Blog: Pete Loshin: Open Document Follies

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Open Document Follies

There's been a lot happening on the Massachusetts Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft story over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I'd try to do a little roundup of interesting and relevant links here. Nothing conclusive has happened yet, and nothing conclusive is likely to happen any time soon, but there sure is a lot of turbulence around this issue, which is just as it should be.

For the latest on ODF and Massachusetts, you can check out my fellow Massachusettsian Andy Updegrove's Standard Blog. He's been covering and uncovering facts about this story since the beginning, and you can get all the juicy political details there. Yesterday he blogged about Linda Hamel's Challenge to a Transfer of IT Power in Massachusetts, discussing some of the reasons it doesn't make sense to let politicians get involved in making IT decisions.

Bernard Golden offers a measured discussion of the benefits of ODF and other open standards, putting ODF in the context of other extraordinarily powerful open standards like Ethernet and TCP/IP that generated explosive growth in Golden's Rules: The real story behind the Massachusetts ODF flap. This is worth a read if only because it echoes so strongly my own opinions about open standards.

Here's a Letter to Governor Romney of Massachusetts about Support of ODF in the IBM Workplace Managed Client, from Michael D. Rhodin, IBM's General Manager for Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software, posted by Bob Sutor, Vice President of Standards and Open Source at IBM, last week.

Going just by the headlines, you may be perplexed by whether or not Microsoft's support for ODF is sincere and positive or not. First, there's Top open source lawyer blesses new terms on Microsoft's XML file format, posted last month on the ZDnet blog Between the Lines by David Berlind. Or, you could go the other way with Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball on eWeek.com, in which Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols suggests that the big news isn't such big news after all.

Finally, the Boston Globe reported last week Romney administration reviewing trips made by technology chief. I'm not sure how long this link will stay good, so the quick summary is that Massachusetts Governor Romney's administration is looking into whether or not there was any impropriety about who was paying for trips to conferences by Peter J. Quinn, director of the state's Informational Technology Division, and the guy behind the ODF decision in the first place. Quinn is in demand as a speaker at open source conferences, and has been flown to more than one to talk. No big deal, but there are those who would like to make it look as if those trips might have been payoffs for choosing an open standard, ODF, supported by many vendors (OpenDocument format gathers steam) over a proprietary standard supported most strenuously by Microsoft Corp.