MA Senator Decries OpenDocument Decision

An anonymous reader writes to mention a ZDNet article on Massachusetts senator Marc Pacheco's OpenDocument study. The report blasts the decision to switch to the OSS-friendly document format, saying the state's IT division didn't have the authority to make that decision and has disregarded the needs of disabled citizens. From the article: "'The process, quite frankly, was driven by one individual in a very powerful position (Kriss) issuing a memo to an individual in a less powerful position (Quinn). Then he was told to get it done and forget about any obstacles,' Pacheco said. Although OpenDocument is not yet widely used, other government entities, including Belgium, have expressed interest in OpenDocument as a standard as well."

Comments

Whats all the fuss

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I mean, I don't understand all this necessity of creating an "open document" standard. Especially when it comes down to politicians deciding which should be a ubiquitous document format.

To my knowledge, its never been a problem for a software company A to read and support documents from software company B, and vice versa. In fact, when it comes to word processing documents, which are largely text based (in a binary format), the problem is moot. Sure, you may not get some advanced formatting features specific to an individual package, but at least you can get the meat and potatoes of the document.

Unless you go to extraordinary lengths to encrypt a document so that only your application and read and write to it, I don't understand what all the hubbub is about.

Lets put it this way. If Microsoft comes out with an "open standard" and the OSS community comes out with an "open standard", whats the big deal? This means that Microsoft products will be able to natively support OSS document standards, and the OSS community will support Microsoft standards. Its not like either community needs to reverse-engineer the document format, both communities are making their standards open and thus, easily supported by 3rd parties.

What I find laughable is the idea that a government has to support ONE standard. I mean, does it really make a hill of beans difference for politicians? Whether your a politician that support the OSS community, or swears by retail software companies (depends where most of your campaign monies came from or didn't come from), the applications your going to use will be able to support either or standards.

Making a software product support one and only one standard is Stupid, period, with a capital S, especially when you have such disparaging differences between the OSS and retail software communities.

So, get over it. I mean, this doesn't need to have have taxpayers money wasted on such an endeavour to try and promote one person's open document standards over another. This is one of those non-news items that people seem to get all fired up over.

As long as I can go into application X, and open application's Y documents, who freakin cares what document format is being used!

If you really need a common standard, saving everything to PDF for goodness sakes!