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Mass. Softens Stance on Proprietary Software (eWeek)
eWeek
reports that the Massachusetts IT policy has been weakened in
regards to the use of open-source software.
"Essentially, rather than focus on open source as a priority, the new policy demands that new IT investments be open standards compliant.
The state's new Enterprise Open Standards Policy defines open standards as: "Specifications for systems that are publicly available and are developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body." The policy gives HTML as an example of such a standard and adds: "Open standards imply that multiple vendors can compete directly based on the features and performance of their products."
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Actually it's not so bad Posted Jan 14, 2004 20:14 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] It's good for two reasons - it sets an example that others states are more likely to follow and it creates a legal definition of open standards.Openness of the source is also important, but this requirement can be intoduced later. Ideally, there should be a deadline after which proprietary software would not be puchased if adequate free software exists. That would give potential software suppliers time to come with solutions based on open source software. As we know from Mozilla and OpenOffice.org experience, it takes months or years to remove proprietary code and clean up the code that wasn't written as open source. Stating conditions in advance creates more competition, which is a good thing.
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 20:18 UTC (Wed) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link] is there anything to prevent, for example, M$ saying its Office is an open standard - you just have to pay them to use it?
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 20:23 UTC (Wed) by dsime (guest, #5764) [Link] Even simpler.Word supports RTF so it is open I bet excel has similar unused formats I wonder if Visio does.
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 20:47 UTC (Wed) by gallir (guest, #5735) [Link] All these MS formats, including RTF and XML, accept "embedded objects ostreams", which cannot be read by other programs. Even Wordpad cannot read some RTF files, especially those coming from Apple.
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 20:54 UTC (Wed) by quickening (guest, #14807) [Link] Visio 5 had a decent export to html/gif ( a static document, mind you!), but M$ fixed that. Visio 2K's export is now useless.
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 21:45 UTC (Wed) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link] Yes, that's an important question! Open != freeStandards should be open *and* free.
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 22:12 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] The state's new Enterprise Open Standards Policy defines open standards as: "Specifications for systems that are publicly available and are developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body."I think "publicly available" implies that the standard can be freely implemented. I hope it's stated explicitly somewhere in the document.
open, but... Posted Jan 14, 2004 23:40 UTC (Wed) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] is there anything to prevent, for example, M$ saying its Office is an open standardThey could say it, but it doesn't meet the state's definition, since it hasn't been affirmed by a standards body. I suppose M$ could also claim to be a standards body...
A wise decision Posted Jan 14, 2004 21:23 UTC (Wed) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link] I think it is a wise decision. They express their goal clearly and it can not be condemned for zealotry toward open source or free software.They just give the reason that in fact is in the the reason for many of us to chose open source or free software. Because it complies better and interoperate with standards it give us flexibility in designing and building networks. In the light of such a simple and sane rule to chose softwares some will hopefully understand that they are precisely locked in their IT evolution due to non respect of standards on their infrastructure. To give some example which I know better of non standard things that lock you with solutions that later become problems and that explain the mood of some of us toward some big corp : - NTLM or even AD (vs LDAP standard) - non standard SQL (I know it is hard to only use pure standard SQL) - DOC, XLS, PPT ... format (but here standard is not totally completed) - SMB (vs WebDAV) If you read carefully the list you will see that standards that answer our needs versus proprietary formats are often recent. So it also shows that maybe the success of open source and free software is also strongly related to those recent changes. I hope this will continue.
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