FOXNews.com - Views - Your Mail: Open Debate About OpenDocument

FOXNews.com - Views - Your Mail: Open Debate About OpenDocument:

This article is a response to the previous one.

Bob Halloran of Jacksonville, Fla., wrote:

1) Massachusetts' argument was simple: they didn't want their public documents at the mercy of one vendor's (Microsoft) planned obsolescence. Try reading an Office '95 file with Office 2003; it doesn't work so well. Their upcoming release requires re-formatting all your existing documents to their new standard.

2) Their criteria were also simple: a published standard, minimal or no copyright/patent encumbrances, and preferably set by a vendor-independent body. Adobe's PDF spec works because it *is* publicly available, has multiple products supporting it 100 percent, and has no license fees associated with it. Microsoft's office file formats are secret, and they walked away from the group that set up the OpenDocument spec.

3) Comments made by the IT chief for the state said there would be costs to convert from the current office suite regardless of what was replacing it. The costs to convert to OpenDocument were estimated at $5 million; upgrading the current vendor's product would cost $50 million, both in license fees and upgraded PCs to support the newer product."

Robert Cole writes:

The OpenDocument format is well in the process to establish itself as an ISO standard and will probably be so in the first half of 2006.

Why anyone thinks this drives up costs I have no idea. If Microsoft ends up supporting the standard (which I'm sure they will if Massachusetts holds its course) then no one will have to change software.

Microsoft has a long and well-documented history of not supporting standards. They have been recently working hard to corrupt the XML standard for example. They've tried and tried to corrupt web standards in general and have been somewhat successful. When they do support a standard, its normally only long enough to corrupt it with their embrace and extend practice rather than going through the proper channel to add something to an existing standard.

Brian Thomas of St. Louis, Mo., says:

[Prendergast] makes a complete hash of the facts surrounding the Massachusetts's state government's choice of OpenDocument for public records. Citing almost exclusively other Microsoft-funded organizations and well-known Microsoft apologists from the analyst and journalism communities, he makes the following unfounded, misleading, and/or simply false statements: “... the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation.”

In fact, the exact reverse is the truth: The policy -- for the first time -- opens competition for software, which can read and write public documents in the state. Previous to this, only Microsoft was realistically allowed to provide office document software, because of the de facto standardization on their file formats, which they do not share with anyone.