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Texas Legislature Considers Open Document Formats
An anonymous reader notes that a legislator in Texas has introduced a bill to require open document formats in all state government business. The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as "open." The story is covered by the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which is careful to be even-handed, giving Microsoft's spokesman equal time. A ZDNet blogger notes that the bill, introduced by a Democrat in a state whose politics is dominated by Republicans, faces chances that "...fall somewhere east of slim and west of none."
That's favoring one vendor over another.
Hmm... one vendor? Lets see who supports ODF.
AbiWord, Google Docs, IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice, NeoOffice, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, SftMaker Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, Zoho Office.
Of those, which is the one vendor that is being favored?
The specification is also open for others to use in either free or proprietary applications. Since the spec is open and there is open software to access the format, the documents created in it should always have the possibility of being accessed.
The ability to switch to open standards and open source software can also save local and federal governments millions of dollars.
If you haven't been paying attention, local and state governments are having a hard time financially. The economic downturn has reduced their income. I'd much rather my government use open source than raise my property taxes.
Dual Opteron < $600
whilst it's always good to see genuinely open formats in use, isn't there already an ISO standard document format? If there is, is it better to use the ISO standard or an open standard?
There are 2 ISO standard document formats (not including ASCII et al). Only one of them is open, and that is the format that this bill recommends, ODF. A "non-open standard" is sort of useless as a standard, and is more trouble than it is worth. The non-open ISO document format standard, MOO-XML, should be avoided.
Actually, it is favoring all vendors....over just one. With them picking one, non-proprietary format...then, any document application can be considered and used to read/write.
You said it yourself that MS can operate with ODF, so, it isn't like MS is being locked out here.
As long as they pick one format, that no one company 'owns', then that sounds to me like the way to go for our public documents. And, often times...as the govt. goes,, so does the general public. Much like hardware is becoming commodity, so are office applications (especially spreadsheets and word processors). They should be treated as such.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you live in Texas, get involved with your reps to see that this gets passed.
open documents means the government stays accessible to all. There is no reason not to want that in a republic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, it's favoring several vendors over one. Microsoft Office 2007 is the only program that reliably supports OOXML (and doesn't even support the ISO standard version). Several office suites reliably support ODF. PDF and XHTML are open formats, so those could be easily supported in addition to ODF, but once you add OOXML to that list, you add a Microsoft dependency.
Yes, and ODF is one of those ISO standards.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Don't forget MS Office 2007, SP2. They are supposed to be including support for it in the next service pack, that is due out very, very soon.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
XHTML has the additional advantage that it is text, and even if 50 years from now, nobody remembers how to render XHTML, they can get the content by reading the file in a text editor.
Also, don't forget that ODF is really little more than XML files zipped together in a single container. Try unzipping an ODF or ODS file—you will find several XML files for formatting, content, etc in there. Personally, I would prefer XHTML or XML files to PDF, simply because I can use vi to read them, if I had to.
$> man woman $> Segmentation fault. (Core dumped)
It has always been policy of many government bodies that at least two vendors of any government purchases be available for anything it buys. This is precisely why Intel was required to license x86 to AMD. (The U.S. Federal government has such requirements on such things and for Intel to be an appropriate supplier, compatible hardware had to be available from another supplier.) It make perfect sense for other government bodies to require similar measures of its vendors.
And if I understand correctly, there is already an ODF implementation for MS Office... or one in the works. In any case, since ODF is completely documented and the information is available to Microsoft programmers, there is nothing to stop them from competing within ODF. Of course the fear of embrace and extend is always a problem... (http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-134250/microsoft-hijacking-odf:the-freedom-to-embrace-and-extend)
No, Betamax was not superior to VHS. That's a myth.
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html
there is not a clear way to interpret the bill as excluding OOXML, the format MS rammed through as an ISO standard to compete with ODF.
The version of OOXML ratified as a standard doesn't even have one implementation I know of, let alone two on multiple platforms. Also the restrictions and royalties clause and IP/patent clauses would likely be an issue since MS's licensing of their format significantly restricts competitors.