Pro-ODF Legislation Loses In Six States

ajanp writes "Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut which 'would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats.' A similar bill in Minnesota was changed to study the issue instead. There was heavy lobbying being done in private on both sides with one problem being 'the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath.' However, 'Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.'"

Comments

UGH! Open Formats Do Not Limit Choice!

[twitter]

M$ spoon fed these people a load of crap and they bought it. The only people fighting ODF is M$ and there is no reason they could not use it. The only people who can use M$ formats is M$. It will always be this way because M$ is NOT RESPONDING and never has. They have promised something that they have never done so that people won't get the ability to use ANY software to read their public documents today.

Re:Write to your reps

[bjustice]

They should be open for anybody to use. There should be no licensing costs associated with implementing the document readers, and the specs should be freely (as in beer) obtainable.

I believe every single one of those requirements is satisfied by MS Office Open XML formats.

Re:Fuck you. M$ is the bad guy here.

[jb.hl.com]

I'm a GNU/Linux user and I can't do anything with M$'s new "open" format. Mac users are in the same boat.

That wouldn't happen to be because the new Office for Mac isn't out yet, or because no Linux office suite has implemented support for the new format yet?

Here's a thought; use your "open" advantage and code support for DOCX into OpenOffice or KWord or AbiWord or something. It's XML, shouldn't be too hard. After all, you are an accomplished IT professional.

Limiting choice to free things is a good limitation. Allowing things like slavery is bad. Yes, the difference is really that stark and the issue will not go away.

Slavery. Yes, twitter, this is a battle of LIFE AND DEATH!!1

Jesus christ.

Re:Write to your reps

[flakier]

Looks like the home/basic edition of office (contains word/excel) is selling for just over $100. IIRC, there are versions of the Word perfect suite for about the same price, if not less, that will open and edit all but the most complex MS word files without dificulty. Even the free Open Office will open most Word files... All but the first product works on Linux.

Now that the MS office suite has totally open file formats your argumets go from being just somewhat, to compleatly disingenuous.

I know it's popular to believe Open XML is not open... There's a nice cliff over there... I'm popular... Let's jump...