Slashdot Mirror
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....
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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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!
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
"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
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.
Walmart want the poor to stay poor since they will be unable to afford to shop anywhere else. I'm at a loss to see how that's good for the US (or the world) economy as a whole though. That arch-communist Henry Ford said something on the lines of "if you pay your workers a good wage they'll buy what you produce", but that sort of intelligent thought seems anathema to the ordinary worker-hating right.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
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.
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.
(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.