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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
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.
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.
I mean, the overall scope creep of the US Government is breathtaking, but do you really think we'll see a Department of Furniture Flinging? I don't think even Mirthless Murtha could support that, unless it were headquartered in his district, of course.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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
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.
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,
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
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.
You don't need to. You can keep going with Word for the time being for recieving attachments, but the agencies would be required to internally communicate and send out communications in a format that anyone could read.
The idea is not to kill microsoft. The idea is to push government agencies and the software suppliers that support them to use and create document formats that we have a hope of reading in 10 or 20 years (let alone 200). Can you imagine if the US constitution was written in Symantec Greatworks? Or if key data from 50 years in the past was written in GobeProductive on BeOS? If Microsoft adopts a truly open format that satisfies this need for transparency and readability, then that's great! But if not, we shouldn't be tying ourselves to them to fill a need they don't want to fill.
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
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!
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
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.