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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.'"
will determine the outcome. It's the American way.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
If McCain wins and puts Ballmer in his cabinet, I'm sure all this will get straightened out.
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?
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?
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.
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
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they crack open a can of lobbyist whoopass and defeat your bill.
All kidding aside, what makes this fight different from the usual standards wars is that it's not between two companies trying to pitch different standards like Beta and VHS or BlueRay and HDDVD. In that kind of fight, whoever wins, the victor is still going to be a giant corporation. For the buying public it's truly a case of same shit, different pile. 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.
I predict that there will be many, many more defeats for ODF legislation, especially in the US. The question is whether there will be a victory or failure after all those defeats. Microsoft certainly has the dollars in this fight. There's the old quote from Vietnam, allegedly from when both sides were having a talk after the final peace was declared. A Col. Summers had a chat with General Giap. "You know you never defeated us in the field," Summers said. "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant," Giap replied.
No matter which way it goes, this war is going to be interesting to watch.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I really don't know if ODF is the best open office-document standard that we could ever develop (probably not) but it is certainly very good at doing its job so far. And I mean that it does both the "office-document" part and the "open" part. With regard to being a good "office-document" standard, it seems to support all the features a user would expect from a modern format. With regard to the "open" part, I recently discovered that you can extract all the data from an ODF spreadsheet using a few lines of python (unzipping and using mindom to parse it), which allows me to write scripts to extract data from spreadsheets, perform more sophisticated analysis (that no spreadsheet could handle), and dump the results back into the document. Needless to say, that would have been impossible using a proprietary, binary, non-human-readable format.
So, again, I wonder whether you can refer me to an objectively better format (that currently exists). Right now, in terms of office documents, I would argue that ODF is the best format, because it is open, it has all the required features, and it exists. Proprietary formats are fundamentally broken as long as it remains proprietary (it is, in fact, defective by design). And though there are other open formats (plaintext, latex, etc.) none of them can do what ODF can.
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.
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!
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.
An AC has the nerve to say OOXML is usable:
your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring
Show me working Mac and GNU/Linux editors. No, I don't mean the pathetic half done Word readers from Novel and M$, I mean full working office suits. It's not because OOXML is not really Open. The people who reverse engineered the previous generation of M$ DOC are more than capable of understanding and implementing this supposedly easier format, but it's not really easier and it's going to take time. This is because M$ is lying and there's no real difference between the new and old formats. It can and is being used as a binary container. The unzip trick no longer works.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
As for your link, it doesn't state that they can't unzip the DOCX .... blah blah blah
What it shows is that you can't get the text out, which is all the man wanted. How's that for Open?
Just stop while you are behind! Those "few minor obsolete" things are people's work that M$ should have translated for them not thrown away. But M$ can't do that because their formats are mutually contradictory. That's why much of their spec simply states do it like prints of the old versions without further explanation.
The OOXML propaganda is bigger and dirtier than Mnt. San Diego but will cost much more. You just can't wash this stuff and the truth will be out soon enough. Microsoft has wasted their time and money making yet another M$ only format and they should be punished by market rejection, not rewarded with state money.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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.
First of all, the use of "Extensible Markup Language" (XML) would lock us into today's misguided technology fad.
Second of all, "file format used by only one vendor" doesn't disqualify Microsoft's OO-XML. Remember, Novell will be supporting it.
Third of all, there is no exception for formats like MPEG!!! OMG, WTF!!!
Result: this effectively mandates that OO-XML replace PDF, with videos being embedded in OO-XML to acheive compliance.
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?
WMV support is built into Windows Media Player. The files are binary, if you look at them in a hex editor, they're generally plain numbers. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS MPEG.
Except not, unless you are a fucking moron. I'm sorry, but XML is not magic open interoperability pixie dust.
Nope. Nice try, though.
What actually happened was, MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it threatened their monopoly of Office applications, they wanted their own "standard" that they could control.
Or maybe they did it by accident. (Yeah, right.)
ODF was designed to be all things to all office suites. OOXML was designed to basically be an XML dump of MS Office documents, and from what I have heard (and seen), it's little more than a straight 1:1 conversion of the binary Office format into XML.
I suggest you go actually try to read the OOXML "open standard", and understand why it is neither. It has little to do with the 6000 pages, it's about how little is actually in that 6000 page document.
No. We complain that it is not a standard, and not suitable for implementation in anything but MS Office.
The problem is not that it supports all these various iterations of Office, and even older things (WordPerfect, etc). The problem is that they support these by creating some sort of tag or attribute or something which flags a section as being formatted for Word95 or somesuch, and then don't define how to do that. They basically say it's "beyond the scope of this document", and that you should emulate the behavior of the software in question.
And this is not the right way to design a standard format anyway. Suppose different versions of Word came with different default heading styles. You could just put <word95heading> tags around something -- or you could use a format that supports defining custom styles.
That's true, we can reverse-engineer MS formats, and have done so. Most open office suites (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc) support the binary Office formats quite well. But it's still reverse-engineered, and still not complete.
It would be entirely possible to make a document standard that is just as flexible, concise, and transparent as ODF, but support all of the crap that OOXML does. The difference is, it would be much more difficult for MS to support such a standard, and much easier for everyone else. As it is, OOXML is much easier for Microsoft to implement than for anyone else.
Consider that, in order to fully support OOXML, you have to actually go and buy all of those different versions of Office, plus random crap like WordPerfect, and reverse-engineer their behavior. So OOXML is not any better than the binary formats, because in reality, you may actually have to reverse-engineer MORE products in order to make it work.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Sure they will. In fact, they'll assume it.
Basically, they will either assume that they can't make it into a webpage (because it's a word document, and that's different somehow), or they'll assume that making a webpage is too hard for them.
However, if they have a nice WYSIWYG editor or CMS, they'll copy/paste from the word processor onto the webpage, and that will work. If they have FTP access, they can just upload the .doc file, and that might work for what they want -- remember that all their friends will probably be on IE+Office, which means it'll just open up in their browser.
It's not ideal, but trust me, real idiots will out-idiot your expectations. And the ones who are smart enough to realize they're being "conned" might actually find "HTML" in the file->save feature of their word processor.
Wow, I've just been conned out of... oh... $0! Zero dollars and zero cents.
Or would you care to clarify that?
I actually tried this, recently. I wrote a script to generate reports for some poor bastard who's stuck on FileMaker. It generates HTML and uses CSS and JS, and does almost everything he wants, except we can't control the page margins as well as he could in FileMaker. Yes, I know about the CSS margin properties, and browser support for them sucks, and even if you crank them down to zero, the browser likes to add margins of its own.
Point is, there are subtle and fundamentally different problems to be solved by each. Maybe someday they'll converge, but right now, word processing programs are designed to make it easy to physically lay something out on a piece of paper. HTML is designed to lay something out on a piece of software, often in a fluid way, with dynamic components.
Yes, it does. It's just the best we've got.
Should I even try to parse that?
I guess I should make gamers the game that is wanted by both Xbox/PC and Xbox/PC gamers?
Yeah, great. That's called a word processor.
That's great for the browsers, but sucks for the main point of word processors, which is: Printing! Yes! On paper!
Please explain to me how this is different or better than Google Office + ODF.
Oh, by the way: ODF and HTML+CSS are actually pretty close. Close enough that I've got less than 1k worth of Ruby code to convert between them, which includes all sorts of stuff that was specific to the last company I worked at.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
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
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
What is really bullshit is writing documents purely in terms of appearance.
http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.
What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.
When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.
I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.
The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.
This isn't a democrat vs. republican thing. It's a corrupt vs. other thing.
Your first paragraph leaves it sounding pretty clear the Microsoft API is the only solution to your troubles. Which highlights what having a standard (a real one not a subverted one which is the Microsoft solution) like ODF much earlier would have left the market for your very needs much more widely open with I'd expect benefits to the range of tools you could select.
No tools that work OK (less than 100%) with Microsoft Office components isn't a solution. You can hardly rely on full compatibility between successive versions of Office and the whole control being with Microsoft allows them to make changes and protect them with patents etc to eliminate competition and remove choice. Fact is their tool might be the best tool, it probably is, but shouldn't I have a choice not to have to use a tool from a company that I think is harmful? As it stands (I'm in the UK) I routinely find I can't even submit things to Government unless they are in Word format. Which in a worst future case driven by intellectual property encumbrances could mean I do have to own Word to be able to participate in the functioning of my nation.
And Java used to be (comparably to any other competition) cross platform until Microsoft in self interest stopped it being present as standard. Which is a demonstration of the kinds of action that are the reason why they (Government especially) should use an open format.
Turn it around and say if to support the likes of me Government either had to support all available formats for submissions or provide tools to allow me to create submissions in a format they accepted the cost would be huge. The principle here is leaving me choice. So then a simple solution becomes to use a format that is free.
I am amazed that this issue is so hard to understand. Government document should be in a readable format. Maybe not ODF, PDF would do as well, maybe better. But government documents being in Microsoft only formats is an obvious BAD THING. You should not have to purchase expensive or platform dependant software to view government documents. The continued trouble convincing people of this is final proof of the existance of EVIL, in my mind. Of course when the averaage word processor can output PDF files (a slam dunk onm the Mac), it will be less of a problem.