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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?
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 $0.02 worth on this dark day.
Ummmm, you obviously are over simplifying the issue. Mass needs to make these documents available to more than one person, potentially sending them out to outside people and organizations. Does this mean that M$ 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).
> 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.
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.