Andy Updegrove writes "For the last year and a half, Massachusetts has been a battleground between Microsoft, on the one hand, and IBM, Sun and open standards advocates on the other over the state's plans to implement ODF. That effort has sparked similar initiatives around the world that threaten to erode Microsoft's multi-billion dollar profits on Office software. Now, we have a new governor set to take office, and observers are waiting to see if he will continue to support ODF like his predecessor, or back off in favor of Microsoft Office. Last week, Governor-Elect Deval Patrick named a new transition advisory group to make recommendations on the state's IT structure, and one of the eight members he appointed was none other than the Microsoft lobbyist that has been leading the charge to not only defeat ODF in the Bay State, but to gut the power of the State's CIO and Information Technology Division as well. Not a good sign of independence from special interests for an administration that has yet to even take office."
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday November 29 2006, @12:45PM (#17036296)
The difference is that if the special interests backing ODF win, then there is a benefit to the citizens of Massachusetts. If Microsoft wins, the state is sponsoring a monopoly.
I love people who define their own meaning in common terms. The term "Special Interests" is used when someone has a personal gain. The use of standards compliant solutions, be they in IT or any other field, are a benefit to the society as a whole. I sure as hell would not like to go to a Doctors office and be told to take 2 aspirins and expect it to be something else...
A standard is not owned by anyone. DOC files are not standard and are subject to change at the whim of one and only one company. As we keep on playing with words, one day we will no longer understand each other.
The slogan special interest is used for all of these variants, but never to describe political allies. Use of that term, especially in the United States, implies that the "special" interest is not the "public" interest. Many scholars dislike the term special interest, since it carries this loaded, negative connotation. Among other things, it presumes that we know exactly what the general interest (or public interest) is. Some use vested interests or particularistic groups, but in academic literature, these have been replaced by "interest group".
While this comes from Wikipedia it is also how it's defined in a few other paper prints. "Special Interest" denotes not in the "Public Interest". A standard is in the public interest. A proprietary format is special interest, in this case Microsoft.
If we continue playing we can make the words say what we want and no longer understand each other. If you look closely at your definition it implies "not in the public interest". In a sense you make my point.
I didn't own a gun before 9/11. I didn't own a gun after 9/11.
I bought my gun after the Patriot Act was passed. I figured that given the legislation the government was passing, I needed to do more to _really_ be patriotic. That is, be willing (and ready) to stand up to a tyranical government.
If the secret torture prisions, NSA wire tapping, etc. haven't convinced you that a gun is a tool you should own, then by the time you really need it, you won't be able to get one.
Your argument is somewhat spurious and misses the point that the interest on the other side from Microsoft is not the other companies, but the general public.
Keeping a proprietary Microsoft format means at a minimum, requiring a Microsoft operating system to view the files. This assumes the O/S comes with a free (otherwise cha-ching, more money) 'doc' viewer and does not also require the person to have to pay for an internet connection to download the viewer. And unless their viewer is NOT like most, if
The person who started this was the CIO for the state of MASS not open office. It wasn't the MS competitors fighting. In fact I haven't really seen any fighting (except for MS trying to keep their market dominance). The state of MASS have made it a business requirement to use ODF to avoid 'lock in'. Any vendor can choose to meet the requirement or not. You really are starting to sound like a shill for MS. Do you complain so much when you hear about software projects abstracting their data persistence
Both sides of the Microsoft vs ODF battle are special interests.
Indeed, but you have to understand the difference between a lobbyist advocating a solution (he was paid to do so regardless of the merits) and a civil servant advocating a solution (he was paid to dispassionately figure out what the best solution is). Appointing a lobbyist for a policy-making committee is silly not because we may disagree with his former employer, but because lobbying and making policy decisions require completely orthogonal skills. For example, I would expect a former lobbyist called upon to make decisions to give undue credence to other lobbists, and to care about political agenda more than technical issues.
Digging deeper, it seems the shill is still an MS employee [consortiuminfo.org]. Can you really trust someone who says he "will be participating as a private citizen rather than a Microsoft employee" in a committee that affects a significant Microsoft business interest?
This practice should be illegal. Only in particular circumstances are officials require to recuse themselves in situations where conflicts of interest are present. The most commonly observed instance would be in the case of a judge trying a case involving a party where he has an interest or a prejudicial opinion and might otherwise be prevented from rendering an unbiased ruling.
This practice needs to be performed at all levels of government except where it's not practical. We shouldn't have the dairy association making USRDA recommendations to the FDA when it comes to milk consumption. We shouldn't have a Microsoft employee (and likely stock holder) in a position to make recommendations or otherwise influence decision making about whether or not to make ANY decisions where a choice to include or exclude Microsoft products or services for the public is concerned. It's simply inappropriate.
If anyone here is living in that state, I recommend pushing for a recusal policy where such a person would be required to recuse himself from any policy making decisions where his employer's interests are involved.
Indeed, but you have to understand the difference between a lobbyist advocating a solution (he was paid to do so regardless of the merits) and a civil servant advocating a solution (he was paid to dispassionately figure out what the best solution is).
Not sure what about my post would suggest that I don't understand there is a difference. My post was merely to criticize the original story poster for ignore the fact that the ODF-side of things are also a special interest. Furthermore, there is no reason to th
By using ODF, everyone wins. Word users can use it [sourceforge.net]. OpenOffice users can use it. Abiword users can use it (though, even with the most recent version I've had problems with it's import/export). Other applications should be implementing it. No lock in is there. With a Microsoft format, if you want to view it correctly you have to use a Microsoft program on a Microsoft approved OS.
The new Office OpenXML format should improve things though, but OpenOffice will still be locked out. Novell is supposed to
On one side there is the special interests of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who would rather not have to purchase a specific brand of computer program in order to interact with the local government.
On other side are the special interests of a convicted monopoly abuser, who is willing to spend a huge amount of money for not allowing really open formats being mandated as it would undermine the very monopoly it loves to abuse.
Both sides of the Microsoft vs ODF battle are special interests.
No. One side is a vendor neutral policy created by the state and aimed at improving the technology used by the state. The other is one company lobbying the government to get rid of the vendor neutral policy and standardize only their company as a supplier. Appointing an employee of one of the companies bidding as your tech advisor is not exactly indicative of impartial decision making.
If using MS Word and Windows allows them to do thier jobs quicker and/or do them more efficiently then so be it. But if you want to switch away from it, you'd better be able to PROVE it's all going to be worth it, and frankly I haven't seen that, or believe it.
Government officials evaluated their needs and then made a policy based upon what they felt was best for the state. That was ODF. That is not a special interest. A special interest is when some group or company tries to convince the state to do som
Ballmer will be nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If those foreigners thought Bolten was scary, they haven't seen the chair hit the fan yet.
Given the rest of the board is reasonable, it's a little early to be shouting "The Sky is Falling".
A reasonable strategy would be to throw the two sides into a kettle and see who wins out. This may be an attempt to shorten the communication lines and ultimately be a good thing.
i seem to recall that there were some "equal-access for the handicapped" advocates that didn't have a buck to make off of MS Office that had concerns
after Microsoft had a "chat" with them, as I recall.
Furthermore, they are misinformed because OpenOffice has pretty good accessiblity support--just not on Microsoft Windows, due to Windows issues and no fault of its own.
Let's see what we have here, viewed from an open standards/FOSS perspective, from someone with no prior knowledge of anyone in the group:
Technology Working Group:
Chair, Charles SteelFisher, New Media Director, Deval Patrick Committee Creative director at ALIPES CME [alipescme.com]. Original Flash site that takes a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on. I like it and hate it all at once. Wife(?) is director of Strategy at Cogent Research [cogentresearch.com]. Verdict: Not promising, but who knows.
Chair, Richard Rowe, CEO, Rowe Communications Not a lot of info there! [rowe.com] More info in the bio here [onlisareinsradar.com]. Looks like an interesting guy. "He is the author of numerous articles and frequent speaker on the impact of digitization and the internet upon society with a particular focus on access to and preservation of academic, scientific, technical and medical knowledge." That could go either way, but sounds good.
Brian Burke, Microsoft For what it's worth, this is a broad technology working group (not just on, say, standards), so I don't think it's insane to have MS at the table. But there are software companies with deeper MA roots...
John Cullinane, Principal, The Cullinane Group [cullinane-group.com] Was a trailblazer in the proprietary software industry (a href='http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/culli nane.html'>Cullinane Corp), which is kinda sorta threatened by FOSS. That said, who knows where his head is at today.
Louis Gutierrez, former State CIO and Director of ITD Former as in about a month ago. He's our man! [com.com]
Keith Parent, CEO, Court Square [csdg.com] Let's see, found here [csdg.com] that they have "Extensive experience with Wintel, Unix, Citrix and Linux platforms" and "Successful migration projects include; VMS to NT, NT to Unix, NT to Linux." Sounds reasonably OK to me, though a little dated!
David Lewis, Private Consultant I presume this is him [watervilleconsulting.com]. On the board at the Mass Tech Dev Corp [mtdc.com], and has done a lot of state IT work, so he's certainly relevant. Can't find anything about him re: ODF.
Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group This talk [itconversations.com] suggests that Larry "gets it", but I haven't listened to it yet. IT Conversations is awesome, by the way. find the Clayton Christensen talk on open source. Here it is [itconversations.com].
All told, as someone sympathetic to FOSS, who thinks FOSS is good for most businesses, I find this group to be well qualified, and apparently with a diverse set of viewpoints on standards and such. Diversity is good. I'll be watching this group as closely as I can.
``But there are software companies with deeper MA roots...''
You mean, you'd rather have Symbolics [symbolics.com] on the board?
For those who don't know: Symbolics was a spin-off of MIT that made Lisp machines. They had a fairly aggressive policy on intellectual property, which basically drained brains and knowledge away from MIT and their competitor LMI, another MIT spin-off that made Lisp machines. This is what motivated Richard Stallman to start GNU (after furiously working at LMI to compete with Symbolics).
Eventually, LMI went under, and Symbolics is only officially still alive. The Lisp machine IP has been a big mess for years, most of it basically lost, because no-one is in a position to remove the intellectual property restrictions. However, recently some source code for one of the old Lisp machines has been released by MIT, bringing back some life.
I don't know if having the world settle on one single file format will help much. I mean, for the web, we have HTML+CSS, but it seems like Microsoft has some "bugs" in their implementation, and since IE is the most popular browser, we're all forced to make webpages that adhere to the MS way of doing things. I imagine the same thing might happen, if ODF was mandated as the standard. MS would make a bug-ridden ODF reader/writer for MSWord, which would still be what most people would use, because that's what they're familiar with, and we'd be stuck in the same boat as we are with HTML. If you didn't use MS Word, then you would end up having a document that didn't look quite the way it's supposed to.
This seems kinda like (warning: analogy) a filmmaker in the 90s wanting to get distribution and saying "I have to adhere to Blockbuster's way of doing things..." It's true for a time, but because that way of doing things is inefficient, it will get competed out of existence by a model that works better.
I think e.g. when China and/or India standardize on a Redmond-free set of office applications, they're going to be feeding amazing innovations into the FOSS pool.
when China and/or India standardize on a Redmond-free set of office applications, they're going to be feeding amazing innovations into the FOSS pool.
Just be sure that we have a good base of translators for documentation and web site homes to get involved. I imagine that most peoples' Hindi and Standard Mandarin is pretty rusty. There could be a fantastic open source tool that you'd use now, but you'll never find it because Google won't find the site relevant in a search in your native language.
well, we could start taking a guerilla approach, and produce strictly-standards-compliant content, regards of how it functions in MS products.
for example, use XHTML rather than HTML, and have your website use the application/xhtml+xml content type. when your customer complains that your website is broken, explain to them that the bug is with their browser.
yeah, it probably wont work, but it's certainly worth a shot. and it will bring more mainstream attention to the issue.
Yeah, and why have laws at all, when people are just going to break them? Why take showers when I'm just going to get dirty again?
I agree that there's no need for everyone to use the same file format, but it'll be good if we can all use open standards. Microsoft is coming more in line with HTML and CSS as time goes on, partially because people have recognized that their implementation is the "broken" one. It's not perfect yet, and Microsoft hasn't always been cooperative, but don't surrender before the
its hard to imagine what those people were thinking when they said (in various ways) that the MS - Novell arrangement is a good thing, or will be good for Linux. Obviously, the political machinations of MS are still working overtime to defeat anything, group, or person that will stand in the way of MS domination of computing.
If he can provide a reasobale argument as to why ODF should not be implemented, He should be an advisor. If I were in charge I would want both sides fully represented along with third party experts (which were also appointed). But alas, given the state of US governance, he's likely just there to funnel money to the right people in order to get his way.
What constitutes a "reasonable arguement" whenm all you have to do to sway politicians to your side is the right combination of campaign contributions and technobabble?
If I presented your average mayor with some stereo manuals, flowcharts of how bees make honey, and some maps of galactic background radiation, while telling him in my best Ben Stein voice that it'd be best for his constituants if he rerouted engine plasma through the bussard ramscoops to generate a static warp shell which will refill the bli
If he can provide a reasobale argument as to why ODF should not be implemented, He should be an advisor. If I were in charge I would want both sides fully represented...
I think this kind of thinking exemplifies a fundamental problem with the way decisions are made in the US. Certainly all sides should be heard -- but they should not be represented in the actual decision-making. Public employees who make decisions should report to only one boss -- the people -- and should know the technical business and
...ODF advocate? Seriously, do you really think you can find an unbiased IT aware technologist? Especially considering that this was posted on Slashdot? LOL. Either a technology savvy/aware person would be pro MS or pro-ODF, I'd be shocked to find one that wasn't aware of both of them. If you did, I'd suggest he's not up to the job in general.;)
I think you're confused: biased doesn't mean "I like [foo] technology better;" biased means "[foo]corp paid me to like [foo] technology better." There's a key difference there. Can you spot it?
Are you intentionally avoiding my point? The poing, again, is that there ARE NO INDEPENDENT OPINIONS either here or in that group of people listed by MA to head the TAG. Think anyone on this website has an independent opinion? Not likely, the majority of people here are anti-Microsoft and you know it. Think anyone on that list is any more independent than anyone else? Hell, the former Microsoft guy knows that he'll be scrutinized very closely by the ODF zealots and probably end up being lambasted by an
the guy is an EX-employee, who is *supposed* to have spoken on Microsoft's behalf
No, according to The Friendly Article,
Brian Burke, the Microsoft Regional Director for Public Affairs,
t is my understanding that it was Burke who led the lobbying effort on Beacon Hill against ODF, and also urged legislators to introduce the amendment intended to take away much of the ITD's planning power generally, and as regards standards specifically, and hand it to a task force made up of political appointees.
It's interesting that this appointment was made by a Democrat. After 6 years of the Bush/Republicans catastrophe, it's tempting to thing that the Democrats are going to side with the little guy, unlike the business-whoring Republicans. This appointment should remind us that BOTH parties are, effectively, pro-(insert rich lobbyist name here).
Democrats aren't often on the Free side of things. Think Hollywood- it has many liberals who think their livelihoods depend on DRM.
That said, I have a lot of hope for the Deval administration. My wife and I actively supported his candidacy from early on; he's one of those rare leaders who is actually inpsiring. That said, I am a little worried about his ability to follow through as an effective administrator. We will see.
The best strategy here is not to deliver a crippled ODF, or one with optional "licensing tags" built in, or even a "binary format option" that is defined by an existing member (MS).
No, the strategy is simply not to deliver. Stall. The longer ODF is not standardized by this group, the more things can slip out of focus among product deliveries. Not a new strategy, and I don't expect to hear much about this for some time.
Government is not a well-oiled machine. It's a vast expanse of bureaucracy, backroom deals, corruption, coercion and many other things. So stop treating it like one and doing that feel good song and dance about "we the people are the government" as an excuse for letting it dictate standards, regulate all over the place, etc. This is the way that government works in practice. The more you invite it into your life, the more of this sort of villainy you will invite in general.
Just out of interest, in the last month or two Microsoft has actually put a note about OpenDocument support into their Office support pages [microsoft.com]. Notice how they insist on identifying it solely with a specific product (OpenOffice.org, whose name they get wrong). Their comments about why ODF is crap and MSXML is sweetness and light are also pretty... partial, which isn't really surprising I suppose. More intriguing to me is how they basically say the whole debate is grandstanding by Sun (and not, say, something to do with public interest).
Why is Microsoft offering a new standard, rather than simply supporting the file format for the Open Office product (sometimes called ODF)?
The OpenDocument format would not meet requirements for backward compatibility, for forward compatibility, or for performance, that millions of Microsoft customers tell us that they require.
Sun submitted the OpenOffice formats to a small committee in the OASIS organization. The record shows that there were almost no material changes to the OpenOffice specification from the time it was submitted to the time it was approved by the working group at OASIS. Sun timed the release of the OpenDocument standard in conjunction with the OpenOffice 2.0 release. The OASIS committee did not focus on the requirements, constraints, and experiences of Microsoft customers.
The Microsoft OpenXML formats have had a number of unique design requirements, including the following:
Backward compatibility with billions of documents produced over decades.
Intrinsic support for integrating customer-defined XML data. This enables new levels of innovation as documents generate and transport information in unique XML styles not defined by Microsoft or the document standard, but defined by the business processes of an organization.
High performance. The Microsoft OpenXML formats put a high priority on the speed of opening, closing, and working with documents, to roughly reflect or improve upon the performance of the past binary formats, rather than degrade the performance due to parsing XML.
Robust Testing. The OpenXML formats for Microsoft Word and Excel have been part of Office 2003 and have undergone extensive real-world testing and usage, by customers and developers.
In conclusion, the formats are significantly different, with different design points and strengths.
If you want opinions and or marketing speak, you don't have to appoint a known partisan member to your committee. All the members are supposed to be independent, right? There aren't any abiword, openoffice, wordperfect, notepad, vi or emacs shilling members on that board now are there? What is that guy doing there?
He doesn't belong on the board. Not only is he an MS lobbyist he is also an MS employee. He is unable to make any rational choices or decisions and will automatically vote for anything MS and anything anti-oss. Why even bother putting somebody on the board when you already know how they are going to vote on every issue.
Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because you agree with one side more than the other doesn't make it any less "special".
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Re:Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:5, Informative)
A standard is not owned by anyone. DOC files are not standard and are subject to change at the whim of one and only one company. As we keep on playing with words, one day we will no longer understand each other.
Parent
Re:Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:4, Informative)
The term special interest
The slogan special interest is used for all of these variants, but never to describe political allies. Use of that term, especially in the United States, implies that the "special" interest is not the "public" interest. Many scholars dislike the term special interest, since it carries this loaded, negative connotation. Among other things, it presumes that we know exactly what the general interest (or public interest) is. Some use vested interests or particularistic groups, but in academic literature, these have been replaced by "interest group".
While this comes from Wikipedia it is also how it's defined in a few other paper prints. "Special Interest" denotes not in the "Public Interest". A standard is in the public interest. A proprietary format is special interest, in this case Microsoft.
If we continue playing we can make the words say what we want and no longer understand each other. If you look closely at your definition it implies "not in the public interest". In a sense you make my point.
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I didn't own a gun after 9/11.
I bought my gun after the Patriot Act was passed. I figured that given the legislation the government was passing, I needed to do more to _really_ be patriotic. That is, be willing (and ready) to stand up to a tyranical government.
If the secret torture prisions, NSA wire tapping, etc. haven't convinced you that a gun is a tool you should own, then by the time you really need it, you won't be able to get one.
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Your argument is somewhat spurious and misses the point that the interest on the other side from Microsoft is not the other companies, but the general public.
Keeping a proprietary Microsoft format means at a minimum, requiring a Microsoft operating system to view the files. This assumes the O/S comes with a free (otherwise cha-ching, more money) 'doc' viewer and does not also require the person to have to pay for an internet connection to download the viewer. And unless their viewer is NOT like most, if
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The person who started this was the CIO for the state of MASS not open office. It wasn't the MS competitors fighting. In fact I haven't really seen any fighting (except for MS trying to keep their market dominance). The state of MASS have made it a business requirement to use ODF to avoid 'lock in'. Any vendor can choose to meet the requirement or not. You really are starting to sound like a shill for MS. Do you complain so much when you hear about software projects abstracting their data persistence
That's not the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, but you have to understand the difference between a lobbyist advocating a solution (he was paid to do so regardless of the merits) and a civil servant advocating a solution (he was paid to dispassionately figure out what the best solution is). Appointing a lobbyist for a policy-making committee is silly not because we may disagree with his former employer, but because lobbying and making policy decisions require completely orthogonal skills. For example, I would expect a former lobbyist called upon to make decisions to give undue credence to other lobbists, and to care about political agenda more than technical issues.
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It's even worse (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:It's even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
This practice needs to be performed at all levels of government except where it's not practical. We shouldn't have the dairy association making USRDA recommendations to the FDA when it comes to milk consumption. We shouldn't have a Microsoft employee (and likely stock holder) in a position to make recommendations or otherwise influence decision making about whether or not to make ANY decisions where a choice to include or exclude Microsoft products or services for the public is concerned. It's simply inappropriate.
If anyone here is living in that state, I recommend pushing for a recusal policy where such a person would be required to recuse himself from any policy making decisions where his employer's interests are involved.
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Not sure what about my post would suggest that I don't understand there is a difference. My post was merely to criticize the original story poster for ignore the fact that the ODF-side of things are also a special interest. Furthermore, there is no reason to th
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The new Office OpenXML format should improve things though, but OpenOffice will still be locked out. Novell is supposed to
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On one side there is the special interests of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who would rather not have to purchase a specific brand of computer program in order to interact with the local government.
On other side are the special interests of a convicted monopoly abuser, who is willing to spend a huge amount of money for not allowing really open formats being mandated as it would undermine the very monopoly it loves to abuse.
Re:Both Sides are Special Interests (Score:5, Insightful)
Both sides of the Microsoft vs ODF battle are special interests.
No. One side is a vendor neutral policy created by the state and aimed at improving the technology used by the state. The other is one company lobbying the government to get rid of the vendor neutral policy and standardize only their company as a supplier. Appointing an employee of one of the companies bidding as your tech advisor is not exactly indicative of impartial decision making.
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If using MS Word and Windows allows them to do thier jobs quicker and/or do them more efficiently then so be it. But if you want to switch away from it, you'd better be able to PROVE it's all going to be worth it, and frankly I haven't seen that, or believe it.
Government officials evaluated their needs and then made a policy based upon what they felt was best for the state. That was ODF. That is not a special interest. A special interest is when some group or company tries to convince the state to do som
Next up on the polticial agenda... (Score:5, Funny)
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Hold Your Enemies Closer... (Score:5, Insightful)
A reasonable strategy would be to throw the two sides into a kettle and see who wins out. This may be an attempt to shorten the communication lines and ultimately be a good thing.
Knee-jerk, get thee behind me!
An even more reasonable strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait
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after Microsoft had a "chat" with them, as I recall.
Furthermore, they are misinformed because OpenOffice has pretty good accessiblity support--just not on Microsoft Windows , due to Windows issues and no fault of its own.
Quoth Peter Korn [sun.com]
Re:Hold Your Enemies Closer... (Score:5, Informative)
Technology Working Group:
Chair, Charles SteelFisher, New Media Director, Deval Patrick Committee
Creative director at ALIPES CME [alipescme.com]. Original Flash site that takes a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on. I like it and hate it all at once. Wife(?) is director of Strategy at Cogent Research [cogentresearch.com]. Verdict: Not promising, but who knows.
Chair, Richard Rowe, CEO, Rowe Communications
Not a lot of info there! [rowe.com]
More info in the bio here [onlisareinsradar.com]. Looks like an interesting guy. "He is the author of numerous articles and frequent speaker on the impact of digitization and the internet upon society with a particular focus on access to and preservation of academic, scientific, technical and medical knowledge." That could go either way, but sounds good.
Brian Burke, Microsoft
For what it's worth, this is a broad technology working group (not just on, say, standards), so I don't think it's insane to have MS at the table. But there are software companies with deeper MA roots...
John Cullinane, Principal, The Cullinane Group [cullinane-group.com]
Was a trailblazer in the proprietary software industry (a href='http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/cull
Louis Gutierrez, former State CIO and Director of ITD
Former as in about a month ago. He's our man! [com.com]
Keith Parent, CEO, Court Square [csdg.com]
Let's see, found here [csdg.com] that they have "Extensive experience with Wintel, Unix, Citrix and Linux platforms" and "Successful migration projects include; VMS to NT, NT to Unix, NT to Linux." Sounds reasonably OK to me, though a little dated!
David Lewis, Private Consultant
I presume this is him [watervilleconsulting.com]. On the board at the Mass Tech Dev Corp [mtdc.com], and has done a lot of state IT work, so he's certainly relevant. Can't find anything about him re: ODF.
Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group
This talk [itconversations.com] suggests that Larry "gets it", but I haven't listened to it yet. IT Conversations is awesome, by the way. find the Clayton Christensen talk on open source. Here it is [itconversations.com].
All told, as someone sympathetic to FOSS, who thinks FOSS is good for most businesses, I find this group to be well qualified, and apparently with a diverse set of viewpoints on standards and such. Diversity is good. I'll be watching this group as closely as I can.
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Re:Hold Your Enemies Closer... (Score:4, Informative)
You mean, you'd rather have Symbolics [symbolics.com] on the board?
For those who don't know: Symbolics was a spin-off of MIT that made Lisp machines. They had a fairly aggressive policy on intellectual property, which basically drained brains and knowledge away from MIT and their competitor LMI, another MIT spin-off that made Lisp machines. This is what motivated Richard Stallman to start GNU (after furiously working at LMI to compete with Symbolics).
Eventually, LMI went under, and Symbolics is only officially still alive. The Lisp machine IP has been a big mess for years, most of it basically lost, because no-one is in a position to remove the intellectual property restrictions. However, recently some source code for one of the old Lisp machines has been released by MIT, bringing back some life.
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Will It really help all that much? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pessimism (Score:5, Insightful)
I think e.g. when China and/or India standardize on a Redmond-free set of office applications, they're going to be feeding amazing innovations into the FOSS pool.
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when China and/or India standardize on a Redmond-free set of office applications, they're going to be feeding amazing innovations into the FOSS pool.
Just be sure that we have a good base of translators for documentation and web site homes to get involved. I imagine that most peoples' Hindi and Standard Mandarin is pretty rusty. There could be a fantastic open source tool that you'd use now, but you'll never find it because Google won't find the site relevant in a search in your native language.
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for example, use XHTML rather than HTML, and have your website use the application/xhtml+xml content type. when your customer complains that your website is broken, explain to them that the bug is with their browser.
yeah, it probably wont work, but it's certainly worth a shot. and it will bring more mainstream attention to the issue.
It'll work fine (Score:2)
Here's hoping that WGA and other attempts to stop pirating of Windows succeeds! The result would be about a billion migrations to FOSS.
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Yeah, and why have laws at all, when people are just going to break them? Why take showers when I'm just going to get dirty again?
I agree that there's no need for everyone to use the same file format, but it'll be good if we can all use open standards. Microsoft is coming more in line with HTML and CSS as time goes on, partially because people have recognized that their implementation is the "broken" one. It's not perfect yet, and Microsoft hasn't always been cooperative, but don't surrender before the
From my perspective... (Score:2, Insightful)
Can anyone explain how this makes MS look good?
Not Automatically bad (Score:3, Informative)
If he can provide a reasobale argument as to why ODF should not be implemented, He should be an advisor. If I were in charge I would want both sides fully represented along with third party experts (which were also appointed). But alas, given the state of US governance, he's likely just there to funnel money to the right people in order to get his way.
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If I presented your average mayor with some stereo manuals, flowcharts of how bees make honey, and some maps of galactic background radiation, while telling him in my best Ben Stein voice that it'd be best for his constituants if he rerouted engine plasma through the bussard ramscoops to generate a static warp shell which will refill the bli
Wrong decision-making procedure (Score:2)
I think this kind of thinking exemplifies a fundamental problem with the way decisions are made in the US. Certainly all sides should be heard -- but they should not be represented in the actual decision-making. Public employees who make decisions should report to only one boss -- the people -- and should know the technical business and
As opposed to the independence of an... (Score:2)
Independent opinion vs. paid shill (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're confused: biased doesn't mean "I like [foo] technology better;" biased means "[foo]corp paid me to like [foo] technology better." There's a key difference there. Can you spot it?
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No, according to The Friendly Article,
Furth [cio.com]
By a Democrat, no less! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Democrats aren't often on the Free side of things. Think Hollywood- it has many liberals who think their livelihoods depend on DRM.
That said, I have a lot of hope for the Deval administration. My wife and I actively supported his candidacy from early on; he's one of those rare leaders who is actually inpsiring. That said, I am a little worried about his ability to follow through as an effective administrator. We will see.
wait and wait (Score:2)
The best strategy here is not to deliver a crippled ODF, or one with optional "licensing tags" built in, or even a "binary format option" that is defined by an existing member (MS).
No, the strategy is simply not to deliver. Stall. The longer ODF is not standardized by this group, the more things can slip out of focus among product deliveries. Not a new strategy, and I don't expect to hear much about this for some time.
There is a lesson here for those who can see it (Score:5, Insightful)
Do something about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Contacting Mr. Patrick (no email address available; but you can fax his campaign at (617) 628-3519 ) WILL make a difference.
Speak up. Now! Or STFU and take it daily from Microsoft.
MS Office Support on ODF (Score:3, Insightful)
Just out of interest, in the last month or two Microsoft has actually put a note about OpenDocument support into their Office support pages [microsoft.com]. Notice how they insist on identifying it solely with a specific product (OpenOffice.org, whose name they get wrong). Their comments about why ODF is crap and MSXML is sweetness and light are also pretty ... partial, which isn't really surprising I suppose. More intriguing to me is how they basically say the whole debate is grandstanding by Sun (and not, say, something to do with public interest).
Public service (Score:2, Insightful)
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