Slashdot Mirror
Open Standards Initiative Fails in Massachusetts
walterbyrd writes "Massachusetts has decided to use Microsoft's Open-XML standard. This decison: 'stands in sharp contrast to the positions taken by predecessor CIOs Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez, backed by then governor (and now-presidential hopeful) Mitt Romney. Both Quinn and Gutierrez insisted on including only "open standards" in the ETRM, and withstood significant pressure from Microsoft to give ground and accept OOXML...'"
...that undoubtedly business and politics are tangled together in a bed of money.
Does this really come as a surprise that a change in regime would change the direction of a major initiative? I think we've seen this many times before, not the least of which being the Microsoft antitrust trial. When the old boss moves out, the new boss moves in, waves his hands, and changes the playing field yet again.
*sigh*
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
is no substitute for actually getting up off your fat ass and voting and making your voice heard to the state governments?
Well, I'm sure the decision will be welcomed by the sponsors. The problem is, the original decision has already sparked somewhat of an avalanche and even the "after the facts", "standard that isn't" OOXML will not halt it. Given the kind of tricks MS had to pull out of its hat to make this reversal happen there is scope for some good digging by the assorted press.
Unless they want to keep their advertising..
if you read TFA it says that they are including both ODF and Open XML as acceptable document formats.
So while the original intention to only include really open formats is regrettably given up (curiously by an interim CIO, why does he decide that if he is only a temporary hire?), it is not like ODF got dumped for the Microsoft format.
All I can hope for is that in {enter date of choice here} years time that all the docs in MA that were arcdhived in OOXML format become unreadable and totally useless as OOXML V25 (or whatver) drops support for V1.
Meanwhile those that were archived with other open (as well as properly documented) formats are still available to the masses.
Any organisation going for OOXML are just asking to get stuffed in the future. Microsoft could enforce DRM and other nasties on the users and then start charging for every access to the document even though the content might be your copyright, they hold the strings over the format.
Just like the Monks in the Middle Ages did paper books. Knowelege is POWER. Control of the access to the Knowelege is ABSOLUTE POWER
Just my warped $0.02 worth on this dark day.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
I'd like to hear from Microsoft apologists why they think this is an ethical and acceptable way to do business.
... haha).
I'm no MS apologist, but some might argue that this is "ethical" because the populace is too weak, uneducated, and disorganized to stand up and cry foul. A population that lacks the will to assert its rights neither deserves nor receives them. The masses, through their own ignorance, get what peanuts they deserve. And a company, through its successful organization and exertion of will over the public offices, gets what it deserves, too.
I'm sure someone can phrase that much better. I don't buy into this argument at all, but I'm sure someone out there will argue it (there's always one
This must be the single funniest thing ever posted on /. What a wonderful utopia it evokes!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
You also didn't realize that Activation isn't going to work forever when you go to install. Don't worry, it's early in the morning.
Okay, but how about you open up this document I have here that was saved with SpeedScript on my C64 17 years ago?
Who's to say that Windows in 20 years will run Office 97, if it still exists?
Are you telling me that we're also supposed to "archive" all the old computer systems that rely on those closed document formats, too? What happens when those documents aren't just on CD's, but on sophisticated document imaging systems? Should we archive the entire data center, including hardware, every six years?
Dumbass.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ummmm, you obviously are over simplifying the issue. Mass needs to make these documents available to more than one person, potentially sending them out to outside people and organizations. Does this mean that M$ will be giving them open licenses so they can send the appropriate version of Office out along with the documents?
The point of using standards is so that whatever software is being used in 10-20 years should still be able to read the documents from today. Yes standards will evolve, but the really good ones still find (and were designed originally) a way to maintain compatibility.
It is kind of pathetic that you feel its acceptable to keep old copies of all that software? Please tell me you are also keeping machines/windows versions around that will still run the software. I would chuckle when you found out that Vista no longer runs Office 3.0 that you have so carefully kept (but not windows 95).
You make very good points about how the adoption of ODF might take place, the problem is your model assumes MS's position and influence remains static during all those steps, which it won't. We've seen that MS will lobby, lie, bribe, etc to get what it wants. At every step of your theoretical adoption chain MS will find ways to disrupt it further. Like you said, it's often about price for companies, but I don't doubt that if it came down to it MS would cannibalize some of its Office profits to keep its monopoly in Office. After all, if everyone you do business with can only handle MS formats, then that's what your business is forced to use. MS will probably do something like subsidize those businesses for whom the cost of switching to OO is actually viable.
I guess I'm being fatalist, but I think my point is that the "wait and see, adoption will come gradually on its own" approach is going to need much more support from the community if we're actually going to affect any change on a large scale.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Forcing out two capable employees that stood in Microsoft's way is clear subversion of supposedly representative government.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Corporate/government copies of Office don't go through activation. Nice try though.
What precisely about the old versions of HTML make data stored on those formats inaccessable?
There's a considerable difference between being cool or being "the lastest and greatest" and being able to recover your data or convert it into new formats. Open standards are about being able to losslessly migrate your data from one platform to the next, not about whether or not a particular document standard supports the flavor of the month.
Given a document, and a description of the document format, you should be able to retrieve all information stored in that document without mangling the output in the process.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
hello? we're talking about standards here. choice is the wrong things. choice is bad. let me explain why.
what happens if a large company suggests that we don't just measure capacitance in farrad but also in #madeUpNameOfNewUnit? what's the point? people would have to learn, adopt and support it, all of which costs money and muddies the issue.
odf is already the standard for document exchange. we don't need and shouldn't have a second one.
if you combine this with the fact that you are not free to support and implement microsoft's ooxml standard, the whole thing just becomes ridiculous. what would the electrics company be told if they went before a standards committee saying "yes, the #madeUpNameOfNewUnit is just as good as the farrad, and if people pay us so much money they will be allowed to use it. conversion to the farrad is however never going to work 100%"? they'd be laughed out and with good reason.
this whole debate is utterly pointless and just shows how corrupt the system it. it is really inexcusable.
Considering that the basic sequence here was....
1) The technical expert in Mass makes a technical desicsion based on business requirements.
2) Microsoft complains because it's not in their interests.
3) Politicians start to meddle on Microsoft's behalf
4) The original technical expert is fired by the politicians.
5) Microsoft gets his way.
What could possibly NOT be corrupt about that?
Mass. is a BIG customer with certain business requirements. The vendor (Microsoft) should be bending over backwards to do what the customer wants, not abusing the political process to avoid doing what the customer wants. Microsoft does this to avoid weakening it's monopoly position which should have been eliminated by the Sherman Act anyways.
Microsoft should have no problem satisfying the actual business requirements of it's big customer.
In the end, all that really matters are the business requirements and Microsoft refuses to satisfy them. In a genuine free market, Microsoft should have been shown the door. Period.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's why the majority of people in the US still travel by rail and use AT&T phone service, right?
1. The Pennsylvania Railroad (or insert your favorite) is a very large, very well known company. They will be around for a very long time to support any of their formats (passenger and freight service).
2. They create a lot of jobs
3. Most government offices travel by rail (or they did), so rail travel is the best format to use since the government is already integrated with their products.
That would still probably hold true if the government didn't look at the monopolistic like power of the railroads after WWII and encourage alternative travel methods by building highways and airports to encourage growth and even more jobs.
The same could be argued for phone service from AT&T at one time everybody had them, so using the same logic, we should all still have them, since we were already integrated with their products and system. Again, the government stepped in and recognized that a monopoly wasn't the best solution for growth and now there are even more jobs and choices.
In Massachusetts, it was the monopoly that stepped in and realized that choice was not in the best interest for its own growth and changed the political process.
When mice go to vote for their government, and their choices are white cats, black cats, and the occational rogue spotted cat, they quickly find that things suck no matter who they vote for.
toleraen said: I'll make sure to go home and destroy my old copies of Office 4.0, Office 97, and Office 2000.
How many people are using corporate gov't copies of office at home? Good luck reading public archived gov't documents.
I think you are intentionally missing the point now...
Corporate/government copies of Office don't go through activation.
;-)
So you mean that, when a government agency sends me a doc and I can't read it on my machine, they'll happily send me a copy of an appropriate release MS Office and I'll be automatically licensed to install and run it on my machine?
Somehow, I don't quite believe this.
(Note that I didn't say what sort of machine(s) I have at home, because this shouldn't matter for government docs. And I can't tell you what I'll have 10 years from now, when I receive that important government document and it comes up gibberish on my screen.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Given a document, and a description of the document format, you should be able to retrieve all information stored in that document ...
/. over the fact that Microsoft has applied for patents for some of their XML encodings. One of the implications of such patents is that anyone attempting to decode their contents may find themselves in violation of MS's patents. In the US, such decoding can be a crime that can get you a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison.
Note that we've had discussions here in
Part of the discussions have commented that this mostly seems to cover the encoding of embedded images in MS XML docs. But you learn something interesting if you try digging around in various government online archives. In many, if not most cases, old docs are "digitizes" and put online by scanning them in and putting the image online. Look at the Library of Congress archives, for example, and you'll see a lot of this. There's a lot of good historic stuff there, but if your software won't display an image, you can't read the document's contents, only the meta-data that someone typed in during the scanning.
So even if you're a good enough programmer to decode government documents in any proprietary format, you may find yourself spending a lot of time decoding an old image format and extracting the text, and your reward may be a huge fine and a stretch in a federal pen if you do it with anything but licensed Microsoft software.
Yeah, you can challenge it in court. Then, ten or more years and a few million dollars later, you might lose anyway. Do you want to be the test case?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
> 2. Microsoft creates a lot of jobs.
That is true. Anti-virus companies, marketing people, help desk, lots of system admins. But on the other hand, you can also create a lot of jobs by simply throwing rocks at windows and breaking them. Manufacturing new windows, transporting it and installing it will create a lot of jobs. Yet people seem to think that breaking windows is not a good thing. The reason for this is, that if the people wouldn't have to repair the broken windows, they could do some other work, that might help the society more.
It is the same with Microsoft products. Sure it will generate a lot of jobs, but the same job could be done with less manpower by using the free alternatives. These resources could then be used for something else.
In other words: We could use the money now spent on marketing by the Microsoft, into making better software.
> 3. Most government offices use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows for word processing, so Microsoft is the best format to use since the
> government is already integrated with their products.
In other words: They are locked in to Microsoft products. And they can keep it that way. Or suffer now and be free in the future.
i'm no microsoft apologist, but i am an observer of things around me. as such, this one is easy as eating a piece of grandma's pie...
it is "ethical" because it makes politicians rich and feel powerful.
that is how the average american politician (really, any politician, anywhere) thinks. stroke the ego and line the pockets and its "all gewd and morawl and ethikel and stuff."
power corrupts.
absolute power corrupts absolutely.
has any rule of human nature been more vetted out than these two?
The important thing is that the information is freely available to the public.
This is clearly not important to the government of Massachusetts, nor to most other US states.
This could be an interesting precedent. The important point is that there are government documents that citizens are legally required to understand and obey. In the past, the most "encoding" of such documents was in microfilm, which is just an image that can be viewed or printed with cheap, commodity hardware. Government agencies would generally do this for you, often without even asking.
But now we're seeing a lot of government agencies move online, with extra charges if you want readable hard copy. For example, there are a number of states that charge less for things like licenses if you renew online. But this decision takes this change a step farther: It holds the prospect that, to read the document that you are legally required to read and obey, you must pay a specific corporation (Microsoft) for the software to read it. Alternatively, you will have to pay the surcharge for hard copy, which already an established practice. Also, without licensed Microsoft software, you may not be able to reply electronically, and again you'll have to pay a surcharge to someone who has such software. The safest would be to take time off from work and visit the government agency to handle whatever is in the document.
It's basically a surcharge on poor people, of course. To us middle-class and geek types, it's mostly an annoyance, that we have to keep a Windows box on hand and up to date, to prove that we have the legal right to read any OOXML doc that the government tosses our way.
What I think would be interesting would be not to challenge the use of such proprietary encodings, but rather to ask the courts to make the government refund to us the price of the machine and software we must buy to read such documents.
Remember that in the US, under current law, unauthorized decoding of protected (via patent or copyright) documents is a $500,000 fine and five years in a federal prison. And Microsoft's XML encodings are being patented. If it were legal for me to decode and read any document that anyone sent me, I wouldn't be worried. Most proprietary formats get cracked soon after they're released. But with the law imposing such a draconian punishment for merely attempting to read a document that a government agency sends me, I'd feel a lot better if they were required to protect me from prosecution for decoding and reading such documents. Probably the cheapest way would be to require that they pay for my Windows box.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
What you were providing was a bad example that is completely missing the point. Yes, you can back-up software. Wow, that's amazingly insightful of you to point out, but it is irrelevent to the reasons of having open formats.
What happeneds when the state gov't double in size over the next 50 years? You have n/2 licenses for the backed up software. How do you propose giving access to those documents for everyone? What happens when the citizens no longer can read the published documents? Are you saying the citizens should download the backed-up software also?
This isn't even a comprehensive list of reasons why open formats are desired, but it contains enought examples to reveal your ignorance of the real issues.