MA moves boldly forward - some senators still like Bill Gates
Massechussets Senators (state) question whether or not its citizens should be allowed to use any software to access state documents or whether the state should require that everyone own a copy of Microsoft’s Office suite. They seem to question the concept of “open government”1. At stake here is whether or not documents produced by the government are available to citizens and under what conditions. The state is moving forward on the OpenDocument standard - a set of standards and specifications on how a document is created, stored, edited and read. It also determines how long a document is able to be retrieved by future software.
The Romney administration wants documents stored in a particular format that would allow the records to be read by a variety of software packages — except Microsoft Office.
Oh boo hoo! Microsoft Office can’t read OpenDocument. What will this do to their poor little business? In reality the only thing holding back Microsoft is… Microsoft. OpenDocument is called “Open” for a reason. There are no patents on using it, there are no royalties that have to be paid to anyone for implimenting it, and ‘lo and behold! Microsoft helped to write the specification. As it is now, only Microsoft products can truly read and write the documents that are created by the state. This becomes more alarming when we take into consideration the fact that Microsoft wants us to go to a subscription model - keep paying or you won’t get to see your precious data ever again. Bring in the state’s concern that data and documents must be publically available for longer than Bill Gate’s upgrade cycle and you really see where this gets you. Open standards and specifications or proprietary, locked in secret sauce concoctions that you can be locked out of tomorrow? I mean, they might as well be arguing about whether we should use a portable document format that consists of pen and ink or whether only owners of stone carving tools should be allowed to write. Assuming the move goes forward Microsoft will impliment the OpenDocument specifications into Office; there’s just no reason not to.
1 - Boston.com
