Hiawatha Bray misunderstands Massachusetts’ OpenDocument requirement
Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray had an article yesterday, October 29, 2005, about Massachusetts’ proposed switch to OpenDocument. He seems to misunderstand the whole point of the switch– he writes as if Massachusetts has refused to use Microsoft Office, rather than refused to use Office’s proprietary formats.
The good news is that in our modern era of email, instead of just fuming, I can send him an email. It’s probably questionable as to whether that actually changes anything. Maybe it’s just a palliative measure used by the Globe to keep zealots like me from storming their offices. Anyway, here’s the email I sent him.
Hello Mr. Bray,
In your article, “Senators question file-storage shift,” you’ve missed the crucial point in the argument behind Peter Quinn’s new policy. You write that the state will stop using Microsoft Office because it “uses a unique data format that may
not be readable by other programs.” The part you’ve missed is that the data format is not just unique, but secret.This is the whole reason for the new policy– as you write, companies can, “add the OpenDocument format without paying royalties or licensing fees.” This will ensure that state documents will remain readable forever, not just until Microsoft decides to change their formats, as they have done repeatedly in the past. As you know, the Romney administration has explicitly asked Microsoft to add support for OpenDocument, so the problem should be characterised as
Microsoft refusing to support open standards, rather than the state refusing to use Microsoft. The state has refused the secret format, not the software or the company.As a taxpayer in Massachusetts, I’m glad to hear that my government won’t use software that relies on a secret format. I don’t want to buy Microsoft Office to read state documents when there are obvious alternatives. The issues for blind state workers are significant, but solvable– a short term side-effect of a long-term solution.
Brandon Stafford
Cambridge, MA
In the meantime, Citizens Against Government Waste, a group based in Washington, D. C., not Massachusetts, has issued a press release opposing the change. Strangely, the argument presented seems to argue in favor of the change.
“‘It is bad procurement policy for any state to unilaterally lock itself into one set of technologies,’ CAGW President Tom Schatz said. ‘Agencies should be able to accept bids from any company that can provide the desired product or service.’”
The desired product or service is: an office suite that supports OpenDocument, a standard open format recognized by an international standards body, ISO/IEC JTC1, the International Organization for Standardization International Electrotechnical Commission’s Joint Technical Committee. The companies that can bid on this contract include: any company. If we stick with Microsoft’s proprietary formats, the companies that can bid on this contract include: Microsoft. How is sticking with Microsoft not “unilaterally lock[ing] itself into one set of technologies”?
And also, this just in: a company in France is working on a filter that allows Microsoft Office to open OpenDocument files. According to a post on Dan Farber’s blog, Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie “attributed the tentativeness on ODF support in Office to resource allocation issues, mainly based on the user support demands that would crop up given that exporting to ODF won’t have full fidelity with the Microsoft’s own formats without some tweaking.” The word for this is “whinging.”