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.

Comments

Summary of What ODF is/means

[acaben]

Can someone provide a quick summary of what ODF means for MA, and a timeline of events that has led up to this story so far? I keep seeing it mentioned, and yet no one ever goes into detail about why it matters.

Re:Summary of What ODF is/means

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

An intelligent casual observer point of view is that a customer requested a better product, and their current supplier (instead of giving it to them) tried to get them fired. Imagine if McDonalds was supplying food for school lunches and the school asked for healthy food that met certain dietary requirements. You could well get a situation like this, where instead of supplying better food McDonalds went to talk to politicians over the school's head. The difference, of course, is that McDonalds is not a monopoly and actually does sell some healthy food. MS just wants to make sure everyone is stuck with whatever they supply forever, regardless of quality, cost, or legality.

Since when do states have CxOs?

[Caspian]

I'm sure I can't be the only one here who finds the continual blurring of lines between "state"/"country" and "corporation" a bit unnerving.

Re:Since when do states have CxOs?

[Foofoobar]

Actually, ODF is an attempt to maintain sovereignty and further separate state and corporation. By enforcinf the Open Document Format as the states choice, they guarantee that at any time in the future should older documents not work with current versions of software, that they as the state have the ability to modify existing open source code to ensure that older documents can either be converted to newer versions easily or will at least be accessible regardless of a corporations intelectual property, their development cycle, etc.

It just maintains an oprganizations ability to access their own documents without waiting for a corporation to create some sort of backwards compatible solution on THEIR timeline rather than the states timeline.

All in all a solid decision in theory. How it is implemented however can be an entirely different matter but conmsidering the intelligence and forethought that went into making this decision in the first place, it seems that implementation should be equally well thought out.

I Was Getting A Little Worried

[canfirman]

'There have been no changes in the commonwealth's published OpenDocument rules, and we are still on track for a January 2007 implementation.'

Well, that's good to hear. I was starting to wonder if the new interm CIO would be a friend of Redmond and would start to turn MA against ODF. Good for them to stick to their principles.

Re:How "standard" is ODF?

[eobanb]

I have little doubt in my mind that AbiWord and Apple will soon support OpenDocument as well.

Re:How "standard" is ODF?

[GaryPatterson]

Apple released the spec for their Pages and Keynote document format. It's somewhere on their developer site (I downloaded it for interest's sake the other day).

It's just a gzipped XML format - very simple to process.

It would be a simple (but not trivial) task to write a converter to ODF, and any reasonable programmer could do it in a day or two. I'm tempted to write one in RealBASIC just for fun.

Well... not a *lot* of fun, but fun nevertheless...