Massachusetts' CIO Defends Move to OpenDocument 274
Mark Brunelli writes "A public hearing concerning Massachusetts' plan to dump Microsoft for OpenDocument featured a fair share of controversy as the state's CIO tried to fight off naysayers. Linda Hamel, the general counsel for the Massachusetts Information Technology Department (ITD), suggested that groups that oppose the OpenDocument file format standard might be influenced by Microsoft." We reported on the bounce back against the OpenDocument move this past weekend.
Re:Microshaft Influened? (Score:4, Informative)
It's currently reading as - "suggested that groups that oppose the OpenDocument file format standard might be influenced by Microsoft."
Of course the meaning is that some believe that the big backlash recently (with every "grassroots" group announcing their beefs with the move to OpenDocument) is the result of Microsoft lobbying, which isn't an inconceivable idea.
God Damn it, Zonk! (Score:5, Informative)
OpenDoc [apple.com] is not the same thing as OpenDocument [wikipedia.org]. If you need to shorten it, you can say ODF.
Re:$50M verses $5M (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OpenDoc (Score:5, Informative)
Realistically, if your project to convert things is happening now, what else would you convert to? OpenDocument already has good support, is a very clearly defined format, and is unencumbered. It's also easy to work with to generate documents from other data.
FSF have a interesting report from the meeting (Score:5, Informative)
FSF have a lengthy and interesting report from yesterdays meeting [fsf.org]
Re:$50M verses $5M (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw coverage (Score:4, Informative)
For details and analysis you can't beat Groklaw's coverage [groklaw.net], including notes by two [consortiuminfo.org] bloggers [danbricklin.com] who attended the meeting.
Also note that the hearing was convened by a senator who seems to confuse "OpenDocument" and "OpenOffice" and "open standards" with "open source software".
Re:$50M verses $5M (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$50M verses $5M (Score:5, Informative)
Of the below, only Office 12, OpenOffice.org 1.1.5, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 have XML document format support. Office 12 is MSXML, and OpenOffice.org are OpenDoc.
Oh, and don't tell me they shouldn't upgrade from Office 2000, or Office 97, or whatever. I'm 100% Massachusetts has a site licensing policy; Office 2000 went End-of-Life on 6/30/2004. Office XP goes End-of-life on June 30, 2006. Neither of these makes for a good, forward-looking 'upgrade'. It's going to have to be 2003 or newer.
Office 12 preliminary system requirements:
Microsoft Office 12 will run on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later, or the Windows Longhorn client. Server components will require Windows Server 2003 or later and, potentially, SQL Server 2000 or later. Office 12 will support x64 platforms natively, though it's not clear whether this support will ship in the box with the initial release, or later as a separate add-on.
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/office12_prev iew1.asp [winsupersite.com]
Microsoft Office 2003 system requirements:
To use Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, you need:
Component Requirement
Computer and processor
Personal computer with an Intel Pentium 233-MHz or faster processor (Pentium III recommended); optional installation of Business Contact Manager for Outlook® 2003 requires a 450-MHz or faster processor (Pentium III recommended)
Memory
128 MB of RAM or greater; optional installation of Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 requires 256 MB of RAM
Hard disk
400 MB of available hard-disk space; optional installation files cache (recommended) requires an additional 200 MB of available hard-disk space; optional installation of Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 requires an additional 190 MB of available hard-disk space
OpenOffice.org system requirements, version 2.0:
Microsoft Windows
* Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher), Windows XP, Windows 2003
* 128 Mbytes RAM
* 200 Mbytes available disk space
* 800 x 600 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors
Solaris: SPARC platform edition
* Solaris 8 OS or higher
* 128 Mbytes RAM
* 250 Mbytes available disk space
* X-Server with 800 x 600 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors
Solaris: x86 platform edition
* Solaris 8 OS or higher
* 128 Mbytes RAM
* 250 Mbytes available disk space
* X-Server with 800 x 600 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors
Linux:
* Linux kernel version 2.2.13 or higher, glibc2 version 2.2.0 or higher
* 128 Mbytes RAM
* 200 Mbytes available disk space
* X-Server with 800 x 600 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors
System Requirements for OpenOffice.org 1.1.x
Windows
Microsoft Windows 98, ME, NT (Service Pack 6 or higher), 2000 or XP
Pentium compatible PC, 64 MB RAM, 250 MB available hard disk space
GNU/Linux ("Linux")
Glibc 2.2.0 or newer
Pentium compatible PC, 64 MB RAM, 300 MB available hard disk space
X server and graphics card capable of 800x600 resolution
Performance testing, OpenOffice.org versus MS Office 2003:
http://www.matt13.com/computer/open_office_or_ms_o ffice/ [matt13.com]
OpenOffice.org uses less CPU, less RAM, and far less Hard Disk space.
Does OpenOffice.org start slower on
Re:Step in the right directions (Score:3, Informative)
I live in Colorado, and the tax burden for CO residents is below average (9.5%), but we cannot fund all of the new unfunded mandates from the new "debt and spend" ruling party.
Brining this back on topic, I'd welcome an OpenDoc initiative in this state to help reduce spending. There are a ton of things I'd rather we spend our public tax dollars on than the MSFT tax.
MS true nature of openness shown in Mac products (Score:4, Informative)
One of the things one should consider when evaluation Microsoft's true openness is the company's willingness to support their own technologies on competing plattforms. More than often - virtuall allways in the public debate, Microsoft seem to forget that they actually do supply products for another operating system: Mac OS X, and one metric for testing their willingness to share their own technologies outside of Windows is to take a closer look at their Mac products. For instance both Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player significantly lacks in functionality and features compared to their Window versions.
Microsoft states in their response letter to MA:
In the case of XML support in Microsoft Office:mac 2004, only Excel supports the MS XML format, where support for XML formatted Word 2003 documents produced on Windows are completely lacking. It is also not possible to write XML documents from Word on the Mac. I blogged an article earlier this fall that explains in more detail how Microsoft's XML support is only Windows deep [andwest.com] and what they have stated on this in relation to Office 12 for Mac OS X. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered.
I have also posted a question to Microsoft's latest blog on the ability to save as XPS format [msdn.com] in the upcoming Office 12 for Mac -- a question that remains unanswered.
Microsoft has been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats well knowing that the country in Europe closest to follow follow Massachussetts is Norway. This following a public hearing [andwest.com] where the government wants to standardize on open document formats in all communication with, and within the public sector, in addition to promote the use of open source code. Microsoft's response to this has been surprisingly vague compared to the response to the Commonwealth of Massachussetts.
Re:What a stupid thing to say! (Score:3, Informative)
I have yet to see a list of what features useful to the visually impaired are present in MS Office and absent from the word processors that support ODF. Until I see such a list, I can only consider this to be FUD. OpenOffice Writer, for example, has some accessibility options in its options dialog. Maybe they aren't sufficient, but it certainly isn't the case that accessibility has not been considered by the authors of software supporting ODF.
On the other hand, how good is MS Word? According to the Wikipedia article on screen readers, neither MS Word nor Internet Explorer meet Microsoft's own accessibility standards:
I sure wish we could hear from some objective advocates for the visually impaired, on the one hand, as to their requirements, and on the other hand from people who know what software meets these requirements and what doesn't.
Re:How very /. of him! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Influenced by Microsoft? (Score:2, Informative)
The article says nothing of the sort. It only makes two assertions, one from Curtis Chong that Word already has certain features with regards to screen readers and braille printers, and also that someone from MA said that such workers would remain on Word.
Neither of these statements say that blind (and there's no reference to deaf whatsoever) workers could not get by using OpenOffice.
Ignorant Slashbots: Please Read (Score:1, Informative)
Also, you can find out about the meeting too [groklaw.net].
Re:How very /. of him! (Score:3, Informative)
1) The State distributes public documents in PDF, not in Word docs. They occasionally will send Word and Excel files around to other government institutions, if they require a lot of data input, formulas, or validation. This *already* causes severe compatibility problems due to issues between versions of MS software.
2) Appointed positions have to be voted upon by elected representatives. There is your accountability.
3) The State has a CIO, and ITD, and various others to make these decisions and recommendations. If they ignore these people/departments, they are basically making them unnecessary, and should justify why they're spending the money for nothing.
4) The State does have several tens of thousands of desktops. Every municipal government has several State machines to do voter registration, police queries, and other functions. You have things like the Registry, with their many thousands of machines, you have courts, DOR, DLS, DET, etc. So yes, there are a very lot of desktops out there under State control.
5) The State tends to run with old computers until they do a full replacement, or they die (it seems whichever is longer
6) You forgot support agreements on all that hardware/software. Not that all of it will be purchased with those agreements. It depends on whether they're doing RFP, going with the bid list under existing contract, etc.
7) People aren't going to be worried about those things, at all. They had to install something to read all those PDFs on nearly every State and Federal website. If they're downloading tax forms, those are PDF, for example. People certainly don't get all worried about installing some random software, either.
The elected officials are talking about squashing this likely because some MS agent bent their ear on it. If you read some of the things that people said against using OpenDocument, and requiring Word, you see how unfounded many of those comments really are. All the talk about disability and accessibility was quite interested. Software had to be specially written for Office because of it's non-standard nature, for example.
If this initiative gets shot down, I think you'll find that it had everything to do with MS influence, and nothing to do with worrying about the People.
Re:$50M verses $5M (Score:4, Informative)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290144/ [microsoft.com]
I quote:
What is the Osa.exe file?
The Office Startup Assistant (Osa.exe or OSA) is a program that improves the performance of Office programs. . . .
What Are the Advantages of Running the Osa.exe File?
The Osa.exe file initializes the shared code that is used by the Office XP programs. When you use the Osa.exe file to initialize shared code, the Office XP programs start faster. If the Office programs, instead of Osa.exe, initialize the shared code, the programs take longer to start.
Back to the top Back to the top
Can I Remove the Osa.exe File?
You can safely remove the Osa.exe file without causing the Office XP programs to fail. However, if you remove Osa.exe, you no longer benefit from the performance advantages that are provided by running Osa.exe. Also, the Office Shortcut Bar (OSB) may no longer start automatically, if you configured the OSB to start when Windows starts. (See the notes for the command-line switches later in this article.)
Don't forget the indexing services; I'm sure they load random shared DLLs, and they do NOT show up in the task manager. I quote:
Microsoft's Indexing Service
Starting with Office XP, Microsoft has included a new "fast searching" feature (parasite) which may cause your computer's hard disk to run continuously.
Apparently, this feature is implemented via Mosearch.exe and Mosdmn.exe, neither of which shows up in the task manager. As with findfast, don't just delete these files. Instead, follow the (very confusing) instructions provided in OFFXP: Hard Disk Runs Continuously After You Install Office XP (Q282106) to disable it. Unfortunately, this feature must be disabled for each installed Office XP application.
Also, I believe the various DCOM stuff that was optional in earlier MS systems, and comes standard in newer OSes preloads a shared office code.
Additionally, MS Office is 'prefetched', meaning that the DLL's are organized on disk for optimal loading speed. This happens with all windows apps.
You can do this on Linux, too. In SuSE 10.0, which has OpenOffice.org preloading set by default, OpenOffice.org loads in 5 seconds, on a mediocre celeron. On my system it times to around 3.4 seconds.
Also, you didn't bother to read the benchmark I linked. OpenOffice.org write uses less ram than MS Word, takes less time to startup (when neither are preloaded), and has a much smaller HD footprint.