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Peter Quinn Explains his Resignation
JSBiff writes "Peter Quinn, former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has given an interview to Pamela Jones over at Groklaw, regarding the people, companies, and events surrounding his resignation. He spins an interesting tale of Microsoft, money, and the politics of technology." From the article: "Now the folks that have say here do not know me from a hole in the wall and the funds were for projects that were totally unrelated to ITD. I clearly had set the priorities for the Bond but this funding is for projects like a new Taxpayers System, new Registry of Motor Vehicles system, etc., all projects desperately needed by the citizens of the Commonwealth. Eric Kriss and I always had a goal of making IT 'a'political and now it was rapidily becoming a political football of the highest magnitude. I took this job in the hopes of making meaningful and institutionalized IT reform. All the previous efforts were about to be for naught as political payback." We discussed Quinn's resignation last month.
I believe he was an advocate for the adoption of the Open Document format by the Massachusettes state gov't, so that's a plus for him at least.
DOC = MS-word ...
ODF = KWord, OOo, AbiWord,
stop trolling, please
He wasn't forcing you to use OO. He was forcing you to use Open Document Format, a format agreed on by *multiple* word processor companies that is royalty free and usable by any company who wishes to implement it, no hooks. That includes MS, should they so choose. This would change the current system, where only people who buy MS software are ensured of interoperability with government published documents. In other words, he was *increasing* choice, not decreasing it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Leo seems to indicate the 'Rat' is something more abstract, like council, than mammalian.
Or maybe the 'F' in front was silent for so long as to fall off the word.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What do you mean by "pace of releases increasing"? Do you mean Office, which has been on about a 2 year release cycle for ages? Or do you mean Windows, which was last released in 2001 (XP) and is set to come out again in late 2006. 5 years is too fast for you?
Regarding support, Microsoft now offers 10 years of free patches for the products. Go look at microsoft.com/lifecycle
Their old products are certainly ending their support phases, but Windows XP is I think scheduled until 2011 for free patches. That's 10 years for the $80 your computer builder paid for it to be on the box you bought.
Oh ffs... I'll bite
The point is not to dictate what software use, but to adopt a policy that ensure that official documents can be opened, edited and converted without fuzz in the future.
Microsoft does not like this so they refuse to support OpenDocument in Word, while others seems to be more positive to interoperability (Koffice, Abiword, StarOffice for instance).
It seems that Quinn was the person that wanted to introduce open document formats in Mass. What happened is that certain senators started cutting the MASS IT budget to the point where the MASS government could not spend anything on IT unless they got the ok of a special commission of senators.
Quinn felt sure that he was the reason the senators were cutting the IT budget. He felt that the whole state was being punished because of him. He believes that the state urgently needs new computer systems to take care of their records (these systems being completely unrelated to the open document controversy) and they will not get them because the senate is cutting the budget.
Since he did not want to see the state and his colleagues in IT getting screwed because of him, he decided to quit.
> He wasn't forcing you to use OO. He was forcing you to use Open Document Format
Actually, he wasn't trying to force YOU to use anything! He was trying to force the Mass. gov't to use open, cross-platform, multi-vendor formats for their public documents! (Note the plural in "formats"--pdf and html are also on the list.) Private citizens creating their own documents would be free to continue using XYWrite or VisiCalc or whatever other stupid, proprietary formats they want their data to become obsolete in.
From a government records manager and archivist point of view, his stance makes sense. Archives must be accessible in the future. Proprietrary formats are anathemas to government records and archives.