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New York and Minnesota Publish Open Document Studies
Multiple readers have written to point out that New York and Minnesota have reached the end of their lengthy deliberations on open document formats. Both reports agree that an open format would be beneficial, but neither were willing to endorse a particular choice. New York's executive summary notes, "The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated." Minnesota's report claims, "The marketplace is still in flux, and it is not certain that a single standard will emerge." In related news, yesterday's announcement from Microsoft that they would provide support for ODF in a future update to Office 2007 has EU antitrust investigators optimistic, but cautious. Microsoft has said that the ISO process was what prevented OOXML from receiving support in the same time frame.
Outdated? Really? Did they even bother to ask anyone that knows anything about opensource? Open standards means that even if it does become outdated there can still be an implementation no matter what. It's the best insurance against having outdated formats. I guess I'm off to write a few paper letters.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Yeah I'm sure it was the ISO process that prevented it from getting support, not the shoddy standard that is OOXML.
they should give a law saying that the document formats chosen by public entities should have Open Standards.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Really, the use of fear of z standard becoming outdated is just a justification for inaction. There is no answer to that in any sort of technical field. What can you say when technology will always improve, standards will always become outdated. Saying you shouldn't adopt a standard because it will become outdated is precisely akin to saying you shouldn't drive a car because it will eventually run out of gas. It's just a mask to allow them to justify to the public why they won't move forward.
If fear of a standard becoming obsolete is a reason for not adopting it, I'm curious as to how they justify any of their IT budget?
Legislation is difficult to change once passed. Competing interests (or lack of interests) and simple inertia mean that whatever gets written into law stays there for a while. It makes sense for the law to say that the standards should be open, that they should be chosen by a particular state agency, or that they should be reviewed every X years. But writing the choice of standards into law is very inflexible. There is a reason why we have building codes and highway codes. This doesn't say that administrative rulemaking is less subject to lobbying and corruption, or that it is more transparent. But on these counts it is no worse than primary legislation.
Do not believe Microsoft for a second. This is smoke and mirrors to distract us from their intent to destroy ODF and force MSOOXML on all of us. Like the continued beta status of stand-alone readers for docx (since standalone readers can easily be made to print to PDF and thus imported into ODF), Microsoft is ready to employ every dirty trick in the book to enforce their file-format-based Office suite monopoly. Do not believe them for a second.
Both reports agree that an open format would be beneficial, but neither were willing to endorse a particular choice.
The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies , as technologies can easily become outdated.
Looks like Microsoft has effectively brainwashed these clueless legislators.
Formats and technologies are completely different things. ODF is an Open Format. Open Office is a technological implementation of this format. Microsoft has recently merely proclaimed that they will also be implementing ODF in the current version of Office.
OOXML claims to be an open ISO certified format. But as on date, there is no technological, compliant iomplementation... in fact, the specification is not yet documented, as required by ISO processes.
Why can't they simply legislate on ODF, and then go about choosing the ideal technological implementation of the same?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Who's to say the won't do a bad job at implementing ODF, and do all they can to make ODF look like the bad guy?
Microsoft has said that the ISO process was what prevented OOXML from receiving support in the same time frame.
Seems to me that they knew full well that ODF is a working standard that they could easily support (since they're going to support it). If they truly thought OOXML was so great, they could have spent the development time on OOXML instead, but they realize that it's not implementable.
Microsoft voluntarily chose to waste the time in the ISO process, to the detriment of the product, the shareholders, the customers, and the standards process.
For the record, I don't see how the ISO process slowed product development. It's not like the coders are the same people who are stuffing the ISO voting committees, so they do have time to code. And Companies routinely implement pre-final standards, with an update to implement the final version.
Take an XML format designed to represent a wordprocessed document. How exactly is that going to go out of date? Is there any good reason to believe that 100 years from now, someone won't be able read/parse the document or virtualize OO.org? Seems to me that Microsoft's Office formats only went out of date because they were deliberately changed from version to version. So while I can understand not specifying a single format, I don't understand the stated rationale.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
As in functionally outdated. What happens when active documents become the norm? (One could argue that with AJAX and magical PDF forms, they already are.) What happens when wikis are the expected way to receive complex information with cross-references? Another chance for content handling software houses to get their fingers sticky? In court, sometimes you don't appeal because you know you'll lose, and sometimes you don't appeal because you know winning would be worse than losing.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Ok, I just read some of the comments, and it seems like I am not the only one who found that comment strange at best. How do the brains of the legislators work? Do they not follow the same logic patterns as others?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080521092930864
Microsoft is the one who screwed over OOXML. The ISO process is supposed to be the same for everybody. It's called a "level playing field". Get used to it.
C|N>K
Perhaps the legislation could simply require that publicly supported, open document formats be considered for use by the archives of the pertinent state.
And they say you can't legislate common sense!
Invenio via vel creo
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
yaya i completely agree with you
The report from NY has a more thorough treatment of the issues than the report from MN. It makes a strong case for openness as a policy, not a technical choice; shows how it is just one of many such choices, not all of which can be equally satisfied in every situation; and then very ably lays out a recommendation for making sure that openness gets pushed down into the state agencies.
The report from MN is focused on relating the wide variety of opinion that exists in this area, and not on making a specific recommendation (other than the commonsense one that the market is in flux and that the legislature shouldn't be picking market winners and losers.) The report gave me a much better understanding of just how confusing it can be when people try to talk about this issue. Like many complex topics, one needs to almost insist on agreements about terminology and scope even before engaging in the real discussion.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Question: How does a format really get out of date
There are several ways in which a format can become outdated. Below I will list some. You will notice that from a strictly technical point-of-view they aren't even close to being show stoppers (ie. you could work around them probably in several way). However, should that outdated format be mandated for use by a law then the technical challenges and financial burdens may become serious hindrances in the least and actual show stoppers in the worst case. Changing a law will always be more difficult than changing just a standard.
An ad hoc list of how a format can become outdated (pardon the poor examples):
1) An underlaying technology or medium becomes outdated. Example: 8-, 16-, and 32-bit integers. Another example: pre-web/xml EDI-formats.
2) A superior (= more fit) competing technology is developed. Example: SGML vs XML.
3) The intended use case of the format becomes outdated and/or irrelevant, which may happen due multitude of technical and non-technical reasons (the world does not stand still). Example: an early text-processing format that does not support hyperlinks or embedded pictures. Data formats for various deprecated ports.
Your particular question was about "an XML format designed to represent a wordprocessed document. How exactly is that going to go out of date?" Let's first note that in practical terms this is a format specifically designed for longevity. However, it fairly easy to imagine that a word processing format designed today does not allow for all important future use cases. Information about intention might be very important in mere twenty years, as AI and cognitive modeling applications might require it. The format might lack important security features that become necessary way you interface with data via a brain implant.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
This should be a POLICY issue not a LEGISLATIVE one. They should make it policy only to use open formats. And worry about the format becoming outdated is hogwash. If you want to open a Microsoft Word document written 20 years ago, simply crank up Word 2007 and open it. Open Office will open current versions (at least up to 2003) of MS's formats as well. I do not know how far they go back, but I'm sure future editions will at least open stuff from today.
.csv files but extended to include text, spreadsheet, database, web graphics, desktop publishing, and even non-editable files (.pdf).
.pdf competitors, but there's simply too many different versions right now. .pdf, .xps, .mdi, etc.
I look forward to an open, non-proprietary standard for all data types. In the same vein as Text files and
I regularly use Microsoft's
In the end, this will all be determined by the 'office' wars. Which may depend on the 'OS' Wars. I.e. if Linux or Mac leapfrogs and becomes the majority desktop platform, whatever office suite works best on that platform will probably be the one whose format becomes most-used.
Bottom line: Who cares? There's always conversion utilities.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
A friend of mine used to go to this bar in his hometown. There was a sign on the mirror saying: Free Beer Tomorrow
... Tomorrow. Open Standards ... Tomorrow.
...tomorrow.
Of course there was never any free beer, and whenever he asked the bartender where the free beer was, he would just point to the sign behind him.
MS proclaims: Interoperability
And if you believe any of that, there this bar where there's going to be free beer
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
For a text based format one thing that can get out of date is charset, but then that is relatively easily converted and we also have Unicode now which should be good enough for a while to come.
Then there is of course the whole markup, that can easily get lost or forgotten in a 100 years. You still might be able to make some sense of the document, but getting an exact rendering of the document might become tricky, unless you also dig out a copy of OpenOffice and have an emulator that can run it.
In practical terms I think there are mainly two dangers of ODF. First there is the Internet and ePaper, both of which will sooner or later make paper obsolete. Why print something, when you can just email it around? And why print it, when the screen you are having already reads as easy as paper? So you might simply end up using other formats then ODF far more often and no longer end up having a copy of OpenOffice around in a few years. The second and bigger danger I think are however subtle improvements in the format. When ODF gets expanded and improved they might try to get backward compatibility going, but you likely never reach 100%. So you will have tiny little differences and when ODF1.1 is no longer used, since everybody is using ODF5.0, software might no longer support ODF1.1 properly either. It might still render, but the output might be wrong in the details. This would be basically what we have today already, you won't have much of a problem getting an old Word document to open, but you will have a very big issue if you want to get the exact rendering that the Word version it was created with produced.
The situation is far more simple than these gutless (and most likely politically motivated) legislators want people to believe.
The most important concept any government (or business really) must adhere to is a SINGLE document format that;
a) meets their requirements
b) the code is accessible to THEM
For most everybody, the requirements have been met by the ODF, and the code is accessible. The reason that the code must be accessible is to ensure that they will have continued access to their documents independent of the existence of any endorsing company. Accessible code also allows a particular entity to customize the code to meet their requirements, should that ever be necessary... of course that would be unlikely, but one never knows.
Regardless, organizations want a format that they will be able to commit to for the rest of their earthly existence (if that were feasible) so that they would not need to go back and convert 10 billion documents in the future. The conversion of documents is a big deal when it comes to the amount of planning, time, and money involved in making the conversion process move along smoothly -- and understandably nobody ever wants to go through the process if it can be avoided. Naturally, the more important the document, the more concerned people become with its handling; both now and in the foreseeable future.
As a legislator, the questions I would need to ask would be the ones mentioned above. Then I would be concerned with the longevity of the target format, and the likelihood that there would continue to be applications that would support it.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
OK, office formats obviously must be open. Where possible, there should be more than one vendor supplying compliant software, and that format should be documented so we can access our documents in the future.
But what about other kinds of information?
In some cases there are good and open formats. For example, for geographic information, we can use Geography Markup Language. It doesn't make sense to use GML as a working format, but as an archival format it makes a lot of sense. Public GIS data should be convertible to, and made available in GML.
Now, what about relational databases? Surely there is much important public information in relational systems, from Access through Oracle, and surely that information should be archivable in an open format. Furthermore, it makes even less sense than in GIS to use the same format for archiving as it does for operational use.
Does anybody know of an open standard for relational data? Would it make more sense to specify an XML schema for each relational schema, or to have a generic XML schema for relational data?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That hard (not to say impossible) for a *3rd party* to implement. BUT implementing it in MS-Office is easily done because, you know, the functionality is already here in the backward-compatibility code that hangs around somewhere in the big spaghetti mess. (In fact the criticism was that Microsoft just dumped their innerworking into a format instead of engineering an format which was actually build for exchange - whereas ODF has undergone quite a few modification since its early SXW days, in which the other player of OASIS had the possibility to take part).
The problem isn't there. The problem is in the small remaining part that actually looks like standard and was a little bit doctored by the ISO to really function as one. (Even if the whole process was fast tracked)
They end up with an ISO standard which is very similar but not exactly like what they have currently. This will force them to dig through all the big chunks of legacy code to fix the ISO improvements, but without breaking the backward compatibility (damaging the rest of the 6000+ bulk).
That's why they blame ISO for the delayed introduction of OOXML : "Oh,noes ! They've edited it ! Even if the ECMA rubber stamped it without question !! How dare they ??? Didn't we bribe them enough ?!? Now we won't be able to sell the software we already have as ISO OOXML compliant ! We'll have to edit it first !!".
That's also ODF makes sense for them : they "just" need it to implement it from scratch. It's non-trivial, but they don't have legacy code (worth 6000-pages) to wrestle, just a brand new implementation.
(As a side note: that's not only valid for OOXML. ODF was intensively reworked by the OASIS committee before being submitted as an ISO standart. And thus, OpenOffice had to implement it as a _separate_ input/output format instead of just relying on its classic SWX reader. The legacy staroffice xml format are still available as an alternate saving format).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The NY report called on the new committee to consider costs, so it's worth a mention. The general view is that switching to a new platform and office suite entails training costs, but they're paid back over about five years. On the other hand, government agencies are likely to license open source systems and pay for support, instead of using free-as-in-beer versions. But once again, Microsoft is forcing people to switch to new versions of their software, which leads to training costs.