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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in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated."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.
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in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies , as technologies can easily become outdated.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....
Then as you said it would be insured to be readable later, of course with one additional caveat, the documents should be stored on media with open source file structures as well, else that insurance could be blocked by the inability to read the old file structure. Old documents might be required to be moved to newer storage devices as well but as time passes on the process could become increasing expensive. How many former modes of storage hardware are no longer in use or at least no longer in wide spread use? However if such a requirement is made, then look for Microsoft and perhaps others to fight it as hard as they can.
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
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080521092930864
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
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.