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New York and Minnesota Publish Open Document Studies

Posted by Soulskill on from the jury-is-in-but-still-out dept.

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in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated."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.

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Outdated laws are a problem by l2718 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Clueless legislators... by joelstobart · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think what the legislators were saying was

    • We want open-standards
    • Every 2/4/6/8 years we'll meet and decide what those standards are to be reviewed by a technical team.

    Other good news....

    • iso OOXML is not going to be implemented by Microsoft until 2010! So no rational government can use that.
    • (oasis) odf 1.1 will be supported by microsoft office 2007 in early 2009
    • there are numerous other ODF choices.
    • OOo3/Write/Google Docs are going to give office a run for its money

    its a good year for document freedom.
    - Joel