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.

Comments

Re:For or Against?

[iabervon]

He specifically avoided making any requirements on documents submitted to his department. The policy explicitly states that you can use whatever you want, and they'll do their best to deal with it. His mandate included making recommendations for what people in general use, and he decided that the correct thing to do was to tell people to continue using the software and formats they were already using. The policy only applies to the documents the executive department produces, and says that they should be in a standard format, not whatever the person preparing them feels like.

If you really want the choice of what format documents are in, why don't you demand that Slashdot post their stories in DOC format, too? Slashdot is forcing you to use HTML right now.

For that matter, the normal thing will be for them to use ODF documents internally, but send out PDFs, since they aren't trying to make the documents they publish easy to edit. So use you be complaining that Slashdot's back end doesn't store their stories in DOC.

Re:For or Against?

[Omnifarious]

First, OpenOffice's support of Microsoft Word documents is not perfect, and it never will be because Microsoft will ensure they never have enough information to make it perfect. And that matters. I get Microsoft Word forms reasonably often, and OpenOffice doesn't really handle them all that well. And, there are a number of word processing programs (Abiword being an example) that handle Microsoft Word documents very poorly but handle ODF just fine. So, really, it was increasing choice, not decreasing it.

HTML and CSV are completely inadequate for office documents. HTML is an mediocre display format, and a lousy format for editing.

The question is, who owns the data? When the data is in a Microsoft proprietary format, Microsoft effectively owns the data. You either stay locked in the past forever (not really an option) or pay Microsoft whatever they ask for new software and the ability to read your old data.

It is beyond unacceptable for a government to be in this position. It basically sacrifices sovereignty to Microsoft. What law will Microsoft demand as a price for an upgrade? How much will people have to pay Microsoft in order to send the government a document their software can understand?

Already the deleterious effect of giving Microsoft so much control can be felt in the enormous political wrangling over this. Microsoft has been able to effectively force this guy to resign. It's utterly ridiculous.

Re:For or Against?

[AuMatar]

Last I checked, which was right now, OpenOffice.org supports exporting to Microsoft Word documents.

It contains reverse engineered support, which is imperfect and can be yanked out at any time by one law from congress. Or by MS deciding to put an encryption on next years data model (making reverse engineering a DMCA violation).

Or, even better, he could have simply not mandated any format at all. Why should any specific format be mandated? As long as someone can read it, does it matter what the format is? Just because you have some personal hangup about using Microsoft Office doesn't mean that the government should forcibly exclude it.

Because the rule forces the *government* to release all documents in the ODF format. Previously, the government released it in any format it chose, which most likely was MS Office. Meaning if you don't shell out money for office, you won't be able to read governemnt forms and documents. The state of Massachusettes was forcing people to buy MS products in order to interact with it. Since ODF is a free format (as in beer), that means ANYONE with a computer can now open government documents, where previously only people who bought MS software could. This is the way things should be- government documents should be open to ALL citizens.

If you wish to use MS products, you still can- either convince MS to support ODF, or convert the ODF files to .doc and edit them in word. If you need to return it for some reason, convert back. Or just use any of the many free office suites that support ODF. See, now you have a choice, instead of having to use MS Word.