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

deep pockets

[bl8n8r]

will determine the outcome. It's the American way.

Write to your reps

[daeg]

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.

Re:Write to your reps

[CastrTroy]

You're right, they shouldn't be choosing technical formats. But what they should be doing is setting down laws which determine what non-technical characteristics the formats should have. 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. Other likely formats would be Adobe Acrobat, at least for read only files. I'd actually prefer this for stuff that you're not supposed to need to edit, as it ensures that the document doesn't have weird formatting or problems translating between different versions of the program. I'm not saying it should be ODF that governments release their documents in, but it should be something that's open to all citizens, not just users of MS Windows who like to spend $200 on an OS and $300 on a word processor.

Re:Write to your reps

[CastrTroy]

The problem is that the viewers for MS word documents don't work on operating systems like Linux. Also, it's up to MS as to whether or not they want to continue supporting the viewers. If MS decides to drop support for certain viewers, then people are not free to view the documents. There's many reasons to switch away from office formats. Having all your documents unreadable except by programs released by a single commercial entity is not good, because they can charge you whatever they want to read them. Proof of this is that they charge $300 for a word processor. Something that hasn't needed new features for most people for the last 10 years.

Re:Write to your reps

[mrchaotica]

Ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Governmental transparency is a prerequisite of freedom, and in a transparent government all documents, including "internal" ones, are potentially released. Therefore, all documents, including "internal" ones, need to be in open formats.

When you get right down to it, proprietary formats are un-American.

Re:I'm not from America

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Keep up the pressure. Eventually, it'll work

[mollog]

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.

Re:Where have we heard this one before?

[jollyreaper]

ODF isn't just a product being shilled by a single corporation and so there's no single company to bankrupt or buy out so victory can be declared. I think this is going to be more like guerrilla warfare than a conventional battle. Last I knew Sun and IBM had lots of stock in ODF and where also the main Microsoft resistance. But neither of those companies will be owned by Microsoft any time soon I think. Precisely my point. Even if Microsoft could buy one of them out, it is unlikely that they could buy all of them out. The concept of ODF is not just owned by one particular company but is a concept that has been adopted by them. The whole open source idea isn't a hippie commune idea the way detractors portray it to be: the idea is that anybody can use the ideas to make money just so long as they also give back to the community. It's about open source capitalism rather than unworkable idealistic communism, that being about as useless for the people as our current model of gangster capitalism.

In my opinion after reviewing the ISO papers on ODF it was an alright idea but poorly implemented. ODF is about as flawed as the Office specification, except that at least the states are already using Office. It will take roughly the same amount of money to the state to change either now or later, so why change what is already working? I'm no programmer so I'm only speaking from my understanding of things here. Even if ODF is a pile of shit, it is an open source pile of shit. None of the information about ODF is locked up under NDA's and nobody will sue you for reverse-engineering it. Microsoft's formats can be best described as closed source pile of shit. It's up to you to decide whether there's a distinction.

Fuck you. M$ is the bad guy here.

[twitter]

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.

Re:ODF is bullshit, use HTML

[KarmaMB84]

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.

Re:I'm not from America

[mrchaotica]

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. Why should ODF be forced on anyone?

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.)