New York and Minnesota Publish Open Document Studies 62
Multiple readers have written to point out that New York and Minnesota have reached the end of their lengthy deliberations on open document formats. Both reports agree that an open format would be beneficial, but neither were willing to endorse a particular choice. New York's executive summary notes, "The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated." Minnesota's report claims, "The marketplace is still in flux, and it is not certain that a single standard will emerge." In related news, yesterday's announcement from Microsoft that they would provide support for ODF in a future update to Office 2007 has EU antitrust investigators optimistic, but cautious. Microsoft has said that the ISO process was what prevented OOXML from receiving support in the same time frame.
Goes to show (Score:5, Insightful)
Outdated laws are a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Outdated laws are a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outdated laws are a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The common way to do it is to have legislation which refers to a standard managed by an external agency. The standard can then be changed without requiring legislative change.
This works well in fields like safety, where OHS laws can reference equipment like fall prevention harnesses, and still allow manufacturers the opportunity to innovate in their products.
It will fail in an arena where the resident monopolist is willing and able to trample standards bodies in order to perpetuate its monopoly. Until the monopolist is unseated, or demonstrably changes its ways, more specific legislation, such as mandating a particular format will be needed.
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Betamax and videocassettes are hardware standards. ODF is an electronic document format.
Do you even have the faintest idea what the X in XML really means?
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Industry would be obliged to fulfill the law to the letter but would also be allowed to "embrace and extend" the codified legal format, but only for purposes not related to public, legal or government affairs, no "extended format" document would be acceptable as lega
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Legislation is difficult to change once passed. Competing interests (or lack of interests) and simple inertia mean that whatever gets written into law stays there for a while.
Exactly! How can we expect progress when there are still statutes on the books such as this:
Re:Goes to show (Score:4, Interesting)
Then as you said it would be insured to be readable later, of course with one additional caveat, the documents should be stored on media with open source file structures as well, else that insurance could be blocked by the inability to read the old file structure. Old documents might be required to be moved to newer storage devices as well but as time passes on the process could become increasing expensive. How many former modes of storage hardware are no longer in use or at least no longer in wide spread use? However if such a requirement is made, then look for Microsoft and perhaps others to fight it as hard as they can.
Yes, outdated. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated."
It's the right answer but the wrong reason. There should be no law mandating a format per se, not because formats become 'outdated' but because people will find one format better than another in different circumstances.
The principle is what is important. People shouldn't be using closed source formats because they can find the data unreadable one day, but an open format can always be interpreted retrospectively because the specification is openly available and can be implemented by programmers at any lat
Damn that ISO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Damn that ISO (Score:4, Informative)
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Not that much. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure that having to implement a spec that is 6000+ pages long (vs. what 900 for ODF ?) might also have something to do with why it will take a while to implement it fully (if MS ever does),
The 6000+ pages aren't the main problem for the specific problem of implementing it into MS-Office because, as you might remember, the bulk of those pages were idiocies quite similar to "handle_spacing_like_win_98='{true|false}' (I don't have the exact example in my head, sorry).
That hard (not to say impossible) for a *3rd party* to implement. BUT implementing it in MS-Office is easily done because, you know, the functionality is already here in the backward-compatibility code that hangs around somewhere i
they should not choose a format (Score:3, Insightful)
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Justification for inaction (Score:5, Insightful)
If fear of a standard becoming obsolete is a reason for not adopting it, I'm curious as to how they justify any of their IT budget?
Re:Justification for inaction (Score:4, Informative)
The current version of the ODF standard will become outdated because it will be superseded by a new, improved version. That is no reason against implementing the current version of the ODF standard now, because the other players in the Marketplace (now including Microsoft) are doing the same, and when the new version comes out, your investment in support for the current version is not lost. Rather, it enables your program to continue using documents in that version of the format, and to interoperate with other implementations of that version of the format.
By contrast, it looks likely that IT reality will completely ignore ISO/IEC IS 29500:2008 (the ISO standard for OOXML) because Microsoft has said publicly that they're not going to bother implementing any of the changes until "Office 14", so for the foreseeable future there isn't going to be anyone to interoperate with via that format. And when "Office 14" comes out, it'll certainly introduce further changes to the storage format. Therefore, why would anyone want to implement the current ISO version of OOXML? Inaction regarding that is totally justified!
Clueless legislators... (Score:5, Interesting)
The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies , as technologies can easily become outdated.
Looks like Microsoft has effectively brainwashed these clueless legislators.
Formats and technologies are completely different things. ODF is an Open Format. Open Office is a technological implementation of this format. Microsoft has recently merely proclaimed that they will also be implementing ODF in the current version of Office.
OOXML claims to be an open ISO certified format. But as on date, there is no technological, compliant iomplementation... in fact, the specification is not yet documented, as required by ISO processes.
Why can't they simply legislate on ODF, and then go about choosing the ideal technological implementation of the same?
Re:Clueless legislators... (Score:5, Informative)
I think what the legislators were saying was
Other good news....
its a good year for document freedom.
- Joel
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- Joel
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You do know there isn't a fully compliant ODF implementation either right?
Re:Clueless legislators... (Score:5, Informative)
More spin.
This statement is misleading. Every file written by OpenOffice.org, KOffice or IBM Symmphony (to use common examples) is ODF compliant. The file may not require every tag in the full specification to describe the contents each application is capable of writing, but it will comply with the standard.
In other words, each application is fully compliant with the subset of the standard mandated by the application's content creation role.
By contrast, MS Office does NOT write compliant OOXML files at all.
Re:Clueless legislators... (Score:5, Insightful)
If not, they are correct in stating that there is no fully compliant ODF implementation.
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What you describe is an inescapable problem with computing in general. You can create a perfectly valid PNG that Photoshop will choke on, or an Excel spreadsheet that will not open in polynomial time. That doesn't mean that either of those applications are faulty for that reason.
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The key difference is that the failures in interoperability in the suites I mentioned will be treated as bugs and fixed promptly.
Office's incompatibilities will be flaunted as failures of the format and exploited to justify extending and extinguishing it.
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A little suspicious... (Score:1)
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Re:A little suspicious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus Microsoft will not be able to read many ODF dokuments produced because of imcompatibilities.
Its Microsoft making a imcompatible version of Java all over again to stop Java from being adopted. Now they are doing it to stop ODF from being adopted.
I wonder who's fault that was (Score:1)
Seems to me that they knew full well that ODF is a working standard that they could easily support (since they're going to support it). If they truly thought OOXML was so great, they could have spent the development time on OOXML instead, but they realize that it's not implementable.
Microsoft voluntarily chose to waste the time in the ISO process, to the detriment of the product, the shareholders,
Question: How does a format really get out of date (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Question: How does a format really get out of d (Score:2)
Re:Question: How does a format really get out of d (Score:1)
Re:Question: How does a format really get out of d (Score:5, Informative)
There are several ways in which a format can become outdated. Below I will list some. You will notice that from a strictly technical point-of-view they aren't even close to being show stoppers (ie. you could work around them probably in several way). However, should that outdated format be mandated for use by a law then the technical challenges and financial burdens may become serious hindrances in the least and actual show stoppers in the worst case. Changing a law will always be more difficult than changing just a standard.
An ad hoc list of how a format can become outdated (pardon the poor examples):
1) An underlaying technology or medium becomes outdated. Example: 8-, 16-, and 32-bit integers. Another example: pre-web/xml EDI-formats.
2) A superior (= more fit) competing technology is developed. Example: SGML vs XML.
3) The intended use case of the format becomes outdated and/or irrelevant, which may happen due multitude of technical and non-technical reasons (the world does not stand still). Example: an early text-processing format that does not support hyperlinks or embedded pictures. Data formats for various deprecated ports.
Your particular question was about "an XML format designed to represent a wordprocessed document. How exactly is that going to go out of date?" Let's first note that in practical terms this is a format specifically designed for longevity. However, it fairly easy to imagine that a word processing format designed today does not allow for all important future use cases. Information about intention might be very important in mere twenty years, as AI and cognitive modeling applications might require it. The format might lack important security features that become necessary way you interface with data via a brain implant.
Re:Question: How does a format really get out of d (Score:4, Interesting)
Then there is of course the whole markup, that can easily get lost or forgotten in a 100 years. You still might be able to make some sense of the document, but getting an exact rendering of the document might become tricky, unless you also dig out a copy of OpenOffice and have an emulator that can run it.
In practical terms I think there are mainly two dangers of ODF. First there is the Internet and ePaper, both of which will sooner or later make paper obsolete. Why print something, when you can just email it around? And why print it, when the screen you are having already reads as easy as paper? So you might simply end up using other formats then ODF far more often and no longer end up having a copy of OpenOffice around in a few years. The second and bigger danger I think are however subtle improvements in the format. When ODF gets expanded and improved they might try to get backward compatibility going, but you likely never reach 100%. So you will have tiny little differences and when ODF1.1 is no longer used, since everybody is using ODF5.0, software might no longer support ODF1.1 properly either. It might still render, but the output might be wrong in the details. This would be basically what we have today already, you won't have much of a problem getting an old Word document to open, but you will have a very big issue if you want to get the exact rendering that the Word version it was created with produced.
Composition of those states' panels? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Moderator: "I was only following orders!"
(OK - it should be das panel, but it's a revealing typo as it is...) :P
No implementations of Microsoft's OOXML (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080521092930864 [consortiuminfo.org]
Memo to Microsoft (Score:1)
Microsoft is the one who screwed over OOXML. The ISO process is supposed to be the same for everybody. It's called a "level playing field". Get used to it.
Radical Thought (Score:2)
Perhaps the legislation could simply require that publicly supported, open document formats be considered for use by the archives of the pertinent state.
And they say you can't legislate common sense!
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Embrace Extend Extinguish in 3..2..1.. (Score:5, Funny)
Executive summaries compared (Score:5, Interesting)
The report from MN is focused on relating the wide variety of opinion that exists in this area, and not on making a specific recommendation (other than the commonsense one that the market is in flux and that the legislature shouldn't be picking market winners and losers.) The report gave me a much better understanding of just how confusing it can be when people try to talk about this issue. Like many complex topics, one needs to almost insist on agreements about terminology and scope even before engaging in the real discussion.
you've got it all wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
I look forward to an open, non-proprietary standar
Free Beer! Tomorrow. (Score:2)
Of course there was never any free beer, and whenever he asked the bartender where the free beer was, he would just point to the sign behind him.
MS proclaims: Interoperability
And if you believe any of that, there this bar where there's going to be free beer
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just DO it! (Score:1)
The most important concept any government (or business really) must adhere to is a SINGLE document format that;
a) meets their requirements
b) the code is accessible to THEM
For most everybody, the requirements have been met by the ODF, and the code is accessible. The reason that the code must be accessible is to ensure that they will have continued access to their documents independen
Question about archiving relational data (Score:2)
But what about other kinds of information?
In some cases there are good and open formats. For example, for geographic information, we can use Geography Markup Language. It doesn't make sense to use GML as a working format, but as an archival format it makes a lot of sense. Public GIS data should be co
multiple formats increases complexity and costs (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering the costs of open formats (Score:3, Insightful)