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California Joins Open Document Bandwagon
Andy Updegrove writes "A legislator in California has decided that it's time for California to get on the open formats bandwagon. If all of the bills filed in the last few weeks pass, California, Texas, and Minnesota will all require, in near-identical language, that 'all documents, including, but not limited to, text, spreadsheets, and presentations, produced by any state agency shall be created, exchanged, and preserved in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format.' What type of formats will qualify? Again, the language is very uniform (the following is from the California statute): 'When deciding how to implement this section, the department in its evaluation of open, XML-based file formats shall consider all of the following features: (1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications; (2) Fully published and available royalty-free; (3) Implemented by multiple vendors; (4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.'"
Minnesota also is considering open documents.
As long as the format meets criteria 1-4, I don't see why it's necessary to specify that it must be XML-based. Keep it simple, and all that...
Why not just require the format to be in ANY published standard format? "XML" by itself is meaningless, "extensible" is a loaded term (and a very bad idea when trying to write a way to keep things compatible). Why do lawmakers always have to over-specify things until the purpose of the law is lost?
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[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
<user="wwwillem">
<subject>we should do this too</subject>
<content>
What is good for government documents is also good for Slashdot posts.
</content>
</xml>
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Format is irrelevant - since these documents will contain legal-speak, they'll be unreadable anyway. ;)
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> The dominoes are beginning to fall.
Are they being hit by flying chairs, perchance?
N00b: Hey we have this data representation problem, we'll use XML!
Greybeard: Son, now you have two problems.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If Government intervention is what it takes to force a level playing field, I will accept it. But still I would prefer it if market forces create a level playing field instead of government mandates.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I can write a text to text converter in about *0 lines* of perl.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
In other news, Microsoft is quickly subsidizing 3 small companies to write quick and meaningless stupid plug-ins using OOXML as input, just to pretend that their format is "Implemented by multiple vendors" and on "diverse (...) platforms" (ie.: Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP *and* Windows Vista)...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Just called my CA Assembly rep to ask them to support the bill. Look yours up here.
It may not be perfect, but is a move in the right direction.
Which truly is the perfect amount of Perl to ever write.
MS made a format that fits the very definition of what they said will be required in this bill. Is this bill just going to lead to government organizations upgrading to the new Office? Technically, all of these things apply even if the implementation of the "standard" will later be forked by MS with their extend and extinguish model. In short, does this really mean truly open formats will get a boost? Or that MS's new format will seem like the solution to a problem they have practically invented?
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I think the only document format that would qualify is ODF (by OASIS). It's the only well known document format, based on XML and extensible, open and implemented by different vendors and office suites.
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"Why do lawmakers always have to over-specify things until the purpose of the law is lost?"
...of course that is the federal process, and the states vary in their organization, but it is mostly the same. It all depends on how the states have drawn-up the rules for their specific legislature.
This is over-simplified, but here goes... American laws are made in sub-committees of committees of the legislative body. The committees are packed with 'specialized' delegates, i.e. someone with a political stake or in the pocket of a special interest group, (like Microsoft, OSDL, or Green Peace).
Keeping that in mind, every law has to 'pass' through the upper committee after the sub-committee, before passing in the full-legislative body. The extra wordiness is to satisfy the other 'specialized' delegates' demands.
To put it simply; They HAVE to make it ridiculously wordy or it will never become a law. There is just too much money involved. This means that all Microsoft, or anyone else, has to do is 'buy' an influential delegate in the sub-committee, or the chair of the committee in order to kill this bill before it is even voted on in the full legislature.
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Just specifying XML doesn't mean much, really:
... more binary crap...
<document>
Description of MS Open Format
<![CDATA[
37642364 78346478 23465789 34657834 65783465 78934653 47895634 78563478 65347856
56347825 63478256 34786578 34567893 45678934 65783456 78465783 46578346 57834567
34895723 48957348 90578934 75890347 58934758 93475892
]]>
</document>
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
SB 446
So far, each bill has been filed and referred to the appropriate committee. However, the legislative session just started in January and things don't usually start happening until after the filing deadline on 2007-03-09.
I am, of course, talking about Microsoft. They refuse to accept the Open standard.
Until that happens, there will be problems. Yes, you could have .odt documents sent internally, but what if someone has to send a document to someone outside the company? Microsoft Office does not recognize .odt, and if you think that you can train someone to remember to send .doc files to outside users, and keep internal documents to .odt, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
XML means it is readable by humans. You don't even NEED any kind of a program to get the text.
What next? Hasta la vista, Vista?
I believe the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) format, intended for cross-app CAD communication, is XML-based, and major CAD developers are supporting or working on support for it.
Death to DWG/DXF.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
If California passes this resolution I can see two outcomes. 1 The state recognizes that ODF has to be used and scraps Office and loads OpenOffice or StarOffice. Big win for the citizens of California big loss for Microsoft. 2 The state recognizes that ODF has to be used and because older versions of Office won't work with ODF they purchase Vista and Office 2007 for all state agencies. Huge loss for the citizens of California huge win for Microsoft. Guess which is more likely?
3 states who's yearly budget is under review are looking for ways to drive down existing IT costs by threatening to pass legislation that will get them huge discounts on Operating System and Office Software .........
20th century Marxism is not progress...
The absolute unfortunate truth in this case is that it will not matter what requirements the state of California sets forth, because in the end it serves not the people but the income of the government.
You see, in California, we have this precedence of hiring under-motivate, under-educated, people into roles to fulfill status-quo on the premise of serving equality.
This results in a rule that I call "Factor 4" where by you can take the initial cost of any related project, service or resource requisition, and thereby multiply it by factor of 4 in order to obtain the actual cost to the government.
Sadly, Factor 4, is a direct result of the mediocrity that has taken up residence within all of our government agencies. I cannot imagine a bigger nightmare than this one that I just read about. Half of the institutions within the government are filled with people that have no idea what that means, and lack the education to understand it.
With this being true, we open the door to committees, educational round-tables to determine educational requirements, requisitions for training, then post-comittees to evaluate if the needs were met, then another comittee to determine if the proper mixture of minority members were upheld, then further we'll add layers of evaluation to insure that all submissions qualified with the sole purpose of perpetuating a verification process that checks itself sometimes 3 times over- with absolutely no guarantee that said process is: accurate, predictable, or effective.
All this does is allow state governments the ability to ask for additional funding, which they will earmark with non-related items, and then fund other programs with the initial request.
Translation- the greater good for which said items are presented will be moderately served.
Outcome: Ho hum and whatever. Can't we think of better things to do with my tax money than fuddling around with this area of business? I say they throw out this status quo requirement and start paying people what they are worth so that we can get some really bright minds into our state governments.
I don't get what all the hoo-haw is and why we need courts or lobbying for any of this. I find it very difficult to write anything when my term paper or [insert your document here] isn't open. Sounds like a bunch of people just need to learn how to double-click.
Although the starting situation is mortly similar with OOXML, it isn't quite exactly the same.
Yes, there may be some different way to interpret the standards, and maybe two different implementation produce slighlty different results (Spreadsheet formules, for exemple aren't standarized yet). The difference is that this standard is controlled by a whole comitee (OASIS), in which several software maker are represented, include FLOSS, and it's in their interest to have the best interoperability as possible.
Thus there's a high probability that, faced with such a situation, the detail of the implementation will be specified in next OpenDocument revision, so that the other software can do a better job in opening their interoperation. In fact, latest versions of AbiWord seem to be much more close to the original OpenOffice.org document. Or maybe they'll even create a new options that allows to tweak the parameters of the function in a documented way ( where 2.67 imitates best the behaviour of OOo and 3.14 is KOffice's default and 3.00 is what every new application is supposed to assume in case of missing param, according to documentation)
And if some other product develops more functionality than ODF is capable of encoding, there's a high probability than an extension will be written and published with the next ODF revision.
In fact, ODF isn't as much direct memory dump of OpenOffice.org as SXW was. ODF has been further processed by OASIS. Whereas OOXML (for now) is still a direct memory dump.
s the sole and unique maintainer of the OOXML specification, it's not in their interest to maintain pixel-perfect conversion for competitor (they need competitor to be bale to interoperate with document formats - to shut the people complaining up - but they need to be the only product that can promise 100% pixel-perfect imports).
Regarding with difference of working, the whole documentation is bloated with definition of options like "" for several thousand pages, which aren't explicitly documented at all (it's only written that they will be deprecated and that implementation aren't required to react to them). Only MS-Office will ever be able to open them by definition (Abiword may be able to reverse engeneer them, but it'll take more work than asking OASIS for a better documentation).
You can bet that, if Microsoft adds some new functionality, they'll be the only one to support them as a paid-for extension... probably called 'Visual OOXML#'. You can be sure that they'll out-"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" their own ECMA approved standard.
Or at least to produce as badly written as possible documentation.
What will make the difference between OOXML and ODF is microsoft willingness to cooperate (or lack of), and OASIS comitee collective need to collaborate between members.
The only potential way to save OOXML is to put it into control of a groups, in which there's at least one FLOSS represented (say, WordView), which will have to grant full right to use and promise not to patent-sue independent implementations, and will force Microsoft to use OOXML instead of some "MS OOXML.net" extensions.
Which they'll never agree to.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All video formats are now illegal. (or is there now an XML video abomination?)
All audio formats are now illegal.
Probably all image formats are now illegal.
Whee.... this'll be entertaining.