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

Sign here for OpenDocument

[oldosadmin]

Please sign the petition at http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/. We are trying to demonstrate consumer demand for OpenDocument. Thanks.

Applying the pressure

[Nate B.]

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?

Solution to the "Problem"

[sweetnjguy29]

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?

Few comments

[Alain Williams]

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.

Wrong: the format can be read by several packages; it cannot (currently) be read by several other packages -- one of which happens to be MS Office. The point is that this initiative is NOT against MS Office, but a move to a stable/published document format. Is MS wants to join in (as it looks that it might), no one will complain.

Pacheco wants to know whether Quinn has the authority to make a major change in the state's records management policies without input from Galvin.

That is a really good point. However it occurs to me: has MS the authority to make a major change in the state's records management policies - as they have done several times in the updates from MS Office 95, 98, 2000, 2003, ... ? The point is that this is a change that will then prevent future changes causing backwards compatibility problems.

blind and other visually impaired state workers raised concerns ...

There is (deliberate) confusion between document format and implementation. Office suites that support OpenDocument format will improve their support for blind/... people, that support will be implemented in a short time compared to the long time that the OpenDocument format is expected to survive.

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.

IBM says Follow Massachussetts to Norwegian govmnt

[Been on TV]

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.

MS Office can already read ODF?

[Stephen Samuel]

Groklaw has an article about the French organization that has already implemented an ODF reader for Office. It's not perfectg (only alpha), but apparently this guy has managed to do, in in his spare time over the summer, what Microsoft claims that they won't be able to do by the end of next year with the millions that MA already pays them.
(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.