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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.
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
Frankly, the whole thing stinks of someone playing a PC card, but for other purposes.
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."
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.
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.
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.