The Massachusetts Office Party 731
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."
As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:2, Insightful)
And anyway, why wasn't I invited to this party?
I love it, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:3, Insightful)
So, which will MS Office support? (Score:5, Insightful)
[1] Yes, I know it can with third party products, some of which are Free.
Re:PDF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Guaranteed Availability in the Future? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why doesn't microsoft offer the option... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know how they feel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:PDFs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:3, Insightful)
The government is not a corporation. The government takes your money by force and spends it. Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.
Taxachusetts (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe these people should be protesting the high income tax, or property tax, or sales tax, or high usage fees, or excessive regulation.
Microsoft is the least of their worries.
Re:PDFs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Did I miss your point? I don't know how else you could mean what you said.
Re:PDF? (Score:2, Insightful)
PDF is really quick for me however. Then again, I'm on a Mac. I don't have Office, and therefore Word would be an absolutely terrible choice for me.
Notice how PDF is a minor irritant for you but will still work, whereas
offset costs (Score:2, Insightful)
I paid a lot less taxes in NH than I do in MA, and despite this development, I'm not optimistic that it will result in any significant changes from my perspective.
Microsoft's Engineered incompatibility (Score:2, Insightful)
MS Office formats are incompatible even between different versions of MS Office. The Microsoft competitive model is to lock out competition using undocumented binary file formats.
In the past, they gain a foothold with one or two in an organization using a "new" Office format, and this forces dozens of upgrades. And also ensures that competitor's compatibility features can't keep up with Microsoft.
These same anti-competitive tactics also make it difficult for different government agencies to communicate. Or even read their own archived documents.
The libre is more important than the gratis (Score:3, Insightful)
This is nice for our bottom line, since all of the money our government pisses away is OUR money. However, I'd be willing to pay EVEN MORE than Microsoft charges to have open formats. And although I am supportive of both commercial and open source software initiatives, and have contributed to the open source community as a programmer, I honestly don't give a crap what our government thinks about it. This is a move in the right direction. I suspect it's motivated by money, however, and not a benevolent government desiring to increase the freedom of information.
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PDF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's the definition of vendor lock-in now, isn't it? Even MS fanboys can usually see that this is a bad thing. MS can abandon its old formats... and they will, eventually.
I think xPDF is available for Windows for free. It opens in about one second on Linux.
Re:PDF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even the tools that can edit PDF are not usually very powerful. They're just for touchup type work. Most of your formatting and layout still needs to be done in a real editor and those output PDF OK, they don't read PDF.
Re:Whilst I applaud this move ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft can garuantee that in 20 years time they will make available software that can still read documents produced with Microsoft Office today, right?
What do you mean "They're only available for Microsoft Windows."? What use is that? What about the
Open document formats are the only fair way to do it. It should have happened over a decade ago, and we certainly should not be perpetuating the problem.
Neither (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't used Acrobat either - I usually generate PDFs from LaTeX using pdflatex. I get much smaller PDFs than printing to PDF creates, and using the hyperref package, I get ecternal hyperlinks wherever I create them, internal hyperlinks from the table of contents/figures and index, and a copy of the table of contents in the bookmarks section for quick navigation.
Re:Taxachusetts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So, which will MS Office support? (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you think their XML format is all about?
The data is still an obfuscated binary, it's just crammed into pseudo XML to bloat the file a bit more.
They get to check off "XML" support, and yet it's completely useless unless you're using Microsoft development tools for anything outside of Office itself.
From the Microsoft Bloglines... (Score:2, Insightful)
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/08
(and that reactions has been resyndicated by the Scobelizer himself already:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/01.html#
From the post:
"I'm a bit stunned by the overall proposal that was brought forward to the State though as it seems to be a bit short sighted and unnecessarily exclusive."
"unnecessarily exclusive"? Someone at Microsoft is claiming that someone else's decision to use an open alternative is unnecessarily exclusive? That does seem like grasping for the last straw doesn't it...
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:4, Insightful)
A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.
Do you really want microsoft to implement them? (Score:1, Insightful)
look at the great job they did with html, another open standard... why don't sites look the same on IE compared to other browsers? what's going to stop microsoft from pulling the same tricks all over again?
Great maybe m$ can layoff more programmers (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:PDF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, my agency has 60 users. For MS Office assuming a government discount that makes the end price $200 we'd be shelling out $12,000.
And lets not forget the obscene pricing of MS software for servers. A 50 user MS-SQL for instance would run you approximately $8K to $10K and that excludes the OS.
LAMP - server cost $5K. Cost of software $0, Cost of configuration time: $1K or so. So for the $20,000 above you could buy three new servers and have them congigured to do what you want them to.
And a desktop can be had for
So yes, it is a bottom line exercise and a clear signal to Microsoft that:
a) We won't pay bloated prices for sofware that we only use a small subset of features on, but isn't crippled from occasionally using the gee-whiz features.
and
b)Constant upgrade cycles in which we shell out full retail for something that is an upgrade.
They had better wake up and smell the coffee. As government goes, so goes business that interacts with government. Microsoft could be staring at a huge defection of customers in the near term.
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:5, Insightful)
Open formats are the clear answer.
Re:So, which will MS Office support? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think much more likely is that eventuallythey might support
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:2, Insightful)
You must be new here...
Whenever they "save" money in one budget, they put that into another budget, they don't give it back. This means that they spend the same amount of money, spending less on one thing and more on something else. If they spent "less" money, then they would be able to lower taxes which means they get less money into the coffers and that is not allowed.
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Non Issue (Score:2, Insightful)
If there's a semi-mythical complaint in desktop support for me, it has to be that "I can't open this proprietary document format" complaint. In over ten years I haven't gotten that once. The last time was a WordPerfect file in 1994 and the file was generated four years earlier.
Next thing you know, we'll hear whining and moaning aimed at Adobe for any nonstandard tchotchkes put into their PDF files. Why does it have to be up to the software vendors to correct the mistakes of those saving the files when they screw up by not saving in the most widely compatible format in the first place which they should have known to do since their very first PC using position?!
Re:Taxachusetts (Score:3, Insightful)
If you look at the site it says "State/Local taxes as % of per capita income", which to me implies that they took all the taxes into account.
As for your links, they do nothing to prove your points. Both your links reference the "economic freedom" rankings created by Pacific Research. Unfortunately I could find no information to describe exactly how they calculated these rankings. In addition rankings are a poor measure to go by because they obscure the actual differences between adjacent ranks.
Given the two data sets, I find the Tax Foundation's data (from the CNN link) infinitely more meaningful than that of Pacific Research.
If you could provide some actual data on how "liberal states have economic environments that are the most likely to screw poor people out of higher wages and opportunity", I'd love to read about it. Especially since my experience seems the other way around...
But as for it being biased, I don't quite see where you're getting that from.
Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine (Score:1, Insightful)
Instead, why not just pick any of the following options:
1) Use HTML as a standard, and use the tools they've already paid for to create HTML documents (Word, FrontPage) which require no new learning. You may say Word/FP suck, but we're not talking any fancy documents here.
2) Use XML as a standard, which like #1 is already supported fully but Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and the others can read/write XML just fine).
3) Use RTF as a standard. It may not be pretty, but it's open and cheap and darned quick.
4) If all else fails, buy the $20 add-on program so you can save your Office documents as a PDF file.
The State of California publishes everything in HTML or PDF format, and I don't hear anyone complaining about inabilities to open documents.
Re:Acrobat Reader? Ugh... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Closed" formats are a pain. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now each of her Works Documents have to be opened in the free "Word Viewer" copied and pasted into OpenOffice because she does not have the original software.
In response to PDF's being "closed", they may be owned by adobe, but at LEAST there is more than one way to view them, and they can be viewed and printed from any computer on a number of different applications. Also Adobe does offer Acrobat reader in some form or another for most systems.
Put it this way: a pdf or a wps of unknown version made in works?
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever worked in / around the Federal Government? My experience in the USAF was that at the end of every fiscal year, every project went on a ill-advised spending spree to ensure that they spent every penny of their budget (flat screen LCDs, the newest computers, expensive peripherals) all of which was totally unneccessary. Every federal project does this at the end of the fiscal year so that they don't come in under budget, otherwise they'd have their budget cut because the don't need the money. Since money == clout in the government, there is never, ever any "extra money". It's all spent. Every time.
The Federal Government will not spend your money wisely, because it is not their money. End of story.
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not a subtle philosophical point.
Re:Why doesn't microsoft offer the option... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you over stated that. You can already share documents between Word and OO; also many companies have processes and custom bits of code that only run on Office right now and they have a comfort level with the suite and Microsoft.
it seeems to me ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine (Score:3, Insightful)
Which version? How do you embed formulas? How do you embed graphics? What archive format will you use to pack the whole mess up for distribution?
2) Use XML as a standard
Opendocument is a standardized XML representation, so I guess Mass. agrees with you completely.
3) Use RTF as a standard.
Does RTF support everything that Mass. may wish to embed in a document?
4) If all else fails, buy the $20 add-on program so you can save your Office documents as a PDF file.
Sounds good! Now you just need to make free PDF editors available to all your citizenry so that they can return completed forms to you.
I forget; what was your point again?
Re:As a Massachusetts Resident (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect you misunderstand what XML is. XML, in and of itself, is just a metasyntax. It doesn't really compare to HTML or RTF.
You could almost just as easily say "Use binary data as a standard, which like HTML is already supported fully but Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and the others can read/write binary data just fine)."
Which would be true, as far as it goes. Nearly all programs can read some form of binary data.
Similarly, just because two programs use some XML-based format doesn't mean they're automatically interoperable.
Finally, someone with reason... (Score:2, Insightful)
stupid is relative...bring your C++, XML, and open source down to the farm (you know, the place where your food comes from) and see how far that'll take you.
Back when Microsoft was being pursued by the government my grandpa came up to me with the local newspaper and said "Who's this Microsoft and why is the government after them?". My grandpa never touched a computer, VCR, MP3 player, DVD, cell phone (he once accidentally hit the OnStar button in his truck and couldn't figure out where the voices were coming from) or even a tape player. He did however run a very successful 1000 acre farm and dairy and he lived a very long and happy life. He was 85 when he died a couple months ago and I still could never explain what I do beyond "I work with computers".
I'd give up all of this technology to live the life my grandpa had (as I build my second home file server/media pc). stupid is relative
Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't get it. There is no version of Office or the free reader available for my system. It's much, much easier for you to download Open Office (for free), or get a free copy from the government (which they'd be legally allowed to give out) than for me to buy a new computer just to run MS Office.
If they were foolish enough to mandate MS Office as the official standard for incoming data, then that free reader turns into an expensive full-blown MS Office install. How convenient is that for Joe Taxpayer who wants to reply to his jury summons?
What about Innovation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wax cylinders were a 'format' for music, but we don't want the government locking out the use of CDs or DVDs just because the people with wax cylinder readers can't use them.
Backwards compatibility is important, but you certainly want to preserve the option to take technology that may innovate, even in the document format space, and provide better services to your constituents.
Here's a good example: early iterations of WordPerfect certainly didn't allow the complex tables and embedded images we have in current formats - heck, early HTML was barely functional for presenting text and pictures. What if we were only allowed to presever content in original WP formats, or HTML 1.0?
Governments should pick winners and losers by the quality of the technology, not ideology.
Build backwards compatibility into your contracts agreements with your vendors, and use the format that gives you the best technology.