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:deep pockets

[jollyreaper]

deep pockets

will determine the outcome. It's the American way. Very true. As Confucius say, "Man with hand in pocket feels cocky all day."

Oh shit, there goes my karma.

Re:Write to your reps

[Timesprout]

If you bothered to RTFA you would have noticed that the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats. Secondly both sides were outputting unhealthy amounts of FUD with IBM FUD in particular identified as being very negative after IBM were apparently deliberately disingenuous about the situation with ODF in Massachusetts. Then there will always be the cost issue with matters like this which decision makers will generally tend to shun away from because they want to spend the budget on programs more likely to get them elected next time round.

Where have we heard this one before?

[jollyreaper]

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.

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:Not practical

[cgenman]

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.

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.)