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

Campaign contributions

[gvc]

Campaign finance records show that those state officials who most vocally opposed the plan received campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists. For instance, state Sen. Marc Pacheco, who held hearings on the move to OpenDocument Format at which he voiced opposition to the plan, received $600 in campaign contributions from Microsoft lobbyists over the past three years.

    -- http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/opensource.html? action=print

Sure, $600 is only a token, but its the thought that counts.

Re:Help for Disabilities?

[ottawanker]

.. also isn't the voice synthesizer and special screen reader and enlargers part of Windows, and not part of Microsoft Office? I have those programs installed, as they're part of the 'Accessibility Pack' or whatever?

Check out the Windows XP Accessibility Resources website:

Windows XP Accessibility Utilities:

        * Magnifier--a display utility that makes the computer screen more readable by creating a separate window that displays a magnified portion of the screen.
        * Narrator--a text-to-speech utility that reads what is displayed on the screen--the contents of the active window, menu options, or text that has been typed.
        * On-Screen Keyboard--displays a virtual keyboard on the computer screen that allows people to type data by using a pointing device or joystick.

Re:Whats all the fuss

[iggymanz]

you gotta be kidding, there's all kinds of problems reading across word processors, at my company we get plenty of unreadable documents from our government clients using Wordperfect and other non-MS stuff. We've had to install old versions of other software just to cut and paste. For legal documents, this is not acceptable, an open document specification is long overdue.

Governor's office fires back.

[AJWM]

The report at news.com also has this to say:

In response, the office of Governor Mitt Romney issued a statement on Tuesday, saying that the executive branch would continue with the standards implementation plan. "Senator Pacheco is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. We are committed to an open-standards approach that fully takes into account all accessibility, cost and statutory requirements," said Felix Browne, an administration spokesman.

Pacheo has been on the wrong side of this for a while. I guess he figured it was time for another headline.

Pacheco

[pudge]

Marc Pacheco used to be my Senator when I lived in MA. I didn't like him. He was entirely dismissive when we disagreed with him about a proposal to allow more dirt bikes in the state forest (he was ferit, we were aginit).

Re:Apples & Oranges

[El Torico]

I wouldn't be surprised to find he's getting some sort of kickback from Redmond at some level, or has a personal grudge against the IT office, or is hoping to make this into some bit of a power play.

I thought of that too, so I looked up his contributors at http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/campaigns/m arc_r_pacheco.asp?cycle=02, but I didn't see Microsoft or its employees as contributors. However, Information Week has an interesting article at http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=172900251 that states that Microsoft gained support of both State Senator Marc Pacheco and Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin. It doesn't state how it gained their support.
I suspect that these two are pandering to a special interest group (in this case, the disabled) to gain votes in upcoming elections. Of course, pandering to Microsoft may benefit them too.

Re:Apples & Oranges

[terevos]

Also, just because OpenOffice is the de-facto standard for reading/writing the OpenDocument format doesn't mean that it's the only thing you can use. And while I don't think there is a good OSS wordprocessor that does support this, there are plugins for MS Office to import and export OpenDocument. I believe they are free as well.

So the good thing about OpenDocument is that everyone can read the format. Even if you're a user with disabilities and you need to use MS Office.

And eventually, there will be a reader/writer for OpenDocument that does have good support for the disabled.

Re:follow the money

[bigtrike]

By searching google: http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance /candidate.phtml?si=200419&c=410033 Looks like most of his money came from unions.

State Senator != Senator

[renard]

An anonymous reader writes to mention a ZDNet article on Massachusetts senator Marc Pacheco's OpenDocument study....

"Massachusetts Senator" == (Edward "Ted" Kennedy || John Kerry)

Marc Pacheco is a "Massachusetts State Senator", i.e. one of 40 members of the upper house of the bicameral Massachusetts state legislature.

Big difference.

Re:Apples & Oranges

[mspohr]

Duh!

I just took a look at my Ubuntu installation and I can turn on "Assistive Technology Support" which includes a screen reader, screen magnifier, and on-screen keyboard.

Of course, these tools work with all applications in the OS, not just the office suite. But is surely works for OpenOffice, etc.

This bozo politician seems to be saying that Open Documents don't have these features but clearly they do.

And for also...

[papal_authority]

Besides this guy's confusion of data format versus application as others have mentioned, why does he think that all disabled people (and abled people for that matter) have $399USD kicking around for a copy of Microsoft Office? Bizarre.

Re:An Even Better Proposed Format

[timeOday]

Ah, you're right, I am blinded by my own zeal. Thank you for helping me see the light.

Not only should we select a document format that supports speech, but that should be embedded into the file format as a wav. I think that this will make it easier for applications to play it for the user

Now you're intentionally refusing to see the problem.

You can argue until you're blue in the face that document format and application features are two separate things, but this fact remains: if you dictate a format, then people have to use an application that supports the format!

The fact that an OpenDocument editor could have the necessary features is almost certainly true, and I happen to think the whole argument has a sort of "think of the children" ring to it. But when you propose an actual switchover in an important application, you have to get all your ducks in a row. You can't just tell people not to worry about a real problem just because it could be solved.

Re:An Even Better Proposed Format

[FractalZone]

I just opened up MS Word and typed "Hello World!" and saved it to my desktop. 24,064 bytes. Why? What in God's name is that bloated app bloating in it's bloated files?

Hmmm. Stuff WGA might use when it phones home? (Think how useful the User Information settings for a new Word document might be to the Evil Empire...) Oh, I'm straying off topic for this thread...but there is little on one's system that is off-topic to spyware such as WGA if Microsoft decides to go snooping around your system without your informed consent.

Absolutely retarded. And Microsoft has the nerve to ask why anyone would want to use other software. I dare them to ask why anyone would want to use THEIR insecure, buggy, incompatible, locked-in, proprietary, asstastic formats and the apps that produce them. Microsoft should've stuck to what it did best: make Excel better.

OK, I'm biased as all hell about Excel. I know it, use it, and think it sucks compared to Lotus 1-2-3 v2+ for the vast majority of things I use a spreadsheet for. Microsoft came out with Multiplan back in the early days of PCs, when VisiCalc was king of the electronic spreadsheets. (See http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html for a nice history of electronic spreadsheets. Then see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan to learn what Multiplan is if you don't already know about it - a glaring omission in the main article at the first URL.)

Why did 1-2-3 fare so well against Multiplan? My guess is that it was simple, fast, and efficient by comparison. Multiplan was overly complicated, bloated, inefficient, and very slow. Gee, that describes Excel, too...I wonder why?

Excel's roots are in Microsoft Multiplan. If Excel were written in highly optimized x86/x64 assembler (in the tight loops that affect performance, anyway) and didn't have so much crap hung off of it (it reminds me of what a pimp would like in a spreadsheet program), it might actually be fast. Excel didn't win the spreadsheet wars on its merits, that's for sure. Microsoft's marketing muscle, monopolistic practices used to keep Windows bundled with most PCs to this day, and its unceasing use of FUD are the only reasons Excel is the dominant spreadsheet today. I'd love to be part of an Open Source project to port and update 1-2-3 to modern platforms. I doubt IBM would allow that, but we won't know until someone asks.

Given today's microcomputers, I think there is room for a program like Lotus Symphony (modernized of course) that does all of the major office application tasks in memory. Symphony was really a spreadsheet at heart and looked very much like 1-2-3 under the hood, with different views of the same data when one used it in word processing or database modes. What percentage of users work with written documents, databases, or spreadsheets that won't fit into 1GB of RAM? As I recall, the empty file overhead for Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony files was very low. Very well designed data structures and tight, fast code tend to do that.

I've used OpenOffice a little, enough to know it will do most anything I expect out of an office suite. Why pay ripoff prices for buggy bloatware from Microsoft when OpenOffice and various flavors of Linux are available for free and now have increasingly good support?