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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.'"
umm California and Connecticut are very demoratic
oregon is a little democratic
florida is a little republican
texas is very republican
Minnesota is a swing state.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
If you bothered to RTFA you would have noticed that the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats. Secondly both sides were outputting unhealthy amounts of FUD with IBM FUD in particular identified as being very negative after IBM were apparently deliberately disingenuous about the situation with ODF in Massachusetts. Then there will always be the cost issue with matters like this which decision makers will generally tend to shun away from because they want to spend the budget on programs more likely to get them elected next time round.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
This is not about government regulating what software or formats people or even businesses use. This is about what the governments themselves use.
Massachusetts is currently the only state that has a policy requiring the use of open formats.
It's important to realize that, practically, that means they produce PDFs. There's effectively no Open Document files available from the Massachusetts government. You can get Word and Excel documents aplenty, and frequently PDFs created from those documents, but you won't find a lot of Open Document files.
Of course, I don't really expect anyone to go searching on their own. Instead try the following Google searches for various Open Document files:
ODT (text): 27 results
ODS (spreadsheets): none
ODP (presentation): 1 result
Compare with:
DOC (text): about 19,100 results
XLS (spreadsheets): about 3,400 results
PPT (presentation): 568 results
And, last, PDF: about 77,600 results
So the "open format" attempt means, effectively, that they produce PDFs. But nothing more. ODF support might as well be dead in Massachusetts - it never really happened.
Looking at the links for Texas, it appears that the two bills in question, SB 446 and HB 1794 are not "defeated", but instead just pending in committee. I'm not naïve enough to believe they couldn't be left there, but they've *not* been voted down explicitly yet...
Write/email your local representative!Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
My reading of Texas HB1794 and SB 446 does not lead me to believe that it is limited in scope to word processing documents and spreadsheet documents.
While it does say:
"Each state agency must be able to receive electronic documents in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file format for office applications and may not change documents to a file format used by only one vendor."
it also says:
"Each electronic document created, exchanged, or maintained by a state agency must be created, exchanged, or maintained in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file format"
While some may interpret "electronic document" to mean only word processing documents and spreadsheet documents it may be that other things such as emails, database entries, and many, many other state records kept electronically could also be considered "electronic documents" and thus fall under the requirement to be "created, exchanged, or maintained in an open, Extensible Markup Language based file format."
If this is the case then it greatly increases the scope of the bill from being a simple switch from MS Office to OpenOffice to a massive effort involving the definition of many new XML schemata, developing, testing and debugging software to handle the new schemata, creation of documentation, deployment of and training for the new software, etc., etc.
Things like tax records, court records, police records and so forth, and databases comprised thereof cannot be automagically converted from their current electronic formats into open XML formats in the twinkling of an eye by snapping your fingers.
So for a state to switch to open XML formats may not be as simple as it seems. Not just a trivial change from MS Office to OpenOffice, but instead a massive undertaking involving far more than choosing open sourced word processor and spreadsheet applications.
What made Arnold very attractive is that he's independently wealthy and didn't have to sell out to any special interest to raise campaign money. Well, sure, there've been other candidates like that (Ross Perot for instance), but most of them have so many other problems it more than cancels out that good. Arnold wasn't beholden, was reasonably smart, wasn't extreme, warped, or insane, didn't have any deal killing hangup about anything, and could comport himself like a responsible leader. You knew that the first thing any other candidate would have had to do if elected is fulfill the ton of obligations they'd piled up to get elected, no matter how petty, stupid, or downright crazy and detrimental to the state as a whole. Party affiliation is a non-issue next to all that other stuff. It was just beautiful seeing all those special interests claw, screech, and howl about losing their political capital.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Please explain how to implement "autoSpaceLikeWord95" and "lineWrapLikeWord6". Microsoft's proposed 6000 page standard does not define these, along with many other parts of the specification. Even if you can reverse engineer Microsoft's products and determine how to implement those features, Microsoft's covenant not to sue does not "apply to things that are merely referenced in the specification". As you can see MS Office Open XML fails on all three requirements.
I interpreted it saying that the legislature writes the requirements, and the executive does the implementation. Courts are for testing.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
Yes, but when I was looking at documentation formats in '90s, there was quite a bit of interest around SGML - this was in the days before MS Word was ubiquitous. The HTML DTD was created precisely to provide a structure for documents which were to be rendered as web pages, and it was Netscape who "extended" the syntax of HTML to add elements and attributes which broke the SGML standards.
The problem was a lack of good and inexpensive SGML tools at the time - though in its Novell days, an excellent Wordperfect SGML edition was briefly around, which gave users the ability to edit documents in a structured way, yet see them as they were to be rendered. Alas, it was about the time that WP lost their way, and MS started hoovering up with their technically inferior product.
What grieves me is not so much that MS Word is so widely used for letters and reports, but that big companies and organisations use it for large scale documentation, for which it is *so* badly suited. If government want to use it for sending letters then I'm not too bothered, but when they ask for statistical returns to be sent in Excel format it makes my flesh creep.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
But I would like to ask why, in a democracy, any organization should be deprived of the freedom of choice in choosing what tools they can use to do their work.
Democracy is the tyranny of the majority. Laws to mandate ODF are no different from the thousands of other social (Note: not "socialist") legislative issues that are debated and passed or rejected every day.