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Acting MA CIO Appointed, ODF A Go
Andy Updegrove writes "Massachusetts has appointed ITD COO Beth Pepoli as the acting CIO of the Commonwealth. At the same time, the Governor's Communications Director, Eric Fehrnstrom, has made the clearest statement yet that it is ODF that the new CIO will be implementing: 'There have been no changes in the commonwealth's published OpenDocument rules, and we are still on track for a January 2007 implementation.' We reported on the resignation of Peter Quinn in December.
Umm, a casual observer point of view is MS Office doesn't follow OpenDocument formatting so by saying the state will comply with ODF, they are giving MS the finger.
You can find exhaustive coverage of the whole thing on Groklaw, naturally.
Groklaw has the skinny, and a comprehensive history.
What it means for the commonwealth of Massachusetts: sovereingity.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Check out www.groklaw.net, which has been covering this and the M$ fud about it, as well as the SCO stuff. Basically, ODF is an open standard produced by a consortium of companies and released for public use with no patents, license fees or other encumberances. M$ could add support for it in a heartbeat (though it may not support all their bu...features) but is refusing to do so as that would place them in competition with the various other office suites that do support it -- and they might not win that one. After all, several of the suites that do support it are free as in free beer, as well as in free speech. M$ is responding that we should use their "open" (but not really) new xml format that they don't even support yet, and which has various legal problems for implementors. Peter Quinn, the CIO who used to have the job, quit because of an M$ funded witchhunt that got him a lot of bad publicity and negative attention. Of course, he was later found to be guiltless, but that little retraction only made it to page four, rather than page one where the accusations were made... See groklaw for more detail.
It has turned into a major political FUD-fest, but one of the more important details is IMHO that Microsoft *chose* not to support their customer (Massachusetts)'s wish to open and save files in OpenDocument format, and instead they questioned why their customer made such a silly decision and who did they think they were anyway. Read the articles on groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/); most news you read about this will be biased one way or another, but groklaw always also has the bare facts. Disclaimer: I don't like MS and I like groklaw.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Correct me if I am weong[sic], but ODF is only used by OOo and Suns Staroffice (which is the same thing, in a box, with phone support), so even though the format is open, which is undoubtably good, isnt it just locking into Sun because no one else reads / writes ODF?
OK, you're wrong. ODF is an open format, thus no lock-in. Anyone can and will implement it. Koffice and WordPerfect have both announced that upcoming versions of their products will support it. OpenOffice is open source, so any company can modify and sell support for it. Even MS can support the format easily, they just don't want to because the benefits it brings, like the ability to migrate easily to other formats, might not allow them to gouge customers as easily. The lock-in part of the .doc format is that no one except MS can read/write it perfectly (and not even MS between versions).
Moving to ODF is smart because it is not a lock-in. In five years when MA wants to evaluate new word processors, they can look at the features and prices of at least four different providers and choose the best fit, without worrying if they can read old files and without worrying about migration costs.