Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
will determine the outcome. It's the American way.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Write to your reps. Most of them are completely clueless and have been fed unhealthy amounts of FUD that programs like Microsoft Office couldn't be used. They can, in fact, be used, and if an entire state government were to commit to using them in such a manner, Microsoft would be forced to provide improved support or lose them entirely to OpenOffice or alternatives.
All they have to do is explain that getting Office to output ot odf is not part of office but requires a downloaded addon, follow that with a breakdown of the man-hours required to get it installed on everyones machines, then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt. It's a nice idea but its just not practical.
Connecticut and Oregon lean democrat. The post before yours is more accurate. Both parties will sell out for money. It's not a dem/rep issue - it is a problem with the core of our political system.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
California - Not even close.
Florida - Not sure about the state legislature, but this is a swing state.
Texas - Heavily Republican.
Oregon - Blue state, although no California...
Connecticut - Blue again.
Minnesota - Last I lived there house was red, senate blue.. pretty much a toss up at the state level.
Technology issues aren't a Democrat V. Republican thing in the states, both sides are equally ignorant and more than willing to listen to the money. They just kind of assume that MS or whomever is talking to them knows best, since they have all the cash.
I've learned by watching the big money interests; you only have to win once. And once you've won, there's no going back. I saw it happen with logging and other environmental interests; the logging lobby wants to log some area, they just keep trying to get the legislature to allow logging, and one fine day, they do. In, out, and the battle is over.
ODF needs to do this, too. Keep it up and one year real soon, they'll win and it's over.
Best regards.
I think we should make a law that politicians are not allowed to legislate about anything that they have not taken courses on (and passed). This goes especially true for technology but could be applied to other things like medicine, economy, etc..
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
California has a Republican governor because the Democrats screwed up the recall election in 03. Gray Davis (D) was loathed by the state (having suffered the result of Pete Wilson (R) signing the act to privatize electricity...which gave us rolling blackouts and the whole Enron debacle).
The Democrats wanted to keep Gray in office, so their campaign was "Keep Gray Davis in office...but if you don't want him, vote Cruz Bustamante instead." That didn't go over very well.
By Nov 04, Arnold was very unilateral in office, going at odds with the Democratic Congress (once calling them girlie-men) and also backed four very controversial propositions, each of which got trounced soundly. Since then he's started working with them more often and was able to win over the majority by '06. Arnie's much less conservative now.
As the other guy noted, this isn't about the government regulating the rest of us. It's about the government regulating itself. Are you saying that the government shouldn't have rules about how it communicates with the public? Is it perfectly fine if some branches of your state government refuse to communicate using anything but WordPerfect 5.1 file format? Of course not. They should communicate in a way that lowers the barriers to public participation. Requiring that citizens purchase Microsoft Office to communicate effectively with the government is ludicrous. Laws like these keep that from happening.
Not all new laws present an onerous burden or a restriction on the freedom of citizens. Some actually force the government to behave in a way that makes it easier for people to deal with the government. Laws favoring open formats do just that.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The "war on drugs" failed because it's impossible to identify and arrest every drug lord hiding somewhere in the South American jungles. In the case of office file formats, we know who they are and where to find the masterminds behind the stuff that's being peddled at the street corners.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
OOXML is built in to Office 2007. The files are zips, if you unzip them, they're generally plaintext XML. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS ODF.
MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it didn't support some functions of legacy Office applications, they wanted a broader definition set, which led to the ginormous OOXML standard.
Now, you can complain (not without significant justification) that OOXML is a hugely bloated standard due to it's trying to be all things to all iterations of Office, but your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring. Also, I have no idea what you mean by "MS is not responding and never has"... not responding to what/whom? Whether or not you agree with their response, they've explained their problem with ODF (which is as I outlined above) so how exactly is that not/never responding?
-AC
the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats.
It's not a technical question. The issue is getting away from a single vendor lock in that limits choice. I'm a GNU/Linux user and I can't do anything with M$'s new "open" format. Mac users are in the same boat. The new format is not "open" and legislators should be able to see the issue for what it is. If they want their documents to be readable, they need to dump the bad apple, M$.
IBM were apparently deliberately disingenuous about the situation with ODF in Massachusetts.
Really? What exactly have they said that could be worse than the above facts?
There is no way a person with an open mind can equate M$'s utter bullshit with advocacy of real document standards, especially when those standards are royalty free and there are no cost implementations of them. Legislators who reject ODF are going to be wasting public money on the new M$ Office. That's money they could have spent on things voters care about. Every dollar spent on M$ Office is a dollar your state does not have for roads, schools, hospitals and everything else your state usually does for you.
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. Those who voted these bills down are going to be embarrassed of their actions soon.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I am increasingly convinced that this country would be much better off today if our founding fathers had extended the principal of separation of church and state to also apply to private enterprise.
Though one could also argue there is no fundamental difference between the two. If nothing else Scientology has certainly blurred the line a bit.
Sorry, but I think you took my comment out of context. I did say that the open formats were fine, just that implying that Office doesn't have PDF support, like I keep seeing it, is a bit silly. And well, you won't need to upgrade computer either, since Open Office has always been pretty much slower. My 6 years old lap-top runs Office fine too :) AND talking about "tens of thousands" of computers is pretty irrelevent -too-, since after a few hundreds, Office comes at a flat fee for unlimited licenses.
So again: not to say there aren't savings to be made with a free format. Not saying its not worth switching either. Not saying states shouldn't ditch office.
All I'm saying is, there are hundreds of reasons to hate Office and ditch it, no need to make up some that don't exist.
The HTML as word processing format issues has been flogged like a dead horse for years. The outcome is always the realization that HTML is poorly suited to the task of word processing and a word processor would be poorly suited for writing web pages. HTML is for web pages and they're trying damn hard to move away from it for that too.
Why not require the government code to the specifications of the language so that any browser that implements the standards correctly can display the website?
Because, in a democracy, all citizens have a right to access government documents. That includes Linux users, people who can't afford to spend $300 on Office, blind people (using specialized software), and people 50 years in the future (long after any proprietary format becomes unreadable -- try opening a WordStar or Word/DOS document in Word 2007 and see how far you get, for example).
Proprietary formats -- all proprietary formats, without exception -- cannot fulfill this requirement by definition.
(Incidentally, Office-type formats are really the least of our worries. Government should be prohibited from accepting building plans in the form of proprietary AutoCAD DWG files, etc. too.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The war on drugs failed because people want them. That simple. Even if you were able to identify and arrest every single drug pusher in the world, from the bottom to the top, the market for drugs would cause new pushers to appear damned near instantaneously.
It's a poor analogy which doesn't apply to document formats. What's important with document formats produced and required by government is that they are a documented standard which will allow interoperation between platforms and which will still be readable in 10, 20, 50+ years.
MS's format is a defacto, not a documented standard which cannot reliably be read after 10 years never mind 20, 50 or more. What makes removal of the Word format as a defacto standard difficult is that it engenders a strong network effect. You must have Word to read/write it and once everyone has Word (the situation now), you have to use Word to communicate documents with other people.
Breaking a network effect like that is extremely difficult.
Deleted
First of all, I don't see OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office, although it seems to be coming along quite nicely, there are several major factors holding back from being a good solution for me. For example, I use Microsoft Office as a full document processing system. I depend on either Office Document Imaging or third party commerical OCR plugins to perform a tremendous part of my work. Microsoft makes a full developer API as well as extensive developer documentation available to me with easily obtainable support from a centralized source. I regularly receive files that are 10-25 years old in document formats that either I'd have to reverse engineer or heavily research to read when Word and Excel read them just fine and give me all the APIs I need to access them.
.DOC support either.
.DOC support was just too limited at the time. Since then, when I experienced problems importing Word files into StarOffice, OpenOffice, SuperOffice, I just blamed it on poor quality software which was in fact the case at the time. Now that OpenOffice is beginning to feel like a professionally written program, I notice it less and less.
So, now seeing a nearly relgious style movement to try and force governments to use a different file format seemed a bit confusing to me. I tried the ODF support system for Word, it's not bad, but where's the support for Excel and such? Am I just missing it?
Now on the other hand, I exported documents as Word 2003 files and Open Office seemed to open them just fine. When I added scripting this appeared to be an issue, but from what I can tell, it doesn't work with ODF either, so there's still no benefit to ODF for me.
When I open both formats for the same document in a text editor, fact is, and I'm no stranger to XML, I feel that Office XML is a bit messier, but since it's really meant more to be a machine readable format, I don't see this being a big issue. Both document formats were clear enough. I won't make a huge check list, but I did feel that Office XML made less assumptions and therefore was more informative.
So why would I want or need ODF if OpenOffice supports Word just fine. I used AbiWord instead of Microsoft Word for 2 years with no problems with
The last time I actually noticed that I was having file compatibility problems with office packages is back in the days when I was diehard WordPerfect and
The way I see it is, it has to work both ways. Microsoft has released documentation to the Office document formats and OpenOffice.org is doing a great job of getting it working. The ODF import filter for Office seems to be coming along nicely, but still has a way to go, I'm assuming it's mostly an issue of trying to map features from one office format to another.
Also, before I conclude, last I checked, I still have support for importing WordPerfect 5.1 document in Office.
So, so far as I can tell, there's really little difference between ODF and Office formats, I would expect that for at least the next 20 years, OpenOffice.org would strive to support today's Word document format. I would also hope that for the next 20 years, developers are working to support the ODF format in each new version of Office. I'd also imagine that most other office packages would work towards supporting both and by reading source to OpenOffice could learn how better to support Microsoft formats.
So as a conclusion, is there in fact a need for forcing ODF over Office when in reality, cross-integration should be the key.
P.S. - Wouldn't time be better spent bullying governments into insisting that ODF support is shipped as standard with Office and made available as a critical office update through Windows Update? This would at least help support for the format propagate.
P.P.S. - Why not reroute some of the lobbying finances towards development of a small lightweight, cross-platform, ODF/Office viewer control so that applications like Office or OpenOffice wouldn't be required to read the contents of e
Despite their reputations, I suspect few in government are honestly going for that ever-fashionable "Word6" look in their documents.
But if some clerk used Word 6 back in 92, and that file has been in use since then, being updated by successive clerks, that 'do-it-like-Word6' tag is still going to be in there, waiting to choke some non-Microsoft reader, which won't know how to do it. It will then muck up the formatting of the file. Maybe catastrophically.
As long as 'do-it-like-Word6' and 5500 hundred other pages of cruft is in the 'standard', those files will continue to work reliably only in MS Office.
Even if we switched to ODF tomorrow, we'll still have to cope with legacy documens for decades to come. But at least, once the document is converted to ODF, we'll be able to read it forever. Even if someone has to write the reader from scratch - at least we'll have both the documentation and the legal right to do it.
With MSOOXML we have neither. If MS decides to discontinue or just charge (ever more) outrageous prices for Office you're stuck. You can't write your own reader because you don't have adequate documentation -- even the 6000 pages is incomplete. And even if you had the docs, you might not have the legal right to do it.
This isn't a democrat vs. republican thing. It's a corrupt vs. other thing.