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.

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: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.)