cylinders for playing sounds, it would make it hard to get my CD, cassette tape or futuristic crystal cube device into the state's procurement process.
Instead of making pronouncements about which standard will be used forever more, how about deciding what goal you are trying to achieve (lifetime access to the data, easy interoperability with different vendor solutions, no unlockable DRM technology) instead of picking permanent winners and losers based on a static moment in time. This plan should have laid out WHAT they were trying to achieve, not name a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Of all people, slashdot-ers should know that there is something newer and cooler coming soon, regardless what the technology is.
We shouldn't let the desire to see Microsoft impaled blind us to the reality of government types who abrogate their responsibility, and instead say "whoops, can't use that, we standardized on the other one back in ought six".
The commonwealth's decision is a meaningless whack at Microsoft - I can't get excited when the underlying myopia is so technology unfriendly.
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
Ahh, the old "Vendor Lock-In!!! Run for Your Lives!" argument. The policy Massachusetts is proposing is a lock-in, it's just a standard-based one.
If the state ONLY saves documents in that format from this point forward, then they will be unable to take advantage of any newly developed tech, be it standard or proprietary. ie, if Massachusetts 'locked in" on wax cylinders for playing sounds, it would make it hard to get my CD, cassette tape or futuristic crystal cube device into the state's procurement process.
You seem to be very confused about why vendor lock-in is bad, and why open standards are good (and important). You see, with an open standard like ODF, you aren't locked into anything. First, you aren't locked into any particular software product or vendor. With an openly documented and freely usable document format, any vendor, commercial or otherwise, is free to implement software to compete in the marketplace. Secondly, and just as important, it will be trivial to write automatic translators that will "upgrade" all of the stored documents to any new openly documented free document storage format.
Thirdly, but definitely not least, you also seem a bit confused about the fact that data formats and storage media are two completely different things. If the filesystem format for storing data on all those wax cylinders and other strange proprietary storage media were openly documented, and if the design of the original machines were openly documented, it would be a fairly trivial matter for modern engineering to build a reader to move that data onto newer storage media. And again, if the document format of those old files were openly documented it wouldn't be too difficult to translate those documents into ODF or any future open document format. Or at the very least to develop software to read the files, which is the most important thing.
Please note that document format (the internal structure of the files themselves) and filesystem format (the structure of how the files are stored and read from the storage media) are two very different things. In a perfect world every level from the physical machine specifications to the filesystem to the format of the document would be openly documented. Perhaps then our government wouldn't have nearly as many data storage fiascos where they lose warehouses full of data that nobody knows how to read anymore. That sort of situation should be unacceptable, and open standards will help keep that from happening.
I really can't fathom where you might have given yourself the idea that open standards are somehow limiting or in any way comparable to a single-vendor proprietary, secret, patent-encumbered document format. If you thought things through you would realize that open standards are extremely important to the future of our data (no matter what storage media it is stored on), and to the ability of the people to access their government's data or send data to their government without being restricted by not being able to afford an expensive piece of software from one particular vendor. Open document standards also encourage competition in the marketplace, which is of course good because competition lowers prices and is necessary for a healthy capitalist economy.
Responding to your other point, of course there will always be something newer and cooler coming along every other year. What exactly are we supposed to do, wait until 3237 A.D. when everyone finally settles on one perfect file format? Ain't gonna happen. But as I've stated already, with an open format we are free to "upgrade" our data to take advantage of new features and data formats in the future because we can look at the open specifications and build nearly perfect software translators, and plugins to let new software read old files and probably vice versa. There is no "lock-in" with open docuement formats. And there is nothing stopping any commercial vendor from building software to implement these open document formats and selling it to the public or