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Romney Continues ODF Support With New Appointee
Andy Updegrove writes "There is a major new development in the ongoing saga in Massachusetts over implementation of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Governor Mitt Romney has named a permanent successor to former State CIO Peter Quinn, utilizing the entire press release announcing his appointment to underline the fact that the new CIO, Louis Gutierrez, would not only be charged with implementing the ODF policy, but that his past experience was uniquely suited to that task. Moreover, the press release goes out of its way to note that implementation of ODF is still on target for an effective date of January 1, 2007."
A headhunter in Boston sent me an email today. In the past Boston has not ranked terribly high on the list of places to which I would consider relocating. With the apparent commitment to ODF, I am taking today's email more seriously. Being able to interact with the state gov't using my primary workstation makes a difference.
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Wow, the first time in a long time that a politician has done something that made me happy. I think I would vote for this guy for president, just based on this alone.
What does it say about him? He isn't blinded by special interests. He is not swayed by all the bad press and slander microsoft can pull off. He has enough moral backbone to make a stand, even in something relatively minor like this. In a political environment where any lobbyist with enough dough can get a law, that means a lot.
Qxe4
Poor me, living here in Virginia, where I don't necessarially have access to the algorithms used to encode state documents, even though all commercial algorithms can handle it.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely, and this is certainly important. But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard? And there will always be people implementing decoders on their own, for either standard. It just feels like we have bigger problems; it's good OSS PR, but not a huge deal. Though of course, I could be wrong.
And on a side note, Romney's presidental prospects are dismal. As a Virginian, let me warn you all about Mark Warner. He's gonna sweep y'all away. Romney, with this, is setting himself up as a pro-tech president. But I was working on a VR project at the NASA research center down here, and in one demonstration at the Southern Governor's Conference, Governor Warner tried out the equipment. He looked around in the simulator for a while, then took off the glasses and started asking some incredibly hard-hitting technical questions about the engineering behind the system. He really knows his stuff. So he's a moderate and charismatic southern Democrat with a strong fiscal record, and definitely strong on the technology front. I'd like to see Hillary run myself, but I think Warner's gonna take the nomination. And Romney doesn't have a chance.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
This is getting out of hand. Mitt Romney is advocating Open Source software and shunning Microsoft. Wikipedia says that MA Democrat Marty Meehan is sleeping with Ken Mehlman. John Siegenthaler trying to discredit James Frey. I'm so confused. Bill O'Reilly, Please Save Me. Slashdot, I wish I knew how to quit you...
You have no idea what this is about do you?
.doc format. And not even that is complitely true, because of different versions. MS locks it's formats to it products and with it the user. Have to write a .doc document? Yes, OpenOffice can write one too, but it's not 100% compatible and might fuck up. Now if MS would open the specs that would be different, but knowing MS they'd do that only if they were made to do it and even than they'd probably give old specs (like in the EU incident)...
Only MS's office is 100% compatible with MS
Now odf is all about free market and competition. You want a very good word processing program and have money? Suite x is for you! 100% compatible with odf format. Looking for something cheaper? How about Suite y? 100% compatible with odf. Not good enough to meet your needs? Than consider Suite z... 100% compatible with odf. Get the point? More competition = more choice = better products.
And I bet you use a pirate copy of MS office...
Not so much anymore. State income tax is currently 5.3%, though you can voluntarily pay 5.9% (I'm not kidding, there's a checkbox in the tax form for this). Romney's trying to get that down to 5%, however, but given the heavily old-boy Democrat leaning of the Legislature, it will be a tough fight. There's also a 5% state sales tax, but it's a short ride to "tax free New Hampshire", so that's generally not a problem.
For you and me, you're right, it doesn't make any difference. But for a company, buying a word processor that relies on a hack to read the accepted standard file format is not an attractive proposition, so they buy MS Word / Office which means that MS can raise the price of Word/Office and the competition have to lower the price of their offerings to compensate for the "hack" compatibility.
Sales droids at Sun, IBM et all must be over the moon. The ODF file format just became "the coming thing", "the future", "the smart choice". No longer the "brave choice", "trend setting choice". Nail biting in Redmond.
Massachusetts is a USD297billion economy with a population of 6.3 million people. Big deal.
Arghhh!! How many times do we need to point this out. You may not feel like there's a problem with compatibility but for a government department who want to *guarantee* accessibility of documents, the MS formats are not currently suitable.
You say anyone who wants to write a good WP package will be decoding word. Sure, many programs do this, but they've all had to reverse engineer the format. This means they cannot guarantee that they're importing the document correctly. MA correctly take the view that they cannot afford to be giving out documents for the next 100 years that *may* be correct, they need to be sure.
That is why MA are insisting on an open spec. They're not anti-MS by any means, they are just clearly defining their requirements and inviting companies to demonstrate how they can meet them. That's a normal tender process. The fact is that MS don't like having to make their programs suit the needs of the customer, they'd rather the customer changed their requirements to suit MS.
This is not a MS / Open Source issue, it's a question of whether there's an open public standard for saving and reading documents. MS have options of making their formats public, or of making their software compatible with a public standard. Neither of these are things MS are keen on doing since they both open them up to competition, but both are quite possible.
PS. I'm not anti-MS, in fact I'm very Pro-MS. I run a domain of 100+ computers and 11 servers, all running MS software, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I think some of the work MS are doing is superb and I'm waiting for their next generation operating systems with baited breath. But despite all that, I can see the sense in the decision MA are making.
Current non-MS word processors already have a hard enough time implementing Word 97 import, particularly for any really complex documents. Why should time make it any better?
Let's look back to the most popular word processors from ~20 years ago: WordStar. According to Microsoft, Word can only import version 3.0 and higher. OpenOffice appears to have no support at all (that I can find). Nor does Apple's Pages. So if you come across a WordStar v1.0 or v2.0 document, you're SOL -- and that's after not even half the 50 year figure you quote.
How about WordPerfect? From the same reference, Word can import WP v4 and higher documents. So anything created in WordPerfect v2.2 (from 1982) or v3.0 (from 1983) is likewise not importable. Again, I haven't found anything about WordPerfect v2.2 or v3.0 support in OpenOffice (it does support WordPerfect import, but I can't find what versions this includes), or in Pages.
And that's just the two most popular PC-DOS packages from the 1980's, and doesn't include documents generated for other systems (like the Commodore 64 -- Paperback Writer anyone?), or from dedicated wordprocessing terminals.
And it gets better. Check out the entry in the above link for Word 6 and Word 95 support -- not even MS Office supports importing these anymore ("Retired - no longer available"). Word 95 isn't even 10 years old. And what about Microsoft Works format? Nada.
If you think that in 2056 you'll still be able to import Word 97 documents in popular word processing applications, you're living in a fantasy world. It's not going to happen. Will they be able to read ODF? Perhaps not -- however if necessary someone could write whatever sort of importer or converter they want, as the official recipe for such documents will still be around.
Less than two hundred years ago, Egyptian Hieroglyphs were virtually unreadable. It took the finding of the Rosetta Stone to make it understandable again. ODF is the Rosetta stone we get to leave for future generations. We already have unreadable document formats, and we're not even 30 years into the Personal Computer revolution. Thinking that we're going to be able to read modern day Word documents 50 years from now is overly idealistic, and seems highly improbable.
Yaz.
I live in Washington State, you know, the land of Redmond. It's nice of our Eastern fellow state to take a look at ODT format. However, you must pitty us. We're never going to see the light of OSS in our lifetimes...
I guess the sun sets in the West and rises in the East. I guess evolution obeys time zones too.
The press release goes on to highlight the fact that earlier in his career, Gutierrez was chief information officer for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest state secretariat with 23,000 staff and more than $12 billion in annual spending. In that capacity, Gutierrez:
So, in other words, it's referring to the fact that he's a) overseen large deployments and large budgets, and b) that he's carried out a cost saving project relying on open standards.
He's good for this job because he's enough of a heavyweight and has had successfull enough projects that he and the Governor can respond to further attempts at power grabs from the senate by pointing out that Gutierrez has done similar stuff before, AND saved money doing it, so any politicians going against this project can much easier be painted as trying to waste taxpayer money to protect out of state corporate interests (Microsoft). It's a smart move...
But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard?
Visual Studio 2005 format is incompatible with 2003. It doesn't even seem to have an export function. That's just a 2 year separation. Do you really think Microsoft formats will remain stable for 50 years?
It's precisely because you have to decode -- reverse engineer -- M$ formats that the push to ODF is being made. At the very least, it's a major reason. ODF is a public standard. If we need to read 50 year old docs in 2056, the worst case is we write a new reader, but the format spec will still be available.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
The reason that Massachusetts has insisted on a Free and open document format is not just because other software isn't 100% Word-compatible. Another big reason is people who -- for one reason or another -- can't use Word. For example, blind people. Screen readers for Office uniformly suck, partly because they have to hack Office and reverse-engineer the Word format to work (just like OpenOffice). ODF's free spec will allow people to build screen readers that actually work properly.
And yes, this is important -- it's the government we're talking about, so using Word effectively disenfranchises people and turns them into second-class citizens. That's just not acceptable.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From the archaeological standpoint, DOC is worse than hieroglyphics. MS DOC format is not a text format, it's an obfuscated binary format that is, in reality, a memory dump of the OLE objects that Word was working with. You have huge amounts of data in that file that is not text, and you can't guarantee that the text is stored as actual text.
BTW - contracts are still typically printed, signed, and stored, all on wood pulp paper.
I'm waiting for their next generation operating systems with baited breath
Bated. BATED.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
More than once I've had more luck opening old Word document with OpenOffice than with a newer Word version...
Besides, if you'd bothered checking what they're actually planning to do, they've specifically made it clear that keeping current software around to handle legacy documents is ok, and that no document conversion is required.
Mitt Romney, as governor of my home state, has been somewhat ineffective as governor, only because Massachusetts is about 80% has a union-funded Democrat state legislature. He is, however, a savvy and smart businessman who has surrounded himself with some very smart people. He may not be a techie, but he has received good advice from his staff about ODF. Any good business person should know the pitfalls of a single supplier of anything. It's good business and hopefully, more states will adopt the standard. Most already use PDFs for downloadable documents, and, while not quite open source, at least there are a few other applications that can create and open PDFs.
For those who think living here might be close to nirvana, keep in mind housing costs. It's true, the taxes here have been brought somewhat under control, but they are by no means low. The town next to where I live has a property tax nearly double what I pay, and they are still struggling financially. The cost of a basic 2- or 3- bedroom house, anywhere inside the Interstate 95 (Route 128) beltway is staggeringly high. The lowest price is around $350K, where the hight end is nearing $1MM! And, if you want to live in anything bigger or newer, expect prices in the high $500s to $800s; in a few places, over $1MM.
Massachusetts has a lot to offer in terms of history, geography and business, but my wife and I agree, that when our kids have completed school, we're outta here. The politics of this state are an embarrassment. Remember, it's the two Ks that represent us in the Senate - Kennedy and Kerry. The Mass congressional delegation is a collection of clowns and the state politics are rife with corruption and cronyism. I'm not sure where we'll go, but almost anyplace with a two party system would be better.
I'd like to see Mitt make it to the White House, but he has a tough road. It's not unlikely that he'll accept the VP nod if the 2008 Republican candidate is someone like himself.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
It's interesting that you mention this. Back in the early 90's (from 1991 until 1993) I published an online magazine called "The Sound Blaster Digest" (which, in my stupidity I eventually renamed after getting lots of complaints that the title showed a bias that never existed). For the first two years it was an all ASCII production (as this was started before the rise of the World Wide Web), but later is was published simultaneously in ASCII and Windows Write format. The latter format embedded graphics, multimedia, and used nice fonts, making it easier to read.
At the time, it was fairly radical. I was getting recognition from Creative Labs, Microsoft, and BBS and Internet users world-wide. America Online gave me a free account to upload new issues each month, CompuServe sent me everything I needed to get on their network to do the same, and letter mail rolled in from all over the world. My name was known at trade shows, and free stuff rolled my way. The whole thing was even the subject of a story on CityTV's Media Television. At one time, I was approched to be interviewed for Wired (something I regret not following through on). I was considered a pioneer by many, publishing a monthly magazine completely in digital format. I did it before any of the big magazine publishing firms did.
Unfortunately for me, I was young and had other things I wanted to pursue. I never made much money at it (although people did subscribe to both a diskette subscription and a BBS uploading service I ran), and it took quite a bit of my time to produce. Other pressures in life eventually took over, and I stopped publishing. Which I do somewhat regret -- back in the day, my name alone was a free pass to a lot of good stuff. I was ahead of the curve, and considered a pioneer, but you probably won't read about it in any history of the Internet.
(The issues are still online in various places. I have every issue here, and have considered putting them up in an "online museum" on my website, perhaps along with some supplimental materials. I still have a box with every piece of mail anyone ever sent me when I was still publishing, including lots of 5.25" diskettes people would send with things they wrote, or sometimes the digital audio of their greetings to me :). I also have a tape copy of the Media Television interview which perhaps one day I'll digitize and put online).
Anyhow, to get away from wandering down memory lane and back on topic -- as mentioned above, later issues were available in Windows Write format, and used Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to include MIDI files, digital audio samples, graphics, etc. And unless I find myself a copy of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, AFAIK there is absolutely no way for me to read them.
So, the most popular online magazine in the world from only 15 short years ago is already unreadable (at least in its Windows Write form). Windows Write was available on every copy of Windows, and at one time was a really easy way to share decently formatted text with other Windows users. But today documents created in it are nothing but a pile of bits.
Admittedly, I was a few years too early for the rise of the World Wide Web, which is a more natural medium for such documents. Sometimes one of the dangers of being on the cutting edge is that a better solution to the same problem crops up, eclipsing the solution that was best at the time you started. If I had continued publishing for another year or two, I probably would have moved to HTML, but timing wasn't on my side.
One of these days I'll revisit this history somewhere, as it probably should be recorded. The Internet seems to have a poor record of things that were happening on it 15 years ago and earlier, and somebody somewhere might find it interesting (or might even remember those halcyon days :) ).
Yaz.
Well, the "rumor" started from Microsoft basically telling everyone that it was how they did it.
MS Office documents are stored as OLE Compound Documents, and have been since Office 97. The way this works is to take the OLE structure that you're working with in memory, and save it to a file. Office stores these as serialized structures representing different OLE objects.
This enables Office to embed many types of other content, as long as it can be represented by an OLE object. The method of saving the OLE memory objects to disc also allows Office applications to quickly load and save complex documents, however it carries the penalty of large file sizes. It also makes it incredibly difficult to load an Office OLE document without access to the format specifications.
While the OLE Compound Document format is documented, the ways that Office stores the data within its specific OLE containers is not officially documented *at all*. This means that you can fairly easily open an OLE document and see the OLE containers in the stream, but you can't manipulate most of them, for lack of documentation.
As an aside, Word 2003 can *usually* open a Word 97 document, and less often, Word 97 can open a Word 2003 document. You will usually get an intact document in the former case, but you will often lose formatting in the latter. In other words, Word 97 and Word 2003 aren't actually fully compatible, in either direction.