Slashdot Mirror
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."
And semi-dirty to dirty politicking if that doesn't convince them. Remember Massachusetts.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as "open."
That's favoring one vendor over another.
I totally agree with you there, and that is what I came here to say.
Microsoft Office, ODF, PDF and XHTML would be much better,
By suggesting MS Office, you miss the point of open formats. Suppose the government saves something, and doesn't open it again for 30 years. This happens a lot for archives. It will be tough to impossible to track down the specific version of MS Office so they can open it. They likely won't even know which version to track down. PDF or XHTML, on the other hand, are open formats, and are unlikely to die soon. 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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
George W Busch was the best President we ever done had, a good god fearing Christian man. God bless his soul
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.........
While PDF is open, it also allows heavy DRM. I have documentation for some software in PDF format that requires you to login to their servers every DAY just to read the manual.
While most PDFs are open, it is possible that a PDF itself can contain locks.
The bill was not specifically tailored for ODF, but currently ODF can pass, OOXML can not. Read the actual bill proposed before agreeing with the parent, you are agreeing with someone who didn't read it.
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.
Hm. It's the fault of the republicans I guess. Evil conservative types, wanting lock-ins. Definitely a republican problem. If we had more democrats in Texas, we would have more open standards! Just look at California, New York, Washington... look at all those open standards being used by those states! And democrat-liking Hollywood! Hollywood is a huge "open source," open document, non-DRM fan. What we need to do is legislate open formats, that way private companies can't be standards incompliant! That will fix the free market, private enterprise will flourish, etc.
[/sarcasm]
I'm not ever really come across evidence one way or another on this type issue.
If anything, I'd say that BOTH parties, in general, vote towards proprietary solutions, since they both are so heavily bought/rented by corporate interests.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
Indeed. I think it's important to realize here that the government isn't mandating OpenOffice usage, just ODF file formats. Nothing prevents Microsoft from integrating ODF support into Office in meaningful ways and remaining competitive with the other players.
They don't want that though. Without lock-in on the MS file formats, they can't keep their customers hog tied to MS Office. It's simple business. I wish politicians would just realize that until they put Microsoft in a position of equal footing, they will always be paying too much for software.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
They can keep them tied to Word (it's still the "safe" choice) but they lose their fiat pricing ability.
Anytime their prices get too steep, you roll out a "test" project with some ODF competitors and microsoft cuts your prices by 50%.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Don't let this thread turn into "Lets bash Texas!" please. I just see it coming, so I write this in hopes to get people thinking.
I recently moved from Washington State to Houston, TX. Things are different here, that's no joke. Some people honestly think of this state as a sovereign country sometimes (and they were for a time... unfortunately). But people are people anywhere you go, and for the most part just want to be left alone down here, free from a government bothering them. This is fairly ingrained into their constitution too; especially as it was re-written when the old southern boys managed to get control back of the government from the highly obtrusive Northern States back in the past-Civil Wars days. They wanted to make sure that the State government was mostly ineffective and powerless so they could be left alone.
What this boils down to, is a State Legislature that is inherently designed to be weak and making change difficult, especially at a state level. In every two year period they are allowed to meet for 140 days (barring a special session being called). Can you imagine your state legislature only meeting for 70 days a year?
That being said, I want to DISPEL any preconceived notions you have about Democrats and Republicans when you look at the Texas State legislature. To get anything done is this ridiculous state, they have to actually work together. Let me repeat that. They have to work together. Partisan lines blur! This political attitude can be seen when you look at our nimrod of an ex-president, all he wanted was to get both Repub. and Dems. sides to work together. Lo and Behold, the political arena in the nation's capital was drastically different (and in my opinion, he was well over his head). Getting back on topic, when you have only 140 days to work with in 2 years, and you have to pass a friggin budget among so many other things, this shows how little Texans trust their government. But these days, no one in their right mind would trust any government at any level.
All I'm saying is, don't generalize Democrat and Republican so heavily in a state legislature. I'm sure most states in this country are the same way, by which I mean, their political arena is drastically different than the National arena.
Posting with out proof reading since 2001.
And a glint in the sky to the northwest as the Ballmer shagadellic jet wings its way south, a fresh load of office chairs fixed to the hard points and Ride of the Valkyries blasting out of the built-in Big Zune sound system.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
That's favoring one vendor over another.
Ummm...ODF is a vendor? I think not. Microsoft is more than welcome to join the rest of the world and support ODF. How many vendors offer products that support ODF versus how many vendors support Microsoft's proprietary formats? You say Microsoft supports ODF. If I'm not mistaken that's through a third party add-on. But if they support ODF with their products, what's the problem? How is requiring ODF excluding them or favoring any other vendor? Is it because Microsoft would actually have to compete based on performance and price? Oh what a travesty that would be. Microsoft actually having to compete.
Quote from the article:
At a hearing on the bill then, Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee described it as anti-competitive and warned that it could be the equivalent of the state "picking Betamax when everyone else goes with VHS."
How can using a format that is free and unencumbered, that anyone can implement and is implemented in a number of different products "anti-competitive"?
Who is John Galt?
Wasn't Betamax the better of the two, and VHS only won because of porn? How does that analogy make any sense?
While PDF is open, it also allows heavy DRM.
But that is entirely at the discretion of the person who made the PDF, rather than at the whim of Adobe.
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?
Go right ahead, Ballmer. You can bribe those oily Europeans until they're shining your car, but I dare you to budge the courageous and independent public officials of Texas! They cannot be bought and will stand tall against oh my god who am I kidding here open document formats are doomed.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
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)
No, Republicans hate democrats and vote against them regardless of the merits of the bill.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And vice versa.
The Microsfot answer to ODF, though approved by an ex-standard body (turned MS plaything) is NOT an actual open standard:
- no usable specs
- no reference open implementation
- just one implementation (ms office), and maybe not even that
Which is why it is important to word open document laws in such a way as to filter it out. Requesting an open implementation and at least 2 full implementations from different vendors does the trick nicely, and probably will for a long time.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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)
Aside from my quibbles that multiple implementations or "uses XML" should not really be part of the definition of an open format, 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. So if the intent is to support ODF and disallow OOXML, I don't see that this will do it. (The bill as written requires documents to be an open document format, which the bill defines as one that is XML, open, interoperable across platforms and applications, published without restrictions or royalties, independently implemented by multiple SW providers, controlled by an open industry organization -- could arguably apply to both ODF and OOXML.)
And boy oh boy, is Aman Batheja, the author of the Star Telegram article, confused. First of all, he confuses "open document formats" and "open source." He writes, "State Rep. Marc Veasey is pushing lawmakers to require all state agencies to create and share their electronic documents in open-source formats." The bill has nothing to do with open source, or programming of any kind! The bill simply states that the file format for DOCUMENTS should be open, like ODF (and unlike, .doc/.ppt).
He goes on, in his confusion, "It could also mean that many state workers may see familiar Microsoft products such as Word and Excel replaced with lesser-known competitors on their work computers." Again, wrong. MS Office 2007 already has an ODF plugin, so you can read and save to ODF formats from within MS Office if you want to keep using MS Office.
I think the "Communist" angle is what they are referring to. If something doesn't cost money the first person to yell, "its communistic!" wins the Republican vote. But you are absolutely correct. They are BOTH bought and paid for.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
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.
So far the only difference I can really see is:
1. One group likes to cut taxes and spend
2. One group likes to raise taxes and spend
Frankly, I'd just like one that went for lower govt. intrusion, and smaller govt. If they did that, the need to tax would naturally go down.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Indeed, there is no business reason for Microsoft to shoot that bill down except ideology.
Of course there is business reason. .doc or .docx in the other hand, Microsoft is favored.
If the government uses ODF, there is a truly level playing field.
If the government uses