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

Re:I'm not from America

[lubricated]

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.

Re:Write to your reps

[Timesprout]

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.

In the case of Texas...

[UncleTogie]

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!

Re:In the case of Texas...

[ajanp]

Those are actually both identical bills. HB1794 is the House version of the Bill sponsored by state Representative Mark Veasey and SB446 is the Senate version of the Bill sponsored by Rep. Hinojosa. Based on what's mentioned in the article and notes from the hearing, it does appear to be dead (until at least 2009 when the issue can be brought up again).

Mathers is chief clerk for the Committee on Government Reform in the Texas House of Representatives and is in charge of researching bills for the committee, which considered and eventually quashed HB1794.

"The committee," he said, "wanted a flat-out answer from the DIR. 'Was [moving to open document formats] something we should be doing right now? And did they need the backing of the committee to do it?' The answer in both cases was, 'No.'"

The article goes on to mention a number of additional factors including the animosity and FUD coming from both Microsoft and IBM lobbyists that undermined the credibility of each side as well as the unwillingness of either side to testify publicly. It's also mentioned that Representative "Veasey blames other factors; for example, he claimed that the reform committee has a historical bias against government mandates. He also cited Microsoft's tactics. According to Veasey, the software vendor cooperated with him on initial drafts of the bill but then refused to sign off at the last moment. He said said Microsoft also hired a top local lobbying firm that went to the expense of bringing in witnesses from other states and countries."

That's not to say you shouldn't write your local Texas Rep if you support either Microsoft's or IBM's position, but for now, the bill has been "quashed".

Re:I'm not from America

[bzipitidoo]

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.

None of them are satisfied

[slashqwerty]

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.

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.

Re:Write to your reps

[epee1221]

I interpreted it saying that the legislature writes the requirements, and the executive does the implementation. Courts are for testing.

Re:ODF is bullshit, use HTML

[dunstan]

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.