The Massachusetts Office Party

Quattro Vezina writes "The Inquirer reports that the state of Massachusetts has performed a modern-day Boston Tea Party, by dumping Microsoft Office in the proverbial ocean. According to the article, 'every state document must be in PDF or using Open Office formats' starting in 2007." Forbes has the story as well. More from the article: "The switch to open formats such as these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to Massachusetts - something that was not possible using closed formats. The proposal, which is open for comment until the end of next week before it takes effect, would represent a big boost for open source software such as Open Office, which is created by volunteer programmers and made available free of charge."

In the grand tradition...

[Altima(BoB) (602987)]

...Hopefully they did it all while wearing festive penguin suits, or for the politically correct Bostonians, Spheniscidae American suits.

So, which will MS Office support?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add? They could relatively easily add PDF output as an export-only option, similar to the OpenOffice implementation, and treat it like printing. This would potentially have the effect of reducing the number of people using .doc as an interchange format, reducing lock in. The other alternative, supporting OpenOffice formats seems much less likely - if MS Office could read and write these formats it would be a lot easier for people to migrate away from it.

[1] Yes, I know it can with third party products, some of which are Free.

Re:So, which will MS Office support?

[Coryoth (254751)]

Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add?

Both? PDF is making steady inroads as an interchange format and from what I understand of Avalon it should make generating PDF on Vista pretty much as easy as on OS X. It would make sense to support it.

As for OpenOffice.org - they're using the OASIS format and Microsoft is a sponsor [oasis-open.org] of that so you'd think they'd get around to it eventually. I think Microsoft is realising that locking up Office document formats isn't going to work for much longer (see their various efforts to create more "open" XML based formats for MS Office) and are trying to work out what to do instead.

Jedidiah.

Neither

[doublem (118724)]

MS will offer the state some discounts on Microsoft Office. If they're desperate they'll push RTF as a document format instead.

As we've seen far too many times in the past, government bodies tend to use moves like this as a way to force a better deal out of the existing vendor.

This isn't about using Open Source to build a better solution. It's about leveraging Open Source to get a better deal on the existing solution

Re:So, which will MS Office support?

[Rude Turnip (49495)]

No, it doesn't. That is a built-in feature of OS X. Any program with a print option in OS X has a "Save as PDF" button.

Groklaw coverage

[stevey (64018)]

This was also covered on groklaw [groklaw.net], yesterday.

I know how they feel

[bgfay (5362)]

For years I used WordPerfect and liked it a whole lot. However, I didn't like the price of it, the upgrades (I know, I didn't HAVE to upgrade), and the fact that the Linux version sucked while the Mac version was discontinued. So I switched to OpenOffice.

Only when 2.0 comes out will I have easy access to all those WP documents.

I use OpenOffice for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I think I have a good chance of being able to open my documents for a long time.

That said, I think that this is all a PR thing to get MS to lower their price. I don't believe that a government bureaucracy will make this step for real. Next thing you'll tell me that they've decided to run Linux.

There needs to be a new name for this sort of thing where groups say "I'm switching!" in order to get the real price from MS. Let's call it the Boy Who Cried Linux or BWCL for short.

AéîLsJ?

[loggia (309962)]

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AéîLsJ?

Funny, but....

[Noksagt (69097)]

This is amusing.

However, less-astute readers should remember that the OO.o formats are well-documented & any other program can easily write an implementation to spec.

They are also XML files, which can be understandable in plaintext. This means many people don't even have to bother looking at the spec to extract useful information.

So why the gobblygook? Look at that "PK" at the beginning of the string. That indicates that it is zipped. Rename the .sxw extension to .zip & throw it into whatever unzipper you wish to.

Re:AéîLsJ?

[Demerara (256642)]

from the comment:

Ê KáÓÝ "%abIpOEYÙ%zè-"z ða*×ÇØ~)Ä"E,...E,? eûK tj--(TM)¼x2YK©~z ÃbÉ3R ý^£è "ÅÃdíYMC9CMY ÑsO¼

Good point, well made.

But consider %oidjowKE%OokssoSeok @o~oOKEN#(SIojNS.

good idea not just because it goes "open"

[yagu (721525)]

In the posts here I see a lot of back-and-forth with some holding fast to the notion staying with MS Office is the prudent thing to do for various reasons including:

• MS Office can produce PDF docs
• MS Office docs can be viewed and printed using the free Microsoft Viewer software
• Probably the simplest solution is to Save As... RTF.

(bullets borrowed from Donny Smith(567043))

From personal experience I think the most important factor is getting out of MS' talons and whimsical changes to their own formats. I've posted about this before.

I've actually been in business meetings which couldn't not get started on time because attendees had to sort out getting copies of the agenda or memos which they'd actually received beforehand but were in formats incompatible with their version of MS Office! This, ostensibly at one company using tools to help conduct business. Were this a one-time anecdote would be one thing, but I encountered this scenario many times. (There are grooves in my eye-sockets from so many eyerolls waiting for business to proceed.)

OpenOffice may not offer the perfect solution, but any move away from unpredictable and untouchable formats brings hope to eventually working with technology that improves our productivity. (I shudder to mention the car analogy, but it's so fun: can you imagine a car industry with such an approach (or maybe it's the highway infrastructure)? Every year or so you find out some cars can't be driven on the highways because of some change it their design, blah, blah, blah.)

Re:Guaranteed Availability in the Future?

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

I hardly see how Open Office and PDF formats "guarantee" citizens will be able to view electronic documents in the future any more so than MS Office formats.

Open Office formats are zipped XML. All you need to get at the data in them is an unzip program and a text reader. It's a good way to "guarantee" that anyone can view them in the future.

Re:Guaranteed Availability in the Future?

[Ihlosi (895663)]

If the format is properly documented and the documentation is available, it is only a matter of getting someone to write an appropriate viewer or conversion tool.

If the formats documentation is not available, you are pretty much at mercy of whoever invented it, and their willingness and ability to provide viewers and conversion tools.

Re:Ironic

[Red Flayer (890720)]

Actually, the Boston Tea Party was held to incite the British into open action against the rebel minority in the colonies. In effect, the rebels wanted to increase the divide between Britain and the colonies so that the colonials who preferred amity and compromise would come to their side.

The pretext of the BTP was to protest the imposition of import taxes, it had nothing to do with opening up the market to American tea traders.

Re:"Your fly is open" formats.

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Open Office isn't exactly created by volunteer programmers either. It was written by paid programmers from Star Division. It was then bought by Sun and open sourced[1]. 75% of the contributors work full time for Sun, and are paid to work on Open Office. The majority of the rest work for Novell and are paid to work on Open Office.

I wish the media would understand that there is a difference between Free Software and Volunteer-Developed Software. There is overlap between the two groups, but they are by no means identical.

[1] Of course, this didn't really happen, because we all know Sun are evil and out to destroy all open source software.

Re:Why doesn't microsoft offer the option...

[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

If Office opened and saved OO.o documents, there would be a flood of people migrating away from it.

Think about it, if you knew you could download OO.o for free and anyone with Office could open/edit/save the files you'd made in it, would you spend hundreds of dollars for Office? Hell, what could possibly motivate you to buy it at that point?

I would say that if MS opens the door to OO.o formats, they may as well just shoot themselves in the head and be done with it, because they're toast.

Re:PDF?

[QMO (836285)]

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ [wisc.edu]
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php [foxitsoftware.com]
http://www.planetpdf.com/ [planetpdf.com]

I've only used Adobe's reader.
I have used a free pdf maker, and it worked fine.

Re:PDF?

[richlv (778496)]

yep, so that's where opendocument steps in (even though in articles it is refferred to as "open office format", i believe it will be od) - so you get pdfs for read-only stuff (reports, laws and other things citizens would not neet to edit normally ;) ) and odt/ods etc for things that could be edited (some forms that must be filled and other things like that)

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[/ASCII (86998)]

I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats. For me it is very important to know that I'll be able to open and edit my own documents twenty years from now, and to convert them to whatever format is all the rage then.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[shis-ka-bob (595298)]

I agree completely. Here is one example. A dissertation is often printed about three times (one for the department, one for the univerisity library and once for the student to keep). If the document is shared, it is shared electronically. What are the odds that you can read an Word 3.0 document compared with the odds that you can read a PDF, LaTeX or even RDF? It blows me away that people will work hard to produce a document that should become part of the corpus of human works, and then save in in a format that will be dead in a few years.

Open formats are the clear answer.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Shotgun (30919)]

When I was laid off, I spent nearly a year working as a security guard. ProEngineer was giving away a 3D CAD program, ProDesktop, so I thought I'd use all that late night desk time to draw up my airplane.

Fast forward a few months, ProEngineer decides the giveaway didn't make them much money, so they kill the program. They were nice though, and gave all the current users a 5-year liscense key to use their current copy.

Fast forward a year. My laptop crashes, and I have to wipe and re-install. My ProDesktop key is gone. I now have several megs of very detailed and very useless drawings.

This is the reason that governments should be using open formats. Thank you, Massachusetts. ...and all those Slashdotters claimed there wasn't a God.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Boing (111813)]

I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats.

How can this be surprising? To 98% of the people in the world, the computer is, and shall remain, a black box. They don't care how it works inside. They don't care about LZW compression, or XML, or TCP/IP, or C++, or the difference between OR and XOR. They don't think of their files as being in a "format" unless poor user interfaces dictate that they must. To them, the file is a photograph they took, or a screenplay they've written, or a song they downloaded, and the internals of its definition are irrelevant.

And to take a small jab at the open source community, this is where we have problems reaching the desktop market. We design interfaces for ourselves, and we care about the internals. We want to know that PNG supports alpha transparency, or that our Windows XP installation is on /dev/hda1 while our Linux swap partition is on /dev/hdb2. We care whether the songs we listen to use VBR to save a few extra kilobytes on a 300 GB hard drive.

But when you provide these things as options to a user who doesn't know or care what they mean, you're asking them to commit to a choice when they don't want to. They'll feel helpless, and stupid, and if/when they complain, we too often reply "well it's not our fault you can't use it. RTFM."

Okay, I kinda veered off topic there... regarding open formats: in the end, there's relatively little difference between an open and a closed format on a twenty-year timeline, from the perspective of the 98% group. Either way, they're not going to be the ones designing the conversion tool. If it's an open format, they have to hope that enough geeky guys with free time find it an interesting or relevant enough problem to solve. If it's a closed format, they have to hope that the company's still in business and updating its tools, or that it released something before it went belly-up, or that it opened its file formats, or that its developers are good samaritans. And here's the kicker: the 98% group does not know which of these alternatives is more likely to be the case. They probably don't realize the problem exists. It's not because they're stupid or willfully ignorant, because once again they only see the computer as a tool. You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[saider (177166)]

Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Re:PDFs?

[m50d (797211)]

KDE now has a very nice and efficient implementation (kpdf), which will be available for all major platforms eventually.

Re:Is this really about open standards?

[Ihlosi (895663)]

BS. What Adobe really offers is the documentation on how the format works. Microsoft doesn't do that for their formats.