Slashdot Mirror
Trimarco Confirms Mass. ODF Support
Andy Updegrove writes "After Peter Quinn resigned, only two brief statements -- both from spokesman for Governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney -- were made to the press regarding whether Quinn's OpenDocument format policy would survive. Both were vague, and both spoke only of the "rules not changing", leaving ODF supporters worried that ODF would be swapped out for Microsoft's XML Reference Schema, even before its expected approval by Ecma. But today, in a private meeting with ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel, Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas Trimarco assured her that Peter Quinn's departure "will result in no change to the Administration's position on the ODF standard." Trimarco is the public official that will supervise whoever Quinn's replacement will be until after the deadline for the new Massachusetts' policy is to become effective."
If governments start to use ODF, MS Office will certainly support the format (either natively or via importing and exporting). It will have to or it will lose revenue. However, I'm sure MS will do what it almost always does with open formats, which is fsck it up just enough to make its output incompatible just enough with other readers to keep those readers from being valid replacements for Word.
Probably the easiest way to do this is to allow importing of an ODF document into native Word DOC format, and then exporting to ODF format. In this way, people will not be restricted to using only features which ODF supports while editing the file in Word. Then, when exporting, they will get a warning message about how features will be lost if they convert this file to ODF. All of a sudden their clip art is grayscale, their title is no longer in 3d and written on a curvature, meta information like comments and 'track changes' is lost or corrupt, etc.
Just enough of a nuisance to keep the status quo and get the user to send their version of the document in Word DOC format.
New York City agreed to a proprietary, closed design for their bus/subway card, "MetroCard." Only the company that designed the card knows the information storage format (although hackers have deciphered some of the unencrypted information, like some users' social security numbers!)
The result? As the Village Voice revealed in several investigative pieces in 1997/8, The state (which administers the city's public transportation) is forced to pay an obscene $125,000 for each full-sized MetroCard vending machine they buy. They've lost millions of dollars (money which, for example, might have prevented the recent strike) just because they misunderstood the difference between "proprietary" and "secure."