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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."
Even though I'd like to see the OpenDocument format tested in a government-sized scenario (I'm pro-Microsoft, but I'm still supportive of OSS), I'd put impaired government workers futures over the file format.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Please sign the petition at http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/. We are trying to demonstrate consumer demand for OpenDocument. Thanks.
Jay | http://oldos.org
Well we got a few blind users in our lug.
There argument for using Linux is that you can do a lot more from the command line.
So in that way is Linux more productive for the blind.
So, using OpenDocuments will only make the blind more productive.
With OpenDocuments the blind users can also go in and read
the XML code itself.
/. readers comined could raise more than that we should start a /. fund for converting seaneors to f(o)ss.
I'm not even an American citizen, and I'd donate; as where the US leads the rest of the world usually follows, if bussiness & government here in the UK found it eaiser to use open formats and standards to deal with US companies and governmet they'd soon switch.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
For instance; a KOffice preview noted many accessibility features are already going into the devel-version of KOffice. See; This Month in SVN
This is just the first sign that leveling the playing field is good for innovation.
Apparently, MS has begun searching for and applying pressure to the correct pressure points. Ordinarily, I wouldn't suspect lawmakers examining a major move like ODF, but in this case, I'm afraid it's not out of valid concern for the consituents, but because of heavy duty palm greasing by One Convicted Monopolist (TM).
C'mon MA lawmakers, fess up. Whose interests are you really looking out for, besides your own?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
I see this as an absolute non-issue. There are so many ways to resolve this long-term and several short-term possibilities:
.. full access to accessibility tools. Once done, convert back. With a little creative hacking, it could be seamless (absolutely seamless if they were running KDE and created a kioslave .. :)
Short-Term:
1. Open document in OpenOffice.org, save as a MS Office doc, open in MS Office
2. Research non-Office suite specific accessibility tools (those that operate at the OS level) and evaluate. These might be satisfactory.
Long-Term:
1. Microsoft supports OpenDocument. Access to pre-existing tools still functions properly, no problems.
2. Third-party creates an import/export of OpenDocument for MS Office
3. Existing third-party accessibility companies provide support for OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice or any of the other suites supporting OpenDocument format. Perhaps funds saved from not buying MS licenses can seed this development.
4. Companies such as IBM already develop/maintain many accessibility tools. It seems likely that they would be a prime candidate for migrating these tools over to be OpenOffice/StarOffice compatible.
The Commmonwealth can accomodate disabled workers by continuing to use Microsoft Office by buying licenses for their computers. The documents can be saved as, lets say, an .rtf file. Then converted to odt. And vice-versa. What about converting the .doc to .pdf? Am I missing something here?
It strikes me that some of the feedback/discussion on /. ought to be fed back to the Romney administration - help them to defend their position. Can someone in the USA/Massachusetts do that please.
I think the issues around open document formats used by governments and in the public sector is too important that lawmakers should be discouraged because of accessibility issues. Such issues can and will be fixed - there is no technical reason why for instance OpenOffice can't provide the same functionality for these users as do MS office. The same goes for support of the OASIS OpenDocument format in applications spesifically crafted for these users. It should not be more difficult to parse these documents than .DOC files.
There are also a number or countries this side of the pond following Massachussetts very closesly, and IBM last week invited the new Norwegian government to follow Massachussetts in standardizing on OpenDocument in the public sector.
Microsoft has also been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered. Microsoft's own Office:mac 2004 is unable to read the Word XML document formats produced by Word 2003 on Windows.
The future is in beta
Nonsense. I have a client who has a mixed Office 2k3 and office 2k environment. For some reason Powerpoint slides from Office 2k won't open on the Office 2k3 PCs.
Also, the nefarious TNEF encoding bug is the most ridiculous thing in the history of email. Even Outlook Express won't open those nasty Outlook TNEF encoded attachments.
MS has only one reason for deliberately breaking compatibility between their own apps (and they regularly do). Do I have to spell it out ?
Stephan.
I have to agree. We've lost more time dealing with Access issues than we've ever saved by using Access over a real database (not neccesarily open source) implementation.
Maybe the OS community should take a page from the X contests... you know, create a fund as a prize for the first team to meet certain objectives that are needed for adopting open source software in various areas of use.
This is a perfect example. Gather up $100,000 and give it to the first team to develop a working screen reader for Open Office.. one that meets the same capabilities as what is currently available for MS Office.
Call it an OS-Prize contest or something. It could be an annual contest or set of contests.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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
Wow, Deja Vu. While I suspect that running Access 97 and Office (Access) 2003 on the same machine can be accomplished, my company is currently facing the same dilemma. Corporate IT hasn't come up with a solution yet, other than to convert all of our Access 97 DBs to Access 2000 (Many users still don't have Office 2003). I don't have a '97 DB handy to attempt to open in 2003 but I am fairly certain that it can be opened. However, you will encounter the same problems as opening/converting it to Access 2000. We have literally hundreds of Access 97 databases scattered among users in many groups in our office. Most, if not all, of them are incapable of converting these databases themselves so my group must now take time away from our usual tasks and priorities and convert these databases for them.
Ok except consider the following:...
Ok, now consider this: MS Access is a strong contender for the Worst Ever Forward Compatibility Prize , no matter what criteria any panel of judges might decide to use. It doesn't look like Jet improves the situation at all-- it appears that the Jet technology is just extending the compatibility issues to the other MS Office applications that have now begun to rely on it for some functions.
The basic problem seems to go back to some of the earliest issues in software design. If I remember my studies correctly, one of von Neumann's contributions in the 1940s was the concept that the program and its data should be separated. If you don't maintain a clear separation between data and procedure, you are going to end up with a system that is impossible to maintain or improve without breaking compatibility, among other problems.
It seems to me that Microsoft has been violating this basic principle of computing for at least 10 years now. MS likes to tightly cross-couple its data with its programming, apparently for marketing reasons (there certainly is no engineering benefit to this practice). Whether you look at Microsoft office products through historical practice or through the rosey lenses of computing theory, you see that they are deficient in providing for long term compatibility.
(and you wonder why MA's techies don't trust them)
In the meantime, Microsoft is threatening to take their marbles and go home from South Korea because that country has the temerity to continue an anti-competetive investigation against them.
And, of course, there was Microsoft's attempt to force the country of Israel to abandon Macs by refusing to properly support Hebrew (or any other right-to-left script) on Office-OS/X. They failed, because Israel decided to pay a group of local geeks (a fraction of the money that Microsoft had refused to fix office) to port Open Office to OS-X, and then announced plans to cut off all their contracts with Microsoft.
There are some signs that Microsoft intends to lock their customers more irretrievably into Office with patents and other tricks. That's one part of the reasons why MA may want to walk away from vendor lock-in.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
man, just ain't no pleasin some folks. Just commenting generally. books are data packed, a tremendous amount of data contained in a relatively small manufactured and mass produced package. That's why I used the book/printed word analogy, because it's still in use today in a widespread manner and is still used in a legal sense with official documents on paper that anyone who can read may access and understand. It doesn't require any upgrading to grok a book. You don't need to pay some company for your book upgrade to continue to access a book you already have. The "format" remains viable across centuries. Your book doesn't go obsolete and become impossible to access as long as it physically exists still. Sure, clay or stone tablets last a long time, too,but it might take you a room full to contain what is in one small paperback, and there is no large scale production or use of them any longer except as curiosities. Modern society is data rich, so we need a way to store and use data that is compact, concentrated, portable, and easy to use and in some manner be able to withstand the sands of time. Paper is an outstanding invention! if we are going to try and replace it, it needs to be thought about. this effort in mass. shows at least some people are thinking about it, not being lead around by the nose by some goofball billionaire crook who's good at sleazy marketing.
Chemical film is not lasting, older movies are in a lot of cases gone because of the fast entropy with chemical based films. Electronic tape degrades quickly. Hard drives fail easily. Optical disks are proving to not have the shelf life originally claimed. And document "formats"? Closed source, something that exists and remains accessible only at the whim of some company, a company with a track record of destroying as much as they create in order to force profits? For OFFICIAL RECORDS? SAY WHUT??
If we as a society are going to electronic storage, we BETTER be smart about it. An open document format is the MINIMAL requirement to accomplish this task, if we want our progeny to be able to access this information hundreds or thousands of years from now. Heck, we need this _now_ just to cover small single digit year spans!
This is one of those deals you either "get it" immediately, or you most likely never will. Not going to get bogged down into minutiae of old cuniform tablets or not, although I will say I certainly appreciate scholars in the past going out of their way to provide an "open source" long range solution for document archival to the best of their technical ability at the time. That shows that at least some human nature was good and remains good over the years and centuries and millenia, and that intelligence and logic can beat out "this quarter's profits" greed mentality in some situations. I enjoy and use modern tech, just wish to see it used WISELY, and paying tax money to insure that you WON'T be able to access important documents in the future short of mortgaging your economic reality to a single monopoly company is *not wise*. Corporations who do that are nuts and not looking at the longer term,so they'll pay for that mistake, over and over and over again, and governments that do that are guilty of short sighted and ill-advised malfeasance and incompetence, IMO.