aachuett

What, you say?  That’s “Massachusetts” without the M and the S.  Yep, in order to keep an open and accessible document structure, the Massachusetts government is going to drop Microsoft Office products for software that supports OpenDocument.

Of course, Microsoft claims that they are foolish, and I’m sure will be citing Scotland Yard’s failure to bring this goal to fruition.  The funniest thing to me, however, is this quote from the aforementioned article:

A Microsoft spokeswoman said that the company’s support of XML in Office and other products shows that Microsoft is also in favor of open formats for data interoperability and the archiving of public records.

The company’s support of XML?  Well, technically, yeah.  But it’s not open, and it’s horrible for public records.  Back in January, MS already fought with Massachusetts after the state adopted the Open Standards policy.  MS made a special concession on their files for them to appear to be “open”.  After some back and forth, MS made their position clear:

We are acknowledging that end users who merely open and read government documents that are saved as Office XML files within software programs will not violate the license.

Good jorb.  You can read it in programs that parse the MS XML Schema, but don’t make changes to it, save it as something new, copy text from it, print it, etc.  Bravo to Massachusetts for not putting up with this, saving the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, and moving forward to adopting an OpenDocument standard.  Unlike Scotland Yard, I’m sure they’ll be using OpenOffice (and NeoOffice on the state’s Macs).  Scotland Yard tried the abysmal StarOffice.  Too bad no one in the department tried out the new OpenOffice before backpeddling to MS.

Posted Thursday September 1, 2005 in News by Derek Jones

This is an older entry and as such, it may be by a guest author or contain formatting problems / extraneous code. If you notice something wrong with the entry, please use the Contact page to let me know the entry title and issue.

Comments

Good for them. It is imperitive that some companies get some revenue to keep nice programs going, but open source is a great innovation and a good way to save money. I wish the savings would be passed on to tax payers but we know better than that.

On the downside, I have had trouble getting Open Office to play nice with word files in the past. My girlfriend needed an office program, so I got her Open office for her PC. She couldn’t ever transfer files between work and home, and I had no better luck helping her. Perhaps I missed something, but I guess the newer versions have remedied this.

NeoOffice for the Mac is nice. Anyone know how much it differs from running the darwin build in X11 under OS X? (meaning i’ve never used the darwin build)

By Greg Ferrell on September 1, 2005 at 06:18pm link

With the new versions of Open Office and NeoOffice, the only Word files you are likely to have issue with are possibly ones with embedded media and such, and it should still work, formatting might need attention.  The X11 version will just be slower and less integrated with OS X in general, since it’s running under the X11 shell.  There is still plenty of Java in the NeoOffice app, so it’s certainly not Cocoa speed, but it’s Carbon for the majority.  It’s definitely fine for working with the OpenDocument files that they will be creating and using.  Their whole point is to not *deal* with proprietary formats anymore, and will be dropping and converting any old Word files as part of this policy.

Little update (from here:

Kriss emphasized, however, that the state is not moving to open standards for economic reasons but to protect the right of the public to open and free access to public documents for the foreseeable future. “What we’ve backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietary standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards,” Kriss said.

By Derek Jones on September 2, 2005 at 04:33pm link

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