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MN Bill Would Require Use of Open Data Formats
Andy Updegrove writes "A bill has been introduced in Minnesota that would require all Executive branch agencies to 'use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this.' The text of the bill is focused specifically on 'open data formats.' While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of 'open standards' that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects. First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one. Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so. Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor's compliance with open standards will increase. And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow."
It is not hard to reverse engineer a proprietary format - several word processors can save in competitor's formats. So this is a symbolic gesture, but it will be good in the future when Microsoft and others copyright their file formats to try and extort money from OpenOffice.Org and others.
Does anyone think it's significant that the two efforts are in states with "blue" histories (at least in election years)?
We know a hell of a lot more about ODF than we do about .doc, and that hasn't slowed it down.
I am glad. Open Standards should be, well, the standard. If it passes there, and similar ones in other states, everyone will be able to read important gov't files without surrendering their freedom of choice, and the files will not become locked in an abandoned format. Hopefully the Federal Government will see the light.
But this isn't about Open Source, it's about Open Standards, two orthogonal issues. Of course, Open Source is preferable, but it's not required to have Open Standards. Microsoft could add ODF support to its next version of MS Office (which they'll of course try to resist for as long as possible, as it'll kill their market lock-in), and it would be viable as a software supplier, but it'd have to compete on ease of use, price, robustness, etc.. It'd have to compete on its merits for once, instead of being the mandatory choice because of the current platform lock-in (even though OpenOffice.org does an excellent job interoperating with MS Office files).
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
The real key to any 'open standard' is that it be implementable without payment of royalties or encumberments of any kind. That is what makes ODF or Ogg Vorbis 'open standards' and MS Office formats and MP3 non-open standards. Open standards are great for consumers and voters because it means they can buy which ever standard conforming product best suits their needs, and that encourages true competition. Vendors like Microsoft will off course complain loudly, but it isn't supposed to be about what is best for the vendors, it is supposed to be about what is best for the citizens, and Minnesota seems to understand that better than most. I expect that Microsoft will go in with all guns blazing to derail this proposal.
ASCII text is an "open data format".. and all word processors support that.
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The more important point is that governments deal in records that are meant to be more or less permanent, or at minimum long-lived. Proprietary formats exist at the whim of a single supplier -- a software company -- and those suppliers are subject to the whims of the market like any other company.
If I buy some paper from the Bienfang company and write a report on it, that report will still exist and be readable possibly for hundreds of years after Bienfang goes out of business. If Microsoft stops making a word processor or (god forbid) goes out of business, the situation may be different.
"So what," you say, "just reverse engineer it." But what if, in the intervening years, Microsoft has successfully lobbied for laws that make that a criminal offense? We're talking about future-proofing data here; whether it's implausible is not really the point. The point is that using a closed format introduced risk.
Another, more likely scenario: Microsoft subtly changes its format, or changes the way that newer versions of its software interprets the older format files. The government is forced to upgrade because Microsoft stops supporting the older version of the program, but the newer version does weird things to all those old records when it opens them.
There are various reasons to choose true open formats and standards beyond ideological ones.
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Thousands and thousands of bills are introduced in legislatures around the US and worldwide it is probably a million or more. Far fewer pass and even fewer of those make it th erest of the way into becoming a law. (For the civics challenged/non-US readers: In most US states it will also need a sponsor in the other legislative body, passage in both bodies and either signing into law by the Governor or another vote to override a veto.)
It is good that such an idea is starting to bubble up, but it has yet to pass into law ANYWHERE at this point. The political power, wealth and proven tendency to resort to outright illegal measures of the Foe is going to make this a long difficult struggle.
Democrat delenda est
...it is the responsibility of a democratic government to be as open and transparent as possible, whenever possible. Saying that the tool chosen should be "the best tool for the job" must take openness into strong account when that tool is for use by the government.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Government assisted-funding software could again have a positive impact as MECC did. OOo, Mozilla, etc. SE Linux even...
This is very true. But there is a reason for this "carefully worded" requirments. All too often, vendors lie about their specs. "Sure, we're section 508 compliant" and in reality all it means is that they have alt tags on their images.
So, what happens, is you specify all your requirements, and in reality, only a few vendors meet those requirements, but a dozen or so "cheaper" vendors who meet the specs on paper end up winning the contract, and then we're stuck with crap.
This has lead to requirements being VERY specific, so that you don't end up with something that barely does what it claims to.
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You're not being told that you cannot use Microsoft Office. The Government is also not being told it cannot use Microsoft Office. The subject here is how the _data_ will be _stored_. You can use Microsoft Office, but the files must be saved in an open format of some sort.
This is certainly a Good Thing.
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I'd love to see it become more than just Open "Formats"... it should also include Protocols. e.g. MS Exchange. Exchange essentially locking people into using MS Outlook.
The MN bill is not specific to ODF. It would require use of some open format (i.e., one which is clearly specified and may be implemented without license restrictions) if such a format is available. Under this bill, ODF would only be required if it is, in fact, ready.
The MA situation doesn't involve legislation, but is an executive order from the IT department. The IT department is responsible for implementing the switch, and there's no reason it couldn't abandon the project if it turned out to be unworkable. They're also perfectly able to make exceptions for cases where they can't get it to work or simply don't feel like dealing (if someone had an extremely complex Word macro that they use a lot, and the ITD couldn't figure out how to do it in ODF, they could just shrug and let it go), because it's just a policy, not a law.
With respect to the maturity of ODF, it was developed by a group of organizations which, between them, are likely to have all of the needs that anyone has. For example, the Society for Biblical Literature was an active member of the technical committee. This may be a bit surprising, until you realize that they've got at least one document (a translation of the bible) in every known living language, documents in many dead languages, and things like illuminated hand-written manuscripts. Additionally, ODF was designed to include the concepts in Microsoft Office formats (based on existing converters and on inspection of the interface presented to the user).
The beautiful flip-side to this is a play on words. They will use open standards unless it's technically impossible to do, which really just means a lot of people will say "It's impossible to do function Y in format Z, I'm sticking with MSWord". It's not so much about impossibility, as it is about ignorance.
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Being a Packer fan, I don't generally pay much attention to Minnesota. But if this passes, it might just be enough to get me to acknowledge that Minnesota is a state.
It is strange how our ideals affect information.
In the olden days, people concentrated quite heavily on open formats. Many programmers saw the data as separate from the program. In this environment, one would expect multiple programs to be dinking with the contents of a file. In such a world, maintaining and adhering to published open formats was the key to success.
One of the ideals of OO revolution was that object would own the data. Taken to extremes that means that one object should own the data through its entire existence. Early ideas on the problem of persistence was that OO would just save the internal state of the program to the disk, rather than going through the complex task of converting the data to an open format (risking the potential that other programs would be tempted to modify the data). It seems to me that OO ushered in proliferation of proprietary formats. It definitely provided an excuse for creating proprietary formats.
It seems to me that open data formats is contrary to the ideals of object oriented programming. However, when dealing with data that last longer than the computer, it seems naive that one object will be able to own the data.
Yes, believe it or not. You obviously haven't ever read many state statues, I suggest you do, it can be both educational and entertaining. They always start off by defining terms. In this case:
"Open standards" means specifications for the encoding and transfer of computer data that:
(1) is free for all to implement and use in perpetuity, with no royalty or fee;
(2) has no restrictions on the use of data stored in the format;
(3) has no restrictions on the creation of software that stores, transmits, receives, or accesses data codified in such way;
(4) has a specification available for all to read, in a human-readable format, written in commonly accepted technical language;
(5) is documented, so that anyone can write software that can read and interpret the complete semantics of any data file stored in the data format;
(6) if it allows extensions, ensures that all extensions of the data format are themselves documented and have the other characteristics of an open data format;
(7) allows any file written in that format to be identified as adhering or not adhering to the format;
(8) if it includes any use of encryption, provides that the encryption algorithm is usable on a royalty-free, nondiscriminatory manner in perpetuity, and is documented so that anyone in possession of the appropriate encryption key or keys is able to write software to unencrypt the data.
Just as an aside, but the SBL isnt a religious group seeking to distribute the bible, its an very well respected academic society which publishes both books of academic interest (usually in Engligh, sometimes in German, and others) and maintains a peer journal, usually focusing on the ancient near east (not so many illuminated manuscripts, but if someone were writing on biblical translations in the middle ages, sure). That a group of historians, linguists, archeologist, sociologists, etc. might want to have a say in a document format meant to be distributable, portable, and designed to last isnt all that surprising.
Moreover, I suspect they may have more technical insight than most - LTR/RTL, printed and script, heavy diacritical use, cuneiform, IPA and other transliteration schemes, etc. are technical hurdles they've been dealing with for quite some time now in both printed and electronic format. They have even been freely distributing a Hebrew font for years.
Just wanted to clear that up, lest people think they are a group of bible thumpers or modern monks (e-monks?).
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I certainly support the idea that Govt and public-domain agencies should use file formats that are royalty free, published, and ideally, with a source-code reference implementation for reading them (assuming they aren't self-describing) and a bunch of sample documents to use as test data for said reference implementation.
What might be surprising is that I hold this view inspite of being a Microsoft Employee. While I certainly want as many people as possible using MS software, I want them doing so because it's the best choice for their situation. I'd like to think that Word can deliver more value to its users than the ability to open Word files, so if govt agencies want to mandate that documents be created, shared, stored, etc in published, royalty-free formats, that's fine with me. Government agencies are a large customer of ours, so hopefully government action around requiring open file formats will push us to make our tools best-of-breed for dealing with those formats, or may even push us to open some of our own.
I don't use WMA for my music files, even though I could just email the guy that designed it if I have a problem. Just because I can today, doesn't mean I can 5 years from now. And there won't ever be a supported WMA player for something like OpenBSD, which might otherwise be a perfectly good audio appliance.
Now here's where I explain the title. As much as I am for the idealistic POV that open formats should be used where possible, I also beleive that govt is amazingly effective at turning a good idea into a bad law. (See also: 99% of current US laws). Another comment suggested that this story is more about Sun/IBM fighting MS via legislation, as opposed to some ideological position that is being done for the best interests of the people. If that's true, it's unfortuneate that our govt is continuing to do these sorts of things that are allegedly in the best intersts of "the people" but no one can explain exactly how, and ultimately, other businesses or politicians seem to derive the most benefit.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.