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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.
Headline: MA Lawmakers Question Move to OpenOffice ...are questioning the move to OpenDocument.
Submission:
You do realize OpenOffice != OpenDocument, Zonkyboy, don't you? And what the hell is a Massachetts?
Please sign the petition at http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/. We are trying to demonstrate consumer demand for OpenDocument. Thanks.
Jay | http://oldos.org
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.
-----------
Lobbycracy stinks....
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
Sun added many accessability features to StarOffice, including support for blind users a while back:
e ssibility/index.xml
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/7/acc
Hopefully someone decides to talk to Sun and ask them if StarOffice has these types of features before their meeting.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
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
Ok except consider the following: If your developing for Windows, the JetSQLengine will be built in. For small databases that will always run on windows, Access is good enough. Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe, or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external dependencies. If you have to extend any product that stores its data in something ODBC accessiable, you can do a linked table in MS ACCESS and store all your data in your own database. I keep all the SQL for my access queries in version control with my code. When ever possible I try to wean my clients onto MySQL/PHP web apps. When I'm interfacing with a third party program I try to eventually rewrite said app or get a cleaner interface to it than access.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
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.
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.
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.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
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."
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.
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
Sadly with access you lose more work-time minute for minute while waiting for the slow database than you save when writing the frontend. A few years back the IT department where I worked used Access to store their PC database (who is the user of which PC and where is that PC located, which Hardware is in that PC,...). You often had to wait minutes to get the page for a single PC from the Access Database with a few thousand (below 10000) PCs when you accessed it through their 6 MBit/s Link across town. I don't think any Open source database would have been that slow.
Linux is not Windows
blinux
"emacspeak the complete audio desktop"
Orca
"Sun's StarOffice 8 (based on OpenOffice.org) was released earlier today. In fact, already one University campus has standardized on it! There are many new features, including improvements to Microsoft Office compatibility, support for the new OASIS OpenDocument format (which the State of Massachusettes is adopting - see pages 18-19 of the Massachusettes Enterprise Information Technology Architecture version 3.5 [available in OpenDocument format too of course]), support for the W3C XForms standard, and new migration tools to help convert the Visual Basic macros in MS Word and Excel documents to StarOffice Basic."
But the new features I most want to highlight are the accessibility enhancements. To my mind, the key accessibility improvements in StarOffice 8 (and the shortly-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 2.0) are:
1. Dramatic improvements in desktop theme support. StarOffice 8 (and OpenOffice.org 2.0) now do an excellent job of conforming to things like the High Contrast theme in MS-Windows, or the High-Contrast-Large-Print theme in the GNOME desktop on Solaris and GNU/Linux systems.
2. Numerous improvements to PDF export support. StarOffice 8 now supports Tagged PDF documents. Tags in PDF files are how the new Adobe Reader 7 exposes all of the accessibility information to assistive technologies and via it's own "self-reading" functionality.
3. The usual collection of accessibility bug fixes (including one that allows Gnopernicus to properly read spreadsheet cells).
You can get a copy of StarOffice 8 right now for Windows, Linux, Solaris x86 or Solaris SPARC; in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Swedish!
It's nice to that at the same time that StarOffice accessibility improves, acceptance and adoption of StarOffice goes up. Some might question an implied cause and effect relationship between those two facts, but I'm content to know we're clearly on the right track in both of these areas. (2005-09-27 13:55:00.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Plenty more at Google where I found these if your interested. Interesting reading, maybe some of you will even find something you want to contribute to. Considering it regards Americans with disablities, you might even be able to get a grant to do some of the work.
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
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.
I agree; and I have seen a flurry of activity around KOffice, including a cool screenshot for better accessibility in the upcoming release. See this page; KOffice preview
How true, how true.
Seriously, and I've done it--
Most businesses have use an Access database in the past because it is fairly easy to start it and build on top of it. Hell, I've had one that grew past it's 1Gig limit (when we migrated it to SQL7 with the same front end).
Personally, I've found that if you build the frontend in an HTML interface and use PHP/MySQL as the backend, you have a much better chance of being accessible and don't have to worry about updrages with the Access front end.
My case had Mac users and where the remotes were using Terminal server, now they can login to a website and make updates.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone want to bet that MS will still be supporting Word 2003 file format for even 10% of that amount of time?
Thought not.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
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
1. Most screen readers and such work within the Windows environment, not just Microsoft Word. If the concern is that keyboard shortcuts or accessibility features won't work, these things are easily adapted to OpenOffice 2. The idea that government documents are designed for accessibility is absurd. Anytime you hit embedded tables (or worse, nested tables), columns, etc., it is that much harder for screen magnifiers/screen readers to deal with. Which is why... 3. An open document format is actually better for people with visual disabilities because custom document readers can be created that are more friendly to screen readers and magnifiers.
> Add the fact that you can distribute the end app as a single exe,
> or an exe and a few custom DLLS, and MS access means no external
> dependencies.
Hee hee hee, until the person/persons* who are developing the GUI use a feature or three that are all in external DLLs that just happen to be in their environment, and then BANG, you find yourself hunting down these other DLLs that aren't documented but for which access complains it needs to function for your database queries.
(*) Person is typically management, and once they've put in functionality and come to depend on it, no way in hell can you rip it out.
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.
Just a tip that may help out a little here. Although Access 2000+ won't let you directly manipulate Access 97 databases without converting them, the Jet DB engine is perfectly capable of R/W access to 97-format databases. One way to have them co-exist is to create a blank database in 2000, then link all the tables from the 97 format database in. By opening the special compatibility database, Access 2000 users can have full read-write capability without having to convert the database.
You can also go the other way (open 2000 format MDBs in 97) if you have a new enough MDAC version installed. A simple linked table won't work, but you can route it through an ODBC data source.
It's an ugly hack, and you still have to manually copy over reports / macros, but it works.
How true. I recently migrated an Access DB with only a few hundred thousand records to PostgreSQL. We haven't even optimized the queries yet (just linked tables to the PG backend) and the weekly reports are already 10x faster. And this is over a gigabit LAN -- I'd hate to think of how slow it would be from one of the frame relay sites.
SQLite is lighting fast, tiny, and public domain. No external dependencies required. It also supports a pretty full-featured SQL (maybe not so "Lite" anymore, except for its small footprint in RAM)
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.
Point One: wrt to archival access, the "standard of the industry" and good corporate practices do not apply to some institutions, such as governments.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was ratified in 1780; it is of course still in active use. There is a large body of documents written before 1780 that might be called up on any discussion of MA law or procedure, as well as a yearly addition to this that has grown exponentially. This is not just the legislative and judicial records; it includes agency policy memos and even invoices and purchase orders since these might indicate how MA actually did its daily work at any time.
This is a "living archive" situation-- any of these old documents of the last 300 years could become relevant again today in a variety of different settings ranging from courtroom fights over MA's stewardship of public lands to the responsibilities that anyone selling goods or services to MA residents must meet.
I agree with the current govenrment of MA that it is important to make these materials as accessable as possible for as long as MA continues to exist. And it makes sense to look for the most efficient way to do this-- which in the eyes of those who have assessed the numerous studies, means moving to OpenDocument.
Point Two: Some other institutions have similar needs. Hospitals are one example that I know fairly well.
Malpractice litigation is one of a hospital's biggest expenses. In its collective wisdom, US courts have determined that a hospital should not be held to today's standard of care for an incident that happened years ago; the hospital should be held to the standard of care that existed at the the time of the incident. It is the hospital's responsibility to prove what its standard of care at that time was, and whether it exercised due diligence in developing and enforcing that standard. That means that all old policy and procedure statements, the research that informed these decisions, attendance records for training sessions in the new procedures, and some indication of compliance with the changed standard, all need to be part of a living archive. Obviously storing all this material digitally has advantages over paper storage. Just as clearly, it makes sense to go to a format that promises easy access into the future.
I worked for a hospital when MS Office 2000 was released. Our IT department thought this was a big deal when the first machines came in, and handed them out like candy to the Most Very Important Persons. IT got slapped hard alongside the head when the hospital Administrator found that the memo he had written on his new computer looked like crap on the computers of the clinical staff who were still using Office 97. IT got slapped hard again, when a Quality Control nurse found that MS Office 2000 mangled old policy statements that had been written in Word 97 and made them unusable. In the end, IT had to go through the expense of ripping out MS Office 2000 on every newly purchased machine, and replacing it with MS Office 97, and living in an uncomfortably ambiguous legal situation since Microsoft wouldn't give a straight answer to whether such a change was actually covered under the blanket contract. Instead of being acclaimed as the white knight heroes that the IT staff thought would be their due, the whole department acquired an odor reminiscent of the unclean shoes of a swineherd.
If there is a moral to this longish Sunday morning writing exercise, it is that youngsters who are entering the IT professions need to keep an eye on issues of long term storage and broad access.
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.
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.....
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.
OpenOffice.org Base is the OOo equivalent of Access, and what's more, linking to external data sources is far easier (for the average user) in OpenOffice.org than it is in Microsoft Office.
Base supports ODBC, forms, basic, and everything else you'd expect from a desktop database platform. What more do you need? Or, are you basing your argument on data that is a year or more old, before Base was introduced (e.g., OOo 1.2.x)? Your statement would have been 100% accurate 18 months ago, fairly accurate 12 months ago when OOo 1.9.xx/2.0 was not ready for use, and totally untrue six months ago, let alone now.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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