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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in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated."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Outdated?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 Open standards means that even if it does become outdated there can still be an implementation no matter what. It's the best insurance against having outdated formats.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Really, the use of fear of z standard becoming outdated is just a justification for inaction.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 What can you say when technology will always improve, standards will always become outdated. Saying you shouldn't adopt a standard because it will become outdated is precisely akin to saying you shouldn't drive a car because it will eventually run out of gas.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.
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....
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.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080521092930864
Microsoft has already said they will only implement ODF 1.1 when at the same time all competitors will produce ODF 1.2 documents.
Thus Microsoft will not be able to read many ODF dokuments produced because of imcompatibilities.
Its Microsoft making a imcompatible version of Java all over again to stop Java from being adopted. Now they are doing it to stop ODF from being adopted.
Just saying it like it are.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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
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.