Modern Day Tea Party in Boston

I have written several times about OpenOffice.org, a free suite of programs that is comparable to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org contains an excellent word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation program. This free program competes directly with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

I like OpenOffice.org. In fact, this article is being written with it, even though I also have Microsoft Word installed on the same system. Now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has cooked up a modern-day Boston Tea Party by planning to dump Microsoft's Office suite and switch to open source software in all state agencies. This may not be the equivalent of dumping all the .doc and .xls files into Boston Harbor to send a message to King Billy (Gates), but the state is dumping them nonetheless, and King Billy may see a revolution in the making.

The state government has decided that all electronic documents created by state employees have to use open formats starting on January 1, 2007. After that date, every state document must be in PDF or use OpenOffice.org formats. As of today, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint running on Microsoft Windows cannot do that. In fact, the Microsoft programs cannot even read documents created in those formats. That will be an issue for all the companies that do business with the state.

The idea behind this move is to make sure that every citizen can open and read electronic documents without having to buy expensive, proprietary software.

Microsoft is clearly worried. A lot of people live in Massachusetts, and a lot of high tech companies are based there. This is a big thumbs up for open source.

You can read more this story at http://tinyurl.com/dytuh. 

Comments

[Dave Keeney]

It seems a little ironic that an article re: dumping Microsoft in favor of Open Source (which I agree with) takes you to a site to finish the entire article but requires additional $ to sign up.

[Dick Eastman]

When that article was posted here on September 7, the online article it links to was available at no charge. However, it appears that ft.com later changed it to a for-pay article.

That isn't unusual. Many online magazines and newspapers do the same: they leave new articles free and open to everyone for a day or a week or some other predefined length of time, then change it to a chargeable item when they place the article in their archives.

- Dick Eastman

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

Dick,
I don't believe that the point is using "open formats" but using "OpenOffice" formats. To the best of my knowledge all of the MS file formats are open. If they weren't, OpenOffice would not be able to open Word or Excel files, or would many of the financial packages that read Excel files for data.

Are all of the databases developed in Access going to have to be converted as well? What format will audio have to be stored in?

At any rate, I'm sure that MS already has the patch ready to go to add OpenOffice format to MS Office products.

[Dick Eastman]

Here is another story about the same topic: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5845451.html

[Dick Eastman]

Microsoft's file formats are proprietary, not open formats. In fact, they are patented by Microsoft. For references, see: http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/006232.html, http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2005/june/thecatch22of2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format and http://www.mass.gov/eoaf/open_formats_comments.html (well down the page)

While other programs may legally be able to read and write .DOC. .RTF and .XLS files, that doesn't make the files open format. They are still proprietary.

[Boston Tea Party Historian]

Interesting reference to the Boston Tea Party considering that the original Party was about about John Hancock's smuggling profits being udercut by the East India Tea Company. I wonder who in Massachusetts has a stake in OpenOffice.org...