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Texas Bill For Open Documents
Ditesh Kumar tips us to a blog entry by Sam Hiser noting a bill filed in Texas that would require state agencies to conduct their work in an open document format. After Microsoft's grueling battle against ODF in Massachusetts, bluest of blue states, it must be galling to face te same fight in the reddest of the red. Hiser notes that the bill includes a rigorous and sound definition of an open document format, which ODF would meet but Microsoft's current OOXML submission would not.
Question: How will each of these states' approach to this `open formats' "problem" be similar and how will it be different if one dares to compare and of course speculate?
Actually, it's been my experience that many are still in the dark ages when it comes to OSS. Imagine one of the 5 largest community college districts in the country still pushing proprietary (and patented!) online education at the tune of millions of dollars a year in taxpayer money. Four-years are no different (ever try to find a LyX layout/LaTeX class for a disseration? La-what?)
I've presented at several regional (Texas) conferences on various aspects of OSS in higher ed, and have talked to many, many people affiliated with higher education. I'm sorry, but I've never gotten the idea that OSS is in "heavy use" in Texas colleges. I'm sure there are "pockets of resistance," but by and large, Texas colleges are very much in bed with proprietary software vendors.
I hope Microsoft's newly released ODF converter doesn't mess with Texas's plans... a partly-free solution just doesn't cut it in my eyes.
For me, this is all about the future. Locking up government documents in proprietary formats is a disaster for future generations. We should ideally be scratching them out on cave walls...
Friedmud
"Texas probably also means Microsoft's OOXML for Texas documents.
Some years ago Microsoft threated the city of Huston to sign up for a multiyear, $12 million software licensing plan or face an audit exposing the city's use of software it hadn't paid for.
But as it turned out, Huston had more than enough proof of purchase seals. And then they voted to dump Microsoft Office in favor of SimDesk because of Microsoft's gestapo tactics. I don't know if that's still true today and I doubt SimDesk supports OOXML. So not all parts of Texas are friends of Microsoft.
Might that be the company the was featured in a quadrilogy on the DailyWTF recently?
Or Austin, for that matter.
Austin's about as red as the Santa Fe sky on a clear afternoon, or Australia's Coral Coast. Add to that a bunch of tech industry, a huge university and about 2000 miles between it and Redmond, and this is hardly surprising.
Austin's where I first heard about Linux... in January of 1992. Slackware was on sale in the University co-op a year or so later. And it's where I first used USENET, IRC and internet e-mail, way back in 1991.
"Microsoft went for ISO fast-track approval which allows only one month for dissenting countries to speak out (and with 6000 pages in the spec it's not enough time -- there hasn't been any public standardization prior to this fast track as is normal with fast-tracked standards)."
That's nice Microsoft but we already have a published ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) for "XML schema for office applications and its semantics". One standard is enough, thanks but no thanks. If you want you may propose revisions to ISO/IEC 26300 by submitting them to the JTC 1/SC 34 committee for review... Have a nice day.
Exactly. Here in Germany, businesses are officialy required to submit their sales tax information electronically (which actually makes
sense) using a Windows-only program (which does not). You can get an exemption if you can prove to the official in charge that using
a Windows-only program is an undue hardship (for instance because you don't have a Windows PC), but I don't think this is a good
solution, since you're now basically dependant on the goodwill of the tax authorities.